Report from the Field – Tina Hargaden
As regular readers here know, Tina is having quite the year. Strongly attacked by traditional colleagues at the high school level, to which her middle schools students must matriculate and then be met with a the equivalent of Beethoven's 9th
Teaching with the Eyes
What Tina wrote here is important. It points to the direction we want to go in: The hardest part about this job is teaching to the eyes - looking at a kid who is in pain when you are in pain
Human Intelligence Requires Free and Open Paths
The following is from a response by Tina to Carmen over the past weekend. I have made the comment into a post because of the subtlety of points made: First Carmen said: It is like magic when you just tell them a
Authentic Texts – Oui ou Non?
The Director of Education of ACTFL, with whom we have tangled before, has recently written the text below. Thanks to Alisa Shapiro for sending it to us. Note the hefty list of references. Hmmm. Who are those people? What are
Observation Observations
My principal was coming in to my classroom last year for a required unannounced observation. Beforehand, she asked me how she could be of help, what to look for. I responded: Hi Beth - I thought of something for you to look
The Introverts Control The Class
Here is another thing Tina said in our conversation last weekend: …now the introverts in the class feel very safe doing stories with the Invisibles because I don't "make them participate” anymore. What I am seeing in my classes is introverts
Report from the Field – Craig West
Craig reports from Los Angeles: Well I was totally demoralized before thanksgiving break. We had just started a new trimester and they had given me a mixture of students who had taken my class and failed it, taken it and passed
Riding the Rails
Here is something else worth sharing from when I talked to Tina last weekend: I have recently found out that my students will trust me, that they can learn to trust me to bring the fun in a calm and consistent
We Will All Teach Differently
Why are people advising that we all do this work in the same way? What we do with comprehensible input is our choice. Some like story asking. Others like story listening. Others like PQA all the time. Others like to
There Is No Right Way
There is no right way to do this work. We all do what resonates best with our internal teaching artist souls. Why deny what we feel is best for our students because someone said that there is some right way?