Can you imagine the frustration there must be in trying to learn a language in the old way? I got the email below from a front line worker in NYC. I include my responses – in bold – because they bear heavily on why your are a member of this PLC: Hello Ben,I am a
2022 is going to be the year I throw ” all I got” at the racism piece in our field. If we don’t start teaching in a way that actively includes brown and black kids, and if we don’t develop and use a curriculum that brings an even playing field, then what are we doing?
Since 2018 I’ve been writing a book on classroom management in the CI classroom. I threw it in the trash in my computer today. Why? Because it’s a waste of time to write and to read a book about classroom management. How can we possibly remember everything in the book and apply it in the
Julia’s students have extended the idea of making clay figures out of their invisible characters into little claymation projects. Described below is the first Invisibles claymation project ever done. When thinking about the end-of-year celebration, after two months of projects, I can just imagine the joy in a class as the kids, the parents, staff,
A repost from 2018: I’m on a new kick – the appreciation of beauty. By us. When we’re teaching. So that our students can experience something beautiful each day instead of what they experience now, with the testing in all their classes and all. Why not? Why not make schools into places where beauty (of
Nine years ago I met Kate Taluga at a conference on saving native endangered languages in Oklahoma. She also attended a National TPRS conference around that time and presented on building community with students – I believe that conference was in Las Vegas. I remember enjoying speaking with Susan Gross and Kate after Kate presented
What do you do if you get more than 18 students or more in your Invisibles online classes in the fall? Don’t you need to see their faces in order for the Invisibles to work online, since grading them is based on seeing their faces? I was asked this question on a webinar with Teacher’s
Up until now, after twenty years of doing CI or some other form of it like TPRS, I have always thought that the two ways of teaching were mostly mutually exclusive. But now, I see no reason why we can’t mix the two, especially in level 1 language classes. That’s where all the oppositional sparks
We were talking about the limitations brought by the new practitioners of TPRS/CI who have over the past twenty years led the TPRS/CI movement into a new marketplace which I call the “CI Marketplace”, where the purity of the research and the elegant simplicity of the Communication standard have been left in tattered shreds of
In the last post we suggested that there have been waves of language teachers since about 1970. The first were the traditionalists. ‘Nuff said. The second were the Blaine Ray disciples who came in with real force in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, they sold out and Krashen and Blaine let them. So now, their potential
I said in a recent Teacher’s Discovery webinar – just yesterday actually – that we need to finally grow up in our profession. We need to become big girls and boys now that COVID has opened up a new and exciting highway for us to align more and more with the research. We need to
