Ben Slavic

Here is a link to some videos I made at East High School about a year ago: http://www.schooltube.com/channel/dpsworldlanguages/ (search “ben slavic’ to get to the videos)

Of all the threads this year that just simply got dropped, Readers Theatre got shrifted the shortest. I mean, got the shortest schrift. Or something. Yet, I hope, at some point, to get all my notes from Jason’s workshop in February (seems like just yesterday) compiled in readable form so that we can come up with a step by step

Bob Patrick made a very accurate statement when he observed that the big mystery of why teachers shun comprehension based instruction so much is that they simply don’t find it interesting: Dear Ben, Some reflections based on recent interaction with other language teachers. The real problem for those of us who are committed to CI is

Hi Ben, I’ve been asked to serve on a committee organized by our county educational service center in order to come up with some models for teacher evaluations.  They’re looking for people who are passionate about what is happening with the teacher evaluation process and changes and I bleed passion for almost everything having to

My definition of an activity is some cute lesson plan that doesn’t use CI, instead using English, or that is connected in some way to some some cool form of computer technology that does not create CI. Activities look like valid language instruction, but are not because they focus the attention on the language and not the message

Grant found these on the DPS website: Writing:  http://curriculum.dpsk12.org/lang_literacy_cultural/world_lang/assessment/Writing_Rubric.pdf Speaking:  http://curriculum.dpsk12.org/lang_literacy_cultural/world_lang/assessment/Speaking_Rubric.pdf [ed. note: In my opinion these are great and can be of excellent use to teachers everywhere, if their district doesn’t have them in place yet.]

Here is a question I got from Lori: Ben, I just found out that all teachers at  our school have a new requirement for next year: …all teachers must prove that the students improve or learn over the course of their class. What will be your year-end summative assessment to show student growth/learning? (example: pre

Here is the continuation of that video on Archie and Circling with Balls: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0ALDg1iTNE

I’m glad I made people pay for the PLC membership. It kept the group small. It kept the right people here. From 12,000 hits a day a year ago and a big, non-focused and argumentative community (people seemed to want to argue the merits of TPRS/CI more than learn it), we have become a group

Many of us met and worked with Sauk, Euchee and Chickasaw tribe members at NTPRS last year. Kate sent me a copy of the agenda for the Inter-Tribal Council of the Five Tribes Native Language Summit which I attended last May. If you notice, it is dominated by Sauk instruction. Here is what Kate said:

Robert got error messages when trying to post this reply about the 10,000 hour discussion. Here it is as a post. It is long but, as with everything from Robert, definitely worth the read: #1 – Ben has mentioned a couple of times that someone has estimated 10,000 hours are necessary for mastery of anything.

The Archie discussion continues here in Segment 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G-2EvHj_Os Here are the other two in case you haven’t seen them yet or want to review them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Lbuqw3xWA (Segment 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRI9DcPLMaU (Segment 2)