I didn’t want to waste any time nickel and diming my students on their final exam this year. So I took a four page embedded reading from a recent story, with approximately 50% new material in it, and, during the first fifty minutes of the 70 minute final exam, we talked around the twenty true/false questions […]
Friday, a Simon Constable column appeared in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal (page A13, Friday, May 21). It was called On-the-Job Straining. It reviews a book by Tony Schwartz called The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working. The entire first paragraph of Constable’s article is a grabber: “Let’s not be coy about it. At times, life inside
Michele put the following up as a comment but it scrolled out while awaiting moderation (comments with url’s get moderated), so I am putting it here in relationship to the discussion about informing administrators about what we really do. In fact, I have one AP who cares to study and embrace CI, because he thinks it can help
We pay attention to the administrators and ignore the parents. Why is this? I think it is a big mistake. Let’s talk about the parents briefly. Yesterday, I met a highly educated and articulate parent who happens to be quite pissed off at years of lack of communication with administrators about what is best for
My heart goes out to students whose learning style is predominantly visual. The reason is that languages are not learned visually – they are learned primarily in an auditory way. Reading, writing, speaking – all emerge from listening. Most students have been made into visual learners by the nature of instruction in schools (thus fully two thirds
This game I invented was a huge hit in my classes. Easy to organize. Very engaging. Might help a few teachers who are looking for ways to keep CI going these last weeks of school. Jody Fun CI Game after Reading (adapt for age group): Devise 10 (or whatever number suits you) opinion questions, which
There is a point of critical mass where, if one too many students is confused, heads go down on the desks and we lose the chemistry of the class, to which all must contribute. Then we feel like fools and blame the method. In order to avoid getting to that point of critical mass, we
People have asked me how our Anchorage TPRS group got going. They’d like to have something similar in their communities. Susie thought I should present a “how to” at a TPRS conference, but I knew it would only take about six minutes to explain. Here goes: Ben’s books gave me the concept of today’s TPRS
There are days when we wish we could go into our classrooms and be mindless and not worry about anything at all, following a set of automatic steps that still hold our students’ attention for the entire class period. Below is a 90 minute lesson plan that does that for me. I use it
We can get lots of reps and lots of additional input with the personalized readings we do the day after our story. But not only can we do this in the class that the story was created, but we can (and should) also share these stories with other classes. Not only are kids interested in
K, my former student who has written so beautifully and with such great courage about her experience promoting stories in her IB school this year, and the unexpected support she got from her wonderfully open teacher, now shares her thoughts on how next year is setting up for her. The blog is very direct and
Having just watched the movie Outrage, I am so moved by how some gay activists must just feel so tired from fighting the discrimination and ignorance perpetrated by those who would oppose or attack them for whatever political or personal reason. I wouldn’t dare compare the intellectual snobbery and ignorance from Krashen’s colleagues’ on his work to that
