Every one in a while a sentence rings true. This from Polly, in just a few words, lays to complete waste everything that has ever been said about assessment: …I really feel like those kids that want to learn the language are going to no matter if they have assessments or not….
Nathaniel responds below to some verbage from somewhere. We don’t need to know where, just some sad educational factory place where people write stuff that they don’t really understand but do it because it sounds good. File this line here in the Intellectual Bullying file: …we are designed to teach the whole language of reading
I updated, made some changes to, this very effective way of getting high numbers of repetitions on the numbers. You will need to have the numbers and colors poster from Teachers Discovery here in order to do this: 1. Get an envelope. If you have a turban, wear it. If you want, have the kids find some
Carnac the Magnificent – Teaching Numbers (update) Read More »
This, from John Bracey, is telling. It is almost the equivalent of a criminal indictment on grammar teachers. It really burns me up: I remember having a conversation with some upper level high school students about how they made it this far in Latin. Here are some roughly remembered quotes: “Before a test, I would
A science teacher is using CI strategies to teach science. Linda sent this to me – it was on Facebook. Yes it’s also a shameless plug for my new book: …today, a young 9th grade biology teacher prepared her lesson on the inner workings of a human cell using my copy of Ben Slavic’s Big
A repost for Keri: A person I know recently brought up some concerns about the 1950’s style of textbook based/thematic unit memorization of lists teaching going on in a certain school. This person made all the arguments in favor of CI and Krashen, all arguments that I have made myself in similar situations. After a
This one is from Keri: Hi Ben, I have a question that maybe the PLC could help me with. Last year was my first “TPRS” year and, of course, those students are with other teachers. (I am the only TPRS / CI teacher in my department.) A teacher came to me concerned because she has
Why would a person look at a book or interact with a computer to learn a language? It strikes me as a very good thing that CI teachers have as their goal each day to teach a verb or group or words, and then see how many other words those verbs can attract to them,
When we create discussion in stories, we can exaggerate one of the qualities of each actor. This can be done using the Director’s Cues. When an actor is really exaggerating one single human quality, it is easier to understand and it tends to be funnier. This is what Molière did. Many of his comedies examine
What if we just did a Free Write Portfolio as our summative assessment each semester? We could use the OWATS model. Then we wouldn’t have to formally test writing each semester with some stupid test, and if he had the kahunas that DPS has, we would just drop testing of speech output, and then we
Q. Is it more important to focus on and use strategies that bring the greatest gains or strategies that focus on keeping the kids’ interest high? A. When the kids’ interest is the highest, the gains are the highest. Its’ not so much if the strategy looks like it is capable of bringing great gains
