Does anyone who was at the Lake Elsinore workshop last month remember which teacher mentioned Earl Stevick in relationship to the point about images (and thus the Invisibles) being more effective than mere words? She shared a line Stevick had said, all the way back in the sixties, that “imagination supports memory, and memory supports learning [what […]
We want good group dynamics in our stories, but wanting is not enough, and a sense of neediness on the teacher’s part actually makes the group dynamics shakier. Good group dynamics happen when the teacher allows the students to just be who they are in the classroom. Then the teacher will see something. Creating an
No comprehensible input class – especially one organized around unscripted, authentic communication – can succeed unless the students and the teacher are trained from the beginning of the year in the art of negotiating meaning. In the same way that we don’t allow students to pick the character, if we are using the Invisibles/emergent targets
Jeff Easthon totally gets it and, like so many others right about now, is therefore experiencing pressure from within his building. When you get it and start implementing it in your classroom you become a target. He’s not alone. I think it’s the time of year when traditional teachers see our CI kids having fun
A cool pic from the hotel in Agen last summer. Tina and I got a few hours in the mornings at breakfast with Stephen Krashen and Beniko Mason. What we learned from them in those discussions only furthered our belief that non-targeted comprehensible input is a fine way to teach a language, and that we
Colleagues who are full of pride about their ability to teach in a way that we know is outdated, from another time, which favors the few, can be dangerous to us. They can even threaten us. Of course, such posturing and judging is always done out of sheer ignorance. If these relics from the past really put
A way to train teachers that I have found very successful is to just return to something Blaine was doing before all the fracturing of TPRS over the past twenty years, Passive Mini Stories, or the infamous PMS term. Perhaps it was the acronym that threw people off the scent of true TPRS, because they
Cherie’s situation and a recent email communication with Reuben Rojas in L.A. prompted this post. I will certainly get some heat on this from the TPRS purists who say that it is CI or the highway, but it’s just an idea. This could impact teachers doing CI in those in departments that haven’t yet shifted their
This is from Cherie Thomas in Albermarle, Virginia: Hi Ben, I have a situation that I need some help with. Our school is using our PD day next Monday to work with the HS we feed into. All departments have to meet at the HS to discuss “common student experiences”. We are supposed to come
I was just thinking how, last summer, I invited teachers who work in Coalition of Essential Schools buildings to a dialogue on this blog about how, in foreign languages, they in no way align with the set of ten common principles that Ted Sizer originally set out about thirty years ago. Unfortunately, we got nothing going –
On the topic of training new people, Robert Harrell has said: “I think there is a place for practicing certain skills in isolation, but if we never practice everything at once, it will never come together.” I have heard it said that doing TPRS in Blaine’s “stepless” way makes it “harder for beginners”. People making
I just found out something interesting.. The corporate offices of the Coalition of Essential Schools are in Portland, ME. That’s right where Annemarie teaches. If you go to their website, you will see that their site is actually offered in Spanish as well. Having taught in a Coalition school, my thinking is that CES needs
