Ben Slavic

Got this from brother Brian. It’s a repost from years and years ago: Hey Ben, I’ll get right to the question: What are your thoughts on the student sense of boredom?  In their world, it seems the only dichotomy sometimes is between activities that are fun and those that are boring.  Their ability to be […]

There are only variations on what we do and there are no experts. All each of us has to do is tap into a human way of teaching and so it doesn’t at all surprise me that all CI teachers are really similar! I am learning that there is very slight variation only in this

I had an insight about our work this morning. I think that 90% of what young people need when they are growing up is to learn social skills. And yet most of what they are trained in, in schools the way they are and have always been set up since the Greeks, probably, is for

Greg asked: Ben, what’s your view on “CAN” – “Confidence, Accuracy, No Hesitation”? It’s the Blaine Ray idea that we should not go on in a story or in our instruction until actors or students respond to questions accurately. Specifically, see page 6 on this document: http://www.mena.northwestern.edu/documents/TPRS-workshop-handout.pdf Here is the passage from that document by

A rant in support of fudging grades: I would like to see some administrator who is aware of the truth of the research, the sobering truth that we can only learn a language by focusing on the message and not on the mechanics of the language, which is merely the delivery system, I would like

From Alisa: Hi, Ben, I got this letter from a 1st grader today. If you can’t read 1st graderese, it says: “From Camilo You teach me different language so I can speak with more people.”

Udo clarifies: “I’m sure that creating flow is essential, but on the other hand I believe students can be in their conscious minds when they are trying to comprehend. For me it’s more a matter of keeping them out of their intellectual, analytical minds during a story.” That’s it! So well said and thank you,

We all know about this phenomenon of “helicopter parents”. In a recent email exchange between Alisa and me, she made some points worth sharing. (By the way, anything I share here from private email correspondence will have always been approved by the sender, just fyi.) Ben, I believe this particular [helicopter] parent was listening to

If anyone wants some good simple stories to read in French, Meg has provided a link and thank you Meg: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MORNMH9OfnQWWjbADpxb5R1gn9guLFF4

Since FVR is not voluntary, Tina and I have espoused the term Free Choice Reading to describe how we start our classes. But that’s not the purpose of this post, rather to just let everyone know that Greg has a video we can watch on how he built his classroom library: Greg reports: I built

From Dana: Hi guys, I have a question for you. How can we expect the kids to only speak in the TL if they’ve only had 1,2 or 3 “years” of it? I just finished reading Bryce’s administrator checklist where it says that teacher and students are speaking the TL, and I remember reading Annabelle’s

In our desire to plan this, plan that, get control of our stories, have a lot of charts on the wall (most of which only serve to confuse students), and then the next day do it again, squeezing all the LIFE AND SPONTANEITY out of our classes, we miss the entire point. For those like