I got this question today: Hello Ben, After about five years, I am again seeking advice/help from TPRS & the CI community to help me teach language in the way I am convinced is the way to go if one’s concern is language acquisition. You graciously gave me of your time and advice five years […]
Today Meg brought up the topic of what to do when the kids don’t respond to Plans A through D. I wrote up a Plan E for addition to the Classroom Management book and share it here: Plan E – Removal If the misbehavior continues, if the side conversations continue, if we have called home
Sometimes we find that our students’ energy needs to be contained with some pencils-to-paper activities. When the kids have a pencil in their hands, they think that they are learning. Let’s be honest and clear here. Our goal is first and foremost to make it to the end of the year with our mental health
How to get structure and still retain what one might call an “intuitive” curriculum? So let’s say we have a choice of our basic types of non-targeted strategies, for example Small Talk (Calendar/Weather), Card Talk, Word Chunk Team Game, etc. – the kind of things we do with beginners. The old thinking is that we
I post something Gretchen wrote here today as a comment in case anyone missed it….especially the last sentence, which I consider huge in its implications for what is happening right now every day in our classrooms because of our new awareness around CI: …I see colleagues who, with good intentions, are having their 1st and
First they listen. Then they read. Then they write. Somewhere along that continuum, depending on the person, speech emerges. Input precedes output. WE cannot control that process, because it all happens where we can’t go, into their unconscious minds during sleep after large doses of listening and reading output the day before in our classrooms.
Our work can be effortless if we want it to be, if we can but rise above our need to “instruct”, to “deliver instructional services”. As we slowly rid ourselves of the old ideas of what a teacher even is, how a teacher behaves in class, many of us (in my view because of the
Gretchen has a question: I’ve also found my teaching to be totally transformed from this PLC and learning from Ben & Tina. I do have a question, although I’m not sure about the best place to ask it. I have a some what unusual situation in that I taught the first 6 weeks of the
I just received this email in support of the work Tina and I are doing and would like to share it with our group here. This teacher is in South Carolina. What I would like to say about this email is how happy it makes me to know that when a teacher really applies the
Does anyone know about teaching languages in Florida or know anyone? I’m asking for someone considering to relocate to the Tampa/St. Petersburg area. Email me at benslavic@yahoo.com if you have any information and thanks. I do know that Florida is as tough as it gets on teachers.
Here is something I enjoyed reading on Jim Tripp’s site: http://www.trippsscripts.com/single-post/2016/08/21/Chomsky-1975-on-the-Unconscious-Nature-of-Language-Acquisition
Tina and I learned a lot from each other this summer in our workshops, and classroom management was at the top of the things that we worked on. We have five or six “plans” now (levels of intervention). Here is Plan D, my favorite, because it is a true power move, perhaps the best I’ve
