The subject matter of this report from Sarah Downey is nothing new, regrettably. She is in a really backwards-looking school and requests help from the group: Common Assessment Analysis Here’s the story: Earlier this month my principal visited a school and came back with the form below that we all need to fill in monthly. […]
Common Assessment w/ non CI Colleague and an Uninformed Principal Read More »
Hi Ben, Just sending along a fine first free write: I gave the topic, some coaching to the class on how to keep it simple…we had our lists of connecting words and our running list of action words from September…and ten minutes. This boy really stuck to what he knows and didn’t resort to English
Sean just giving you another rep on Steven’s sentence from last week. This gem is worth memorizing, as you said in your comment last week, so you can “repeat it every time I sit behind a desk from an admin. This is some juicy admin-ease. It strokes their backs while not compromising our approach.” Steven:
Our mental health is completely dependent on our knowing and remembering that we cannot teach a language, but only deliver comprehensible input.
In a comment here last night Alisa said that traditional teachers believe that teaching a language means that kids can: …[demonstrate] temporary mastery of [ certain vocanulary] terms on interval tests…. She goes on: …[traditional teachers typically] don’t look for or grade for demonstration of contextual comprehension – certainly not of extended chunks of texts
Part One – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vItnp6-1PjA Part Two – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzM09herNdE (I especially like the point that Tina makes at 1:55 to 2:15 in the first video calling out traditional teachers on how they hold students “accountable” to standards for certain vocabulary words when no such standards even exist in ACTFL.)
If you are feeling down about how hard this work is, here is a reminder of why we do it. The kids could be from any country, so that doesn’t matter. What matters is that these kids have hope in the future and pride in their heritage. They have hope and every adult in their
I rarely post stuff here that is unrelated to our work but this is just wonderful and in fact is good for our mental health bc laughter is so good for us: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/slippery-stairs-japanese-game-show_us_5a13fd14e4b0aa32975d8fc0?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
I was looking at some of the comments here from a few days ago. The following anecdote from Alisa kind of blew my mind: …I actually had the former head of curriculum say to me, when I brought to her attention that language acquisition isn’t conceptual like math or social studies and cannot be measured
The videos here were taken at a recent workshop I did in Connecticut that was organized by our long time colleague here on the PLC, Keri Biron. As such, the videos are not what we might find in a classroom with students, but rather are more instructional in nature for the teachers in the workshop.
Hi Ben, I recently read with envy about our colleague that has so much freedom to teach as he wants. My status as a new teacher in a department based on traditional textbook instruction leaves me vulnerable on many angles. I have had blowback from parents, students and administration. I have not been able to
In terms of their classes, there are certain “big words” associated with school in the minds of kids like: test, homework, grades. Those words all carry an air of negativity, if you think about it. But there is one word in the Invisibles program that doesn’t carry a negative feeling: jobs. Of the more than
