Just a few years after Insights was founded, the Global Forum for Education & Learning – now called Education 2.0 – awarded our founder as a Visionary in Education, an honor bestowed upon only a hundred people worldwide each year.
Insights does not exist merely to help teachers get through a lesson or to help students pass their next exam; we exist to foster a deeper understanding of how English grammar works. With such understanding, educators can teach with confidence, and learners will soar to greater levels of proficiency.
Insights’s resources don’t just rehash the grammar explanations that you can find in most textbooks; we’re dedicated to developing alternative approaches, especially for those students who have difficulty connecting to the classic explanations.
Our material is not meant to replace any curriculum. Continue using whatever syllabus and books you already have in place; Insights's videos and other resources simply help you explain grammar topics in a way that's likely to reach more students.
Most videos and other online resources address students directly and cut teachers out of the picture. We know teachers to be invaluable in the learning process. We keep teachers in the conversation, fostering a better learning environment all around.
There are a lot of great resources out there that teach grammar, but most of them use the same old methods. Since those methods don't work for every single learner, sometimes a fresh approach is required. You'll find that we present grammar topics differently from everyone else.
Instead of simply showing the end result of an atypical structure, we outline 3 OR 4 STEPS to take in order to reach that structure from a more familiar one.
For example, we outline 4 steps to go from Active Voice to Passive Voice, and 4 steps to combine two clauses into one sentence in our Relative Clauses topic.
We establish RULES-OF-THUMB to help prevent or correct common grammatical errors, even at rudimentary levels.
Did you know that (with a few exceptions) there should be exactly one ending ‘s’ between a subject and its Present Simple verb? You could say “dogs bark” or “a dog barks”, but not “dogs barks” or “a dog bark”.
Instead of a long list of words or rules to memorize, we identify PATTERNS to make relevant lessons both more concise and more comprehensive.
When forming a Verb Pattern, there’s a long list of words that should be followed by Infinitives and another long list for Participles (we’re talking about hundreds of words). We’ve condensed these lists into just a few categories.
Grammar topics are not isolated elements; we reveal CONNECTIONS between a grammar point and several other related ones.
For instance: Active Adjectives, Gerunds, Participles in Verb Patterns, and Continuous Tenses all have ‘-ing’ endings. That’s no coincidence; they all express action or activity.
It turns out that English grammar rules are not arbitrary, but that there are patterns and formulas hidden beneath the surface. We at Insights are convinced that if teachers and learners could see the reasons and connections behind our language, so many grammar topics would make much more sense!
Language is a science, and we’ve put in the work to learn not only what the grammar rules are, but why. Insights to English has done the research to uncover what makes various elements of grammar special. The ‘insights’ we glean guide us to consider how grammar topics could be taught in a new light.
The methods we then develop are a blend of pedagogy and this linguistic knowledge … put into layman’s terms.
Our goal is to illuminate the hidden structures, patterns, rationale, and even art of English grammar for teachers and students alike.
How we view grammar topics is the foundation of Insights. But almost as important is how we convey our methods to educators and learners. To best connect our ideas with them, we apply the following to our videos and other content:
Instead of lecturing to the audience, we prefer to maintain a friendly and engaging learning environment.
Analogies can illustrate how seemly-abstract grammar topics work while demonstrating their application.
We could just tell you everything, but we find it's better to prompt viewers to think about the answers first.
Our graphics aid visual learners and represent the manipulation of word formation and sentence structure.
Just a few years after Insights was founded, the Global Forum for Education & Learning – now called Education 2.0 – awarded our founder as a Visionary in Education, an honor bestowed upon only a hundred people worldwide each year.
Take advantage of every method, idea, tip, and trick we have to offer teachers. We’ll keep you informed of every new resource we release.