Ben Slavic

I perhaps gave the wrong impression about participants needing the experience and the vocabulary to get into the War Room. That’s not true. Newer people can attend and observe and not say or do anything. All that is needed is a willingness to go narrow and deep with the acronyms found on this site. A […]

To repeat: learning is a completely unconscious process, as Krashen has shown us, but we ignore that, and so we get nowhere in our teaching. We water down Krashen. Our interpretation of his work turns muddy and so our work turns muddy. And then we wonder why comprehension based instruction doesn’t work for us. In

Skip asked me in an email for some thoughts on what it feels like to retire. Here is my offering: Tonight is the last Sunday night of my career. Sunday nights have been typically hard for me, the hardest time of the week, as I, totally a night person, have tried again and again for

We need to keep in mind that we can’t just order up a serving of higher order thinking for our students. We must spend enough time at the lower end of the taxonomy with the basic three steps of TPRS to set up the higher order thinking which only then can be applied to the

Here is the format and a statement of philosophy for the War Room sessions at iFLT and NTPRS: In the afternoons after lunch at iFLT I plan to show my version of TPRS/CI, mainly how I prefer to go through the three steps of TPRS, as well as lots of other things. I feel that

Brigitte shares: Dear Ben and all, Here is my situation and I would really love the input from the group: I am in the (fortunate?) situation that my level 1 and 2 students have taken so amazingly well to being taught with CI that the parents went to the superintendent of our district and asked

This first of two articles is a background article. The second, from Brigitte, the real focus of this new thread, will appear later this week. First, I want us to try to come to some kind of agreement about some of the points I raise below. A full appreciation of what Brigitte is asking the

In a recent comment here David wrote: …when kids are writing things down it brings a sense of legitimacy…. Then Drew this morning suggested exploring adding into his classes this summer: …a three sentence dictation in the form of notes that deals with the target structure and relates to the PQA…. I see this as

Robert actually has found a real answer to your question Greg: Here are the URLs for a couple of articles on the history of grading – http://www.indiana.edu/~educy520/sec6342/week_07/durm93.pdf http://academics.holycross.edu/files/Education/schneider/Making_the_Grade_JCS_pre-pub.pdf An interesting comment from this article: … Prussian schools organized children and the curriculum in terms of a series of stepped grades that allowed students to move

Sabrina has played hooky from the blog since last August. Who could blame her? Last summer she moved from Chicago to Denver, as Diane Neubauer is doing this summer, and went into Thomas Jefferson High School in DPS and also worked throughout the year with Mark Knowles at UC Boulder teaching CU faculty French with

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This wonderful report from Annemarie is just further proof that we all got on the right train: Hey Ben, How are you? Are you counting the days? I can’t believe you are almost totally done. Good for you! The school in which I work is considered an “exemplar” school within EL and the chief academic