Alisa and I shared an interesting email thread today. She wrote: Hi Ben, The place where I’m consulting [ed. note: a Hebrew School in NYC] has a very intense testing culture. As they become schooled in CI, the principal of the junior high, I’m told, is quite stuck on what standard to hold the junior high […]
Personally, I don’t like the pressure to create a great story in every class. There is the idea out there that the teacher has to walk into the classroom and create with her students a great story, as long as they have the skills. Too much pressure. In that story model, everything, all the interest and
Those who, like me, think that the Star Sequence provides the truest overall curricular form to NTCI might enjoy this suggestion from Alisa: Here is an optional modification to The Star Sequence: Add a 6th point that includes: (1) Small Talk (2) Classroom banter (3) Card Talk (4) National Day and other beginning of class
I just had an insight into the reason these things are on the ACTFL pages. I once worked, an eternity ago, with Vicki Galloway, who was the South Carolina Foreign Language Consultant and later a big shot in the ACTFL hierarchy. Every time I talked to Vicki I could not understand her words. She was
Those six principles/”core practices” – I have to put them in quotes because I can’t take them seriously – that Alisa brought up won’t leave my mind, and hence me, alone, since I am what I think. Kind of. I keep thinking about them. They are just too juicily wrong and out of touch with
Well, the weather just turned cold here in Colorado after five months of perfect mountain weather. It had to happen. I have been going through old files and I found four quotes that might help us deal with another Monday morning in that very strange month in school buildings called October: The first is from
I have been going through old Google docs and found 98 pages of old blog articles from before 2007. Some may want to peruse them. But keep in mind that they are very TPRS oriented and were written way before the NTCI thing happened (2016): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AJFFDTJmEDjbd455DjZHOBS_5MBjJ9NKEWtBvZbySyc/edit
Greg wrote this cool power point on A Natural Approach to Stories, which I think in many ways is an even more important book than A Natural Approach to the Year: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12oBa_3fzgiJuxvPdmpzj8LRxyqGWmJMs8fAxLqXa6tc/edit#slide=id.g2a2aee8035_0_29
Question for anyone in the group on the scripts: Hello Ben, I just purchased the 97 Scripts (Matava) from your website. Thanks for making it available! Question: Do you think it might be a good idea (apart from creating a story with the whole class) to provide students with the script so they can create
When you do non-targeted input you end up creating much bigger CI swimming pools in your classrooms. But when you try to limit the vocabulary being learned to certain words that someone told you to teach from a list, you’re in the small pool; you’re almost in the kiddie pool. Not trying to control everything
We in this online community should be so very appreciative of our Alisa for her unlimited and always expanding awareness of what is going on in our profession. In what looks like some serious backsliding in mainstream WL education, there is a new term out there called “WL Core Practices” that didn’t get by Alisa’s
This is from Anne: Hi Ben, I can’t remember if I read this somewhere or if I made it up myself: Every day of the year is National Something-Or-Other Day. Most days it’s 3 or 4 things. On nationaldaycalendar.com you can find a list; you can also get put on a mailing list and receive
