Ben Slavic

Ugly Classes

John has a question for the group that some of us may be able to relate to: My question for the group is, what do you do when you are faced with an ugly class? I can’t think of any other word to describe this class, except ugly. It’s ugly in there almost every day.

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The Old Way Crushed Hope

Let’s not mince words. Kids of today have few reasons to believe in themselves. The scene in most schools is still all about competition and testing and dominating and winning and excluding others. But if we learn to teach using comprehensible input we can change that culture of competition into one of cooperation and mutual

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Corazón

Here is an old blog post from 2008: There is a line in either Baudelaire or St.-Exupéry, I can’t remember which, in which the writer is talking about some guy who thought that he could get somewhere by “voie de terre”, by land, not realizing that his destination was an island. I’ll have to track that

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Don’t Forget!

If you need a little chuckle this morning here’s one. My favorite is the advertisement in the third paragraph. Unless, of course, you think that by filling out their survey something will happen. I don’t: Dear Colleague, ACTFL will soon be launching a sixteen month initiative, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to

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We Accept Stress

A repost from last spring: We accept classroom stress as normal, in spite of the fact that we have now found a way to teach that is not inherently stressful. Yes, the great fact about comprehension based teaching is that its nature is to be almost devoid of stress. It is the atmosphere of striving

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Just Read This Post

Robert made the effort to actually purchase and read the Content-Based Teaching and Learning book, so the least we can do is read this post slowly and reflect on what he says: When we start talking about method, approach, strategy, etc., we quickly get into a quagmire of conflicting definitions and opinions with often little

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jGR Defended Twice

Matthew Webster and Nathaniel Hardt have written in defense of jGR, or the Interpersonal Communication Skills Rubric (ICSR), the following. Teachers new to this powerful rubric can use them in discussions with parents about its enforcement in their classroom. I have also placed these two statements in the Primers section (hardlink above) for ease of

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