Teaching with a smile

I have finally found it! I have seen this video first time when our colleague showed it to us at the work-shop and I have been trying to find it for quite some time. I really think this is a nice video for all the ESL teachers in the world, especially because it speaks about a nice way of teaching, an efficient method, a visual one. I have experienced it on my students and it's 100% result-based. Just as Stephen Krashen says, even though we try to teach a foreign language through reading or writing excessively, we will only get results if we make ourselves understood. The more we move, the more pictures and visual or audio materials we use, the better and the sooner the progress is. During most of our interviews we usually like to ask this simple question" How would you teach  TODAY (Oggi,Aujourd'hui,Heute,Hoy) to your students?" We rarely found teachers naming the calendar. Everyone tends to go for the theoretical explanation, which in fact cannot really work for a beginner, because he doesn't know the language;how can you explain something in a language that person is just there to learn? :)) It's really funny and ironical.And most of all it's boring, terribly boring.And this is the last thing we want from our students...leave the room as if they escaped Alcatraz.
I guess there are are 3 basic rules we need to apply when teaching:
1. Smile (That's my no.1 rule! I know it has no methodological background, but it is extremely efficient). In order to keep ourselves smiling during the lesson we need to prepare the lesson as if we are also students, as if we teach ourselves in the same time, because if we don't enjoy it, our students definitely won't. Nobody wants a sad face standing in front of them and if we do have some problems, we can forget about them those minutes spent in the classroom, we can actually get detached and have a bit of fun ourselves.
2.Be creative and open-minded - try to think of the surrounding objects or events as potential class material; it's real, it comes from our daily experience so it will be appealing to the learners.
3.Talk less than your students! We are not there to give a speech, we are just their coach: we lead them to the understanding of things, words and we help them talk to the others (correct them when needed and praise them when they have done it great). The moment they share ideas, opinions in this new language we are teaching, we have achieved our first major success.
And I think the toughest lesson is to understand our students, learn how to read on their faces the lack of understanding, because they will rarely admit or even tell when something isn't clear.So we need to be prepared for this, change immediately the whole lesson plan, adapt it to them, find means of making ourselves clear.
And as you can see also in the video, jokes and good mood can relax them, give them confidence and even work as feed-back: if they laugh at our jokes they definitely understood; and if they understood and they don't laugh we need to change the teacher:)
Enjoy the video and good luck!