Month: February 2019

Woo Watch: EdyouFest

I recently came across an education festival for TEFLers called ‘EDUyoufest‘. Plenary speaker Lonny Gold is presenting a talk on “Teaching WITH the brain instead of AGAINST it“. Now whenever ‘the brain’ gets mentioned I do start to get a bit worried. Brain based approaches generally tend to come from the Romantic Humanist wing of the ELT world so I decided to investigate further and Gold did not disappoint. 


Gold, a Suggestopedia Master Trainer, has appeared in videos promoting the whacky teachings of Georgi Lozanov. Regular readers of this site will know that I have something of an obsession with all things Lozanov and so Gold instantly grabbed my attention. 


I managed to find a few of his articles and one of them in particular really impressed me. Most of lozanov’s acolytes are cool with his claims of accelerated learning and suggestive states of mind. Yet there aren’t many who are willing to follow the good doctor when he starts talking about using telepathy as a communication method. Gold is fearless though. He writes about a workshop presentation he held for the Liverpool SEAL conference:

The third and final segment of the workshop dealt with telepathy. In any open and nurturing environment, the telepathic connections between people are countless and to pretend they do not exist is silly and even irresponsible. In the case of teachers, a belief that what happens in class is not largely determined by the telepathic links within the group is either a dereliction of duty or – far worse – an admission that all form of human life has been successfully extinguished.

So there it is folks. Telepathy as a teaching tool. You heard it here first!