Ben Slavic

LTU

There are teachers who earn their paychecks with an almost complete disregard for what is going on in their students’ lives, and who see their young charges as nothing more than incapable annoyances who could never compete with their five star students, those who take over the classroom and thus divide the class, labeling the

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Grading

This is from my Category A book: The approach described herein involves no planning. This involves no planning of instruction and no planning of assessment as well – no preparation of tests and no grading of tests, or almost none. First, we have students writing the quizzes during class. Our use of the Interpersonal Skill

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MLK

The old type of language teacher mostly only taught in ways that allowed privileged kids, usually white ones, to get into their AP classes. You know the type of teacher I mean. Other kids who “weren’t that smart” weren’t allowed into their upper level classes. But the research shows clearly that all students, regardless of

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Pre-recorded Language Lessons

I understand that some schools are requiring teachers to pre-record online lessons. Here is what Alisa says about that: I have to attend trainings now on Schoology, Nearpod, Flipgrid and some iPad apps like Apple Clips, Keynote, Numbers and Pages (it’s a suite) –  assuming we’ll need them for remote learning (at least partial, maybe full-on)

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The Sauk People

These people use language differently. They don’t just use words to convey ideas. There is something more to it. Those who descend from these people know about it. We don’t. Maybe some day we will. Their gaze seems to be more inward. It seems like such a different time!

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Jigsaw Puzzle

There are so many experts selling CI stuff – disjointed strategies and activities – online now that it has all gotten just too big. It’s like going into one of those huge 800 acre markets in India divided into big sections where there are 570 people who all sell chicken. How much chicken do you

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Dogs

Dogs learn words individually, words like “Sit” or “Fetch” or “Stay”.  As humans, we require richer, more contextual input. So it is probably best that we learn languages in context, and not from individual lists of words where CI is used with the goal of making sure that certain individual vocabulary words have been learned

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Real Communication

This is from Frank James Johnson, the first person to join the PLC back in 2005 when it was known as “The Blog”: Ben: Russian orchestra conductor Valery Gergiev: “The conductor’s eyes convey almost all of it. His hands give the orchestra a rhythmic hint: ‘Play now!’ But how to play is not in the

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Webinar

Becker sent us this link to my last Teacher’s Discovery webinar. Thanks John: Ben – Here’s the Google Drive link – looks like it was all posted by Chuck Verhey of Teacher’s Discovery. The folder has a copy of the video, a copy of the seating chart, Star Chart, and a transcript of the video.

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A New Mission

The old mission of this online community was simply to get better at what we do. This includes classroom management, awareness of the research, how to deal with tough kids, etc. We’ve done a good job for over 15 years on that. Now, with Minnesota, we move into the real mission. It is my prayer

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