Erin asks the group: Ben, I have a question I’d like to ask the group. I’ll be missing the last 5 weeks of school this spring (if not longer) to have my first baby. What on earth can I leave for my Spanish students that will do the least harm? My department head was out […]
Let’s take a break. I’m not interested in thinking about how to become a better teacher right now. I don’t think you are either. Let’s pick this ball up again in January – that would be the soonest for me. We have almost 4,000 posts and 17, 000 comments here dating back six years, so
Think of this post as a place to say or not say what we are thinking and feeling, if we have not gone numb, right now. We work in schools. Our lives are around children. We may choose to read here in the next few days each other’s thoughts on this event. We may choose
Today Diana Noonan came by and saw me using bWT. She didn’t like it. She said that the story we wrote together was more about production and critical thinking and so did not go along with what we in DPS know CI to be. I had to agree, but I am still going to use the
Today one of my classes ended with my group of kids having created the following text as per bWT. We were working from a prompt of three couples dancing at a party: There were three girls and four boys at a party. The guitar player, whose name was Zach, was Muslim. One couple was Johnny and Leslie. They
We should respect what goes on in the deeper mind as it does its work of creating language systems. We should listen to TPRS/CI experts like Judy Dubois when they speak like this: …it seems so obvious today that the world is round, that it’s hard to believe that the vast majority once thought otherwise
Jody La Maréchale des Forces de l’Ouest said in an email: I think we should name ourselves “The Round World Group”. I can no longer see my work through the “flat world lens” no matter how many people believe it’s flat. There is no going back for me. Hard to explain to people who think
How beautiful this is from Jody, our Maréchale of the Western Forces: I notice how easily we “change course” trying to manage our own personalities, histories, perceived weaknesses, anxiety/fears about our job security, etc., and end up fogging up our main mission–to deliver CI to our students in a humane and compassionate setting for them
The listening input we provide for our students is not a set of activities but rather a process based on a template (we call it the first two steps of TPRS). In the same way, the reading input that we provide for our students is not a series of activities but rather a process that we can say
This writing idea is from a teacher in Robert’s school: Our French teacher is also an English teacher, and she showed us a way to nudge our students along in writing and give them the support they need while they do the cognitive stuff. While it isn’t acquisition per se, it helps student writing (which
It’s weird how we can work with this comprehensible input for years and not see things right under our noses. The idea of doing R and D as per recent comments here by Jody, where we just compare characters in novels to kids in our class, is something that I knew about, because I had
This is just to announce a new category designed as a gathering of information point for Mark Knowles at UC Boulder. If you get any information on how your TPRS/CI kids fare in college, pls. send it to him or put it here as a comment. Hopefully this category slowly grows over time and we
