Ben Slavic

Agen 2014

I have asked Judy to send us news of the second annual Agen conference in France this summer. Here is her first report: Hey Ben – Sabrina Sebban-Janczak has agreed to run a special three day French language workshop in Agen just before our TPRS workshop. So the French teachers can get some intensive Comprehensible

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On Being Let Go

I’m not going to get into details here, but one of our group has been axed for next year. The (most excellent) TPRS/CI based program he started was eliminated. Here is a paragraph from the people with the axes, justifying their move. Below it are two emailed responses from other colleagues, also members of our

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Article and Video

We are lucky to have an article and videos by one of our own PLC members and one of the five finalists in 2014 for ACTFL’s National Teacher of the Year – Dr. Robert Patrick in Atlanta, Georgia. The article and video clips appeared this week in the newsletter of the Classical Association of New

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Free Writes

One of our new members, Polly Fuller, has a question about Free Writes. I think it would help a lot of the newer teachers to be able to read some comments from experienced teachers on this excellent winter activity, when we just don’t feel like teaching and want our students to just be quiet for

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Just Go with the Flow

[ed. note: I will republish some articles from 2008 and 2009 on flow since they fit in with recent articles. They discuss a concept that is most important to our success in our CI classrooms – flow.] We ask questions. We do not know what the answers will be. One of the answers feels right

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Language and Family

I wanted to comment on what skip said this morning in a comment but I got that annoying security rule, so here it is as a post: Skip said: …I have been reminded a couple of times recently how common it is to try to use CI to TEACH the language – vocab, present tense,

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PQA vs. Stories

There has been a recent thread on whether PQA or stories are easier to do, or bring the best gains. My thought is that it depends on the teacher. I personally have gone back and forth on this, as I am sure many of us have. One year I might prefer PQA to stories and

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