Ben Slavic

PLC Mission Statement

I was just thinking how we should get into a more positive mindset re: all the fighting of the past 20 years with traditional teachers. We have certainly done some major growth in that area this past year, especially, ever since Eric and Robert and others went into the ACTFL Language Educators lair in Oct.Nov. […]

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The Pedagogy of Poverty

Michele shares: Hey Ben: Students have been well trained to expect a certain kind of teaching. Even though it doesn’t do anyone any good, they are comfortable with what they know and expect and train us to give them just that and nothing else. Parents would be just fine with nothing but scantroned assignments, tests,

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Chinese Video

There are ripple effects happening from Bob Patrick teaching a class on TPRS at the University of Georgia, starting about three years ago and still going strong. This post provides us with some Chinese instruction video from Sandra Lin at UGA. The video is 49 minutes long but I was thinking that if we all

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Whatever Gets It Done

I believe that this is a metaphor for what is happening now in our schools: http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-south-carolina-school-employee-tosses-student-in-classroom-20151026-story.html Therefore, any small spark of humanness that we can bring to our schools, however we do it, through CI or grammar translation or the audio lingual method, whatever gets the job in any small way done to make school have

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Japanese Question

This question is from Ros Stannard in Australia. I gave here Betsy Paskvan’s email address in Alaska, and Martha Nojima’s in Japan, but if anyone else has any insights I’m sure they would be welcome. Hi Ben – I am trying to implement TPRS into my Japanese classroom. Do you know of any teachers that

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