Teacher with a classroom that spans the world

STARR Green has only been teaching for six years at a school in Yorkshire but her language lessons have already helped to educate millions of children in the more than 100 countries around the world.

Her lesson plans and activities not only benefit the pupils learning French and Spanish at her school in Morley, near Leeds, but are also being taught in languages she cannot speak and in countries she has never been to.

This is because her work is among the most sought after on a website which allows almost two million members from all over the world to share ideas about teaching over the internet.

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Under the username “Rosaespanola” she has posted more than 700 lesson plans and tasks online which have been downloaded more than half a million times in almost 150 countries.

If every one of the teachers who has downloaded her ideas used them in a class of 20, it would mean they were reaching 10 million children.

She said: “It is pretty amazing. I would never have expected so many people to have downloaded my ideas.”

One of her most popular resources are lesson plans which use phonics – the building blocks used to teach primary school pupils to read – as a way of getting secondary school pupils to pronounce unknown words in a foreign language.

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She came up with the idea after speaking to friends of hers who are primary school teachers.

These phonics-based activities were developed for her French and Spanish lessons at Bruntcliffe School in Morley but the feedback she has received online shows that the same approach works in other languages.

Her work has been downloaded from the TES Resources website by teachers everywhere from China to the Central African Republic. Now she has been nominated for a TES award as the best online contributor.

She has also been chosen to work on the website’s secondary languages panel which helps teachers to talk about current issues in education, work collaboratively on interesting projects and to share guidance and offer support.

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She said: “TES Resources is an absolutely fantastic way for teachers to share their knowledge and hard work.

“No one has time to develop all of their own resources – especially in my school where we don’t use textbooks. And sometimes you just need some ideas.

“TES Resources is great for that – you go on looking for material to teach whether to your year eights and you end up with a whole load of stuff for your year 10s. That is why I upload so many of my materials – I have benefited so much and you have just got to give something back.”

She first started using the website while training to be a teacher for her PGCE at Leeds University and now recommends it to all the student teachers she works with.

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One trainee took her advice and based an entire lesson on one of her resources without knowing who it had been uploaded by.

She said: “There is a lot of useful stuff on there. I started using the site when I was a student I found things which I could adapt.

“I don’t know how teachers used to do this before they had the internet.

“It is a brilliant way of being able to share ideas and learn.”

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Among the 719 resources she has downloaded onto the site include a series of ideas to make language learning accessible to pupils.

She has also created a brochure in French about Hogwarts School from the Harry Potter books and films.

On the site she says: “My year 11s went nuts over this. They are all big Harry Potter fans, and its fame spread so I ended up with year sevens asking if they could see it too.

“You could use this for reading comprehension, speaking activity – anything really.”

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She also developed sessions around food and drink where a family has been poisoned and pupils use clues and a menu to work out what they chose in the restaurant and which food they all had in their meal that poisoned them.

Her ideas may have helped to educate millions but the 32-year-old, who lives in Hillsborough, Sheffield, with her partner Adam, never planned to be a teacher.

After graduating in French and philosophy at Sheffield University she had vowed to do “anything but teach”.

However while travelling in Canada she took on a job as an English language assistant in Quebec and it made her realise that she had found her ideal profession.

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