Are we stuck in our minds with our students’ attention on the form of the language when we teach? Or are our students experiencing the meaning of the language without being focused on its form? In the former, things feel heavy, in the latter they feel light. I have added “heavy” gesturing to the list […]
This article is only for those doing the Ultimate CI approach: Of the six questioning levels used in the Ultimate CI approach, QL5 is always going to be the longest, the most complex and the most important. It is here where you build levels of dramatic tension that are impossible in the tableaux, where you
A lot of what we talk about here involves our newly unfolding consciousness that is centered around the Black Lives Matter movement. Schools are just little microcosms of society and it is where a ton of social change happens. So if we don’t have built into our curriculum the most pressing issue of our time,
Here is another poem by Hafiz, translated by Dan Ladinsky: DIVIDING GOD The moon starts singing when everyone is asleep and the planets throw a bright robe around their shoulders and whirl up close to her side. Once I asked the moon, why do you and your sweet friends not perform so romantically like that to a larger crowd? And the
Here is my favorite image from the Ultimate CI trainings last summer: “Two Men Dancing on a Beach”. I think what Danielle achieved in this drawing is the perfect amount of 10% new embedded material (with the rain). In this one word image we see a good example of the level of SIMPLICITY we want
In a recent exchange with a department head who is trying with mixed success to point her teachers in the direction of CI, she said to me: I miss the days when teaching was truly teaching and we didn’t have to check off items on charts, prove that we’ve covered the standards, show test scores,
Here is another poem by Hafiz, this one also from 2009, translated by Dan Ladinsky: DIVIDING GOD The moon starts singing when everyone is asleep and the planets throw a bright robe around their shoulders and whirl up close to her side. Once I asked the moon, why do you and your sweet friends not
Here is a cool testimonial from Cynthia Tann: Hi Ben! – I have followed your work for the last 5 years or more. The strategies of CI work! I am looking forward to refreshing the details as I feel like I need it. Using ONLY CI for the last four years, I have a story
Here is another poem written by the Persian master Hafiz. The translation from the Persian is by Dan Ladinsky: DROPPING KEYS The small man builds cages for everyone he knows, while the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.
We must push our profession forward right now. At stake is not just the self-esteem of millions of children (which the traditional ways of language instruction did not honor, preferring to focus instead on intellectual achievement), but also at stake is the fabric of the countries of the world and the ways in which they
Here is another Hafiz poem, this one published here in 2009, that I tried to connect to our work: SPICED MANNA Someone will steal you if you don’t stay near, and sell you as a slave in the market. I sing to the nightingales’ hearts, hoping they will learn my verse, so that no one
A repost from a few years ago: We just can’t afford to be bored in our life’s work. It’s terrible to go to a job every day that we don’t enjoy. We must find a way to make it fun. We just must. We don’t have a choice. For me, twenty years ago, it was
