Nurturing the spark! Lessons learned from ETAI 2025 presenters for communicative, caring, creative English teaching.
- Michelle Korenfeld
- Jul 17
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 22
Hello, you are most invited to read this article, yet maybe you lack time. So, I first would like to invite you to click this link to listen to the podcast I made using NotebookLM, based on this article I humanly wrote. I want to think that my human creative writing helped make it more interesting. This is what I want for students, that they would make the best out of their human intelligence, and only then leverage it with AI. Don’t you? Yet, I must say that I was quite at awe with this podcast. It made things clear and contextual. Chapeau!
“Rabban Johanan b. Zakkai… used to say: If all the Sages of Israel were in the one scale of the balance and with Eliezer b. Hyrcanus (a plastered cistern which loses not a drop) in the other, he would outweigh them all. Abba Saul said in his name: If all the Sages of Israel were in the one scale of the balance and with them Eliezer b. Hyrcanus, and Eleazar b. Arak (an ever-flowing spring) was in the other, he would outweigh them all. (Pirke Avot, 2,8. From Masterpieces of Hebrew Literaure: A Treasury of 2000 Years of Jewish Creativity, by Curt Leviant, Ktav publishing, NY, 1969. P. 77).
ETAI Summer National Conference Jerusalem 2025 was a delightful enriching experience. In this newsletter article, I would like to share with you some very helpful insights and ideas.
Susana Galante, techno pedagogical coach & speaker, stressed that digital literacy skills are not all technology related. For example, adaptability, creativity, the durable skills. Since the latter model outlines 100 skills (!!?) and our concern is teaching English, I’d like to focus on communicative, caring, creative literacy.
Ms. Galante supported an integrated approach - Fostering diverse skills: critical, adaptive & creative. She suggested students use Napkin AI to make infographics as learning products. Students can think of a metaphor and its meanings, then turn their interpretations into a visual by prompting LEONARDO AI.
From Simone Duval, Jerusalem District Inspector and Counselor, I learned that struggling students feel frustrated. Aarona Agronov, Inclusion and Special Education National Consultant, stressed that children who can - do. Those who struggle – seek ways to avoid practicing. I realized the need for resources that students connect with and are curious about, as starting point for learning. On top of that, Simone Duval illustrated the essentiality of differentiation, of reaching each student, responding to individual needs.
Elias Farah, Chief Inspector of English Language Education, portrayed how machines learned language, yet he accentuated human teachers’ roles in supporting learners to proficiency.
The need for human language teachers couldn’t have been demonstrated better than in the adventures of Gulliver in Lilliput: “It was... ordered ... that six of his majesty’s greatest scholars should be employed to instruct me in their language...” (Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, Adventure Classics, Florida 2001. p. 24). To compare with, it took 300 tailors to make Gulliver a suit of clothes, but just 6 ingenious teachers to teach him the language!
Back to the conference, Daniel Weiss, speech recognition specialist, specified that poetry helps learn intonation. Rhythm and rhyme serve as methodologies to promote pronunciation and speaking in general.
Howie Gordon, ICT National Counsellor, suggested delightful AI tools to help students present their learning. For example, using NotebookLM students can upload a composition they wrote themselves, or provide a Youtube or Wikipedia link, to turn the information into a podcast. They can even add questions to be answered within the podcast. I took his advice by making this article's AI podcast based on my human writing.
Aarona Agronov, stressed practice, to make what students learned automatic, gaining fluency in writing and speaking. Proficiency is difficult to achieve because of the complexity of learning English. In the final plenary, Leo Sellivan, author and worldwide speaker, suggested that complex systems can be adaptive, and thus creative. A positive point to consider.
Ms. Agronov affirmed that the more students read, the more vocabulary they have. The more vocabulary they have, the more they read. I loved her recommendation to have an English board in the classroom. For teachers, yet also for students. Having their learning products hung on the wall can build confidence and self-efficacy.
From Leo Selivan, I learned that education systems are adaptive ones – Teachers need to adapt to war, reforms, and the list continues. The good news is that language is a living, changing, adaptive system, as taught by Jean Piaget. Maybe adapting to today’s bright creative students is an opportunity! Stressing adaptability was a wonderful closure, because adaptability was one of the skills Ms. Galante called for in the opening plenary promoting digital citizenship.
Mr. Selivan determined that exposure is important because our mind recognizes patterns, thus building English proficiency. Students “record” what they learn, then retrieve based on patterns, that we should help them notice. Mr. Selivan concluded by signifying repetition, repetition, repetition… Practice, as Aarona Agronov emphasized.
I presented my program for English teachers, based on the concept that teaching English is like growing a tree. It takes nurture, yet the growth is lifelong. It’s not only an adaptive system, but a growing one, as well.
We provide food for the soul and mind, paving pathways for the brain. We are fostering human intelligence! We first need to touch the hearts of students. Then open the door for them to a living vibrant English.
It seems we are still considering what kind of learner we want to raise: a cistern that loses not a drop or an ever-flowing spring. Maybe we can raise learners that both repeat & practice on the one hand and adapt & create on the other.
I know this article signifies adaptability, a perplexing concept. So, let’s befriend it. According to the Encyclopedia of Creativity, ‘adaptation’ derives from Latin: to fit. It could mean conforming to a confining environment, thus stifling creativity. Yet, it could also mean adjusting in small nuances to a new or dynamic environment (Cohen, LM in Runco & Pritzker eds., Elsevier, 2011, p, 9). You could say that with my creative learning units and PD program, I’m trying to adapt the world to my ideas. Yet, they are also out there, have been for long.
When we adapt, we create a new way of coping, of delivering. If you worry that you are not creative, to be humorous is also to be creative, and we all have moments like that. Humor is creative, because it reflects a new perspective of seeing things. I’ve just brought my mom a book about Yiddish jokes, and we sat together laughing. It’s in our culture. It’s part of coping. It helped my mom and me adapt.
With these optimistic words, we are about to farewell.
Thank you for reading and listening!
For Israeli English teachers,
Register for the refreshening summer workshop!
Summer workshop + The Bee and 3 more sample units (PDFs) – 125 NIS per participant
Gefen programs: 54003 (Primary)
55484 (Junior High, High School).
Dates to choose from:
Tuesday Aug 19th, 19:00
Monday Aug 25th, 9:00
75 minutes on Zoom.
050-7968035
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