I got this email today from a colleague who has dived deeply and fully into the waters of the Invisibles this year which, since she is in Southwest Asia, began for her and her students only five weeks ago. Hi, Ben, One of the hardest things about teaching in a foreign school is that the
Classroom Management is Based On How Our Students Feel We must make our classes interesting if we are to plug into the CI powerhouse and make it work for us. Here is the key sentence that we must keep in mind at all times if we are to make CI work for us: Students must
We are not yet arrived at the nuts and bolts of classroom management in our summer examination of what the term actually means and how we can master it in our classroom in the fall. More reflection on what we want to see from our students in our classrooms is needed before we go to
Comprehension of another language itself is joyful. So we can stop thinking of ourselves as hilarious entertainers who always have to bring the “wow” factor and begin to think of ourselves as calm, measured providers of comprehensible messages. Usually what teachers read as “boredom” is actually, in reality, “not understanding.” If we think that our
One Has to Be Out of One’s Mind One has to be out of one’s mind to acquire a language. Thinking about the language is a mind-based activity that goes against the research and isolates students from one another. Feeling the language in happy communication (no thinking – everyone focused on the message) creates strong bonds between everyone in
For a language teacher to not be in touch with the concepts put forth by Dr. Krashen and Dr. Beniko Mason and the other comprehensible input experts carries a high price tag in terms of the actual results we get from our students. This is true not just when applied to academic gains but also
Our book on classroom management continues to be written here on a day-to-day way in this, our seventh installment: What Are Our Goals? What are our classroom management goals? What might we imagine a well- functioning CI classroom to look and feel like, from our own point of view and that of our students? If
I know that we’ve decided to make classroom management the focus here this summer, and a good focus it is. To that end, I have so far published here nine introductory articles, over the past few weeks. Each article represents the progressive, day-by-day development of what will become an eventual actual book on classroom management.
It seems rather obvious, but we must speak slowly if we want to build communities in our classroom. How can we build community when our students don’t understand us because we are speaking too quickly? The numbers below are from an article in the The Wichita Eagle from 2008. Studies give slightly varying rates, but the conclusion
This post is from 2015: We have talked so much about SLOW over the years, but I think we all still go too fast. We always go too fast. Our classes then split under this burden. What is too fast? There are some posts from the recent years here that support 130 words per minute
Starting stories with a general idea about a problem and no targets is a great way of getting a robust and healthy plot line going. The reason I say that is that I have carefully studied how Joe Neilson (the unrecognized co-founder of TPRS along with Blaine Ray) used to start his stories. I’ve interviewed
Leaving Vampspooder and returning now to our progressively expanding new book on classroom management: A Fly in the Ointment As the proficiency movement and comprehension-based instruction have moved steadily forward, one glaring problem has arisen: classroom management has become more and more of a problem as each new teacher who has embraced comprehension-based instruction has
