Ben Slavic

I love this idea from Bryan Whitney. Check it out: …another thing that I’m going to try as a job is having one or two “coaches”. The coaches write down when they see good contributions from specific students and positive/happy moments in class. You can then have them share what they saw during the last […]

In the Invisibles Star Cycle there is potential to work a lot less than we usually do over the course of a year. Here are 6 things you can do to work a lot less but get the same paycheck. Not sure about the math, but the point is clear: (1) Don’t give homework. Make

Another way we can find out who the best artists are – the ones who will get the job all year long – is to simply look at their Card Talk cards. Steven Sebald here in MN just thought of that. (Without great artists we cannot get the Invisibles off the ground as well as we

A repost from 2011: It’s like a locomotive. We shovel the language coal – the input – into their minds in class, but, once the speed is up, the train is perfectly capable of using its momentum to largely run down the tracks on it’s own – language begets more language – without us getting all freaked

I was once giving a year end diagnostic speaking test to a quiet level 2 student who listens really well in class. I really didn’t know if he could say a word or a thousand words. It turned out to be the latter. That’s how comprehensible input works. It goes in, rolls around, some of

Here’s a good thing to watch at the beginning of any year: http://learninglanguages.celta.msu.edu/sla-vanpatten/

The best way to neutralize criticism in our buildings is to flood our critics with information that supports what we do, using email, stopping them in the hallway, etc.. The other primers can be used as well: Ben: I wrote up this email to send to my principals, my district administrators, and my five colleagues

A point for those doing the Invisibles: It is non-targeted if we work from an image. This does not mean that we have to go into a story using ONLY the image as the sole point of departure with the class into the story. In the Town Meeting (Questioning Level 1) we can look through

I keep learning new things. In Maine I learned the value of adding new characters in Questioning Level 5. We usually have two characters in the story when we arrive there (QL is the creation of the problem), but then I found out that it is so much easier to solve a problem in a non-targeted

We’re in Tuscon now. We just left Maine yesterday. What Alice Yates, a friend of Susan Gross, started there back in 2000, or even before, I think, is amazing. Those guys are badass up there. They are relaxed, sharp lobster-eating devotees of storytelling, and so working with them was easy and fun. Our Jen Schongalla

Here is a post of a Matava story script from 2008 to show how some things never go out of style.  Those using Anne’s scripts this year will probably want to try this one:  The Smith family were just about to eat.  Dad said, “Let’s start!”  They started eating, and there was a knock on the