Counseling departments in some schools where CI is practiced in language classes often sense that special needs kids benefit from CI instruction in languages in ways that they cannot when the teacher is still doing

It generally feels like we’re failing at our careers but it’s not us; it’s the system around us. We’re doing a pretty good job actually, putting in as we are an entirely new pedagogy to

Note: I’m coaching a Chinese teacher on the Invisibles. Here are some questions that she asked. They cover more than Chinese instruction, so even if you don’t teach Chinese you may want to give this

A repost: (I had a copy of this taped to my desk for 30 years. It helped me keep my sanity and know how to respond to bad leaders and other negative and controlling voices

Why should we transmit mere information to our students when we can transmit so much more: interest, meaning, fun, confidence? Maybe we could even transmit to them a reason to believe in themselves. Why teach

This information is from The Big CI Book. It gives proper credit to Jody Noble. Jody’s idea – dating from about 2001 – was (certainly unintentionally) appropriated by many TPRS teachers over the years so

Summary: Practitioners of CI get a lot more bang for their buck when they spread the process of getting repetitions on the language out over a process of reading the story, as opposed to using

One Word Images have caught on. I’ve been doing them since I first started them in 2002, but only lately have they become a basic CI strategy. Here are some additional thoughts about them as

A repost from 2017: A teacher needs help in how to respond to this situation: “I am in need of justifying how CI is an effective instructional strategy to my principal who indicated on my

It’s never too early to plan our end of the year activities, and this post is simply to remind those who in the past have found success in late spring using the Children’s Story Project

Sunday nights after dinner during the school year used to be emotionally very difficult for me. I made this prayer to God one time and it helped. I reprint it here periodically: Dearest God, Your

The whole thing about teaching a language is that it is the heart that leads in language production and not the mind. What does that mean? It means that people say things (i.e. use language,

Quick quizzes are easy, short, true/false questions (five or ten or however many you want). If you are pressed for time ask five and double the score. The questions are written during the story by

It’s always a good thing to focus on your storytelling skills, image building skills (all those things described in ANATS and applied in ANATTY) but in my opinion that is something you work on most

Here is the Interpersonal Skills Rubric referred to in the previous posts, but in a different format (from ANATS). It is no easy task to pull this off grading move in January, since we all

In this last article in the series on textbook companies, Robert Harrell offers a concluding statement to Sarah’s original set of questions about how to respond to her department’s actions in choosing a textbook. The

jGR, aka the Interpersonal Skills Rubric (ISR) is the second and most important to us of ACTFL’s Three Modes of Communication. Here is some more information about it. I am recommending that you use it

In this series of articles about surviving the winter and especially that first month back in January, we focus primarily on assessment changes, accepting that changes in classroom culture are hard to effectuate in mid-year,

In this article Robert asks the textbook companies about how they address relevance. The point he makes below is also one of my favorites in this series, which, to repeat, if read with an open

Based on:  http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html Stephen Krashen is a Second Language Acquisition researcher and professor at University of Southern California who has been publishing and speaking since the 1970’s. “Language acquisition does not require extensive use of

It’s funny – funny in the sense of weird, even unnatural – how we put kids down and then blame them (using our weapons of choice: grades) because they can’t do what we ask them.

On the first day back after this vacation, check in with your students in English, like you do in the town meetings with the invisibles. Throughout the year, this check-in period at the start of

(Note: This was published after Thanksgiving but will work equally well after the Winter and Spring breaks as well. In my opinion there is no better way to start in with CI after a vacation

The end of Christmas break signals a time of depression in many of us. We have five hard months in front of us. The question invariably comes up, “Can I do anything to get the

Robert addresses rigor in this question: How does the textbook support the following constituent elements (according to the US Department of State) of rigor? Sustained Focus Depth and Integrity of Inquiry Suspension of Premature Conclusions

Over the years, there seems to have been a unique theme, or maybe two, that we as a group have kept at the forefront of our collective mind for discussion here on the PLC for

We’ll take a few weeks to break now for the holidays. There is no shortage of articles to read. All you have to do is pick a category that you want to work on next

What happens in schools over the years with our students is that everything becomes increasingly based on performance. Beginning in the latter part of elementary school, everything starts to become based on success and tests,

Let’s not mince words about going back into our classrooms after a vacation, esp. the summer vacation. The purpose of this post is to help us get mentally ready to go back to school AFTER

Obviously. The outage was caused by malware. Thanks for your patience. Rest assured that the new company protecting this site is very highly rated, so we should not have any more hacking problems, fingers crossed.

I got this from a group member today. It seems like this is a tough part of the year: Hi Ben, A student came into my room yesterday upset about his grade.  He disagreed with

Craig has a question for the group: I’m realizing finally that I have a problem. It is this. I am far too accommodating to students. Especially to ones that don’t make any effort to accommodate my requests.

Q. I know that in the Invisibles book you offer lots of ideas for sub days. Could you summarize some of them here? A. Here are some: (1) Give the students translation tests of previous

When a semester or final exam period arrives, I do a story that goes through the phases of the star, just as in a normal Invisibles class. An exam period of two or three hours

Here’s an article we should probably all read: https://medium.com/kaizen-habits/psychologists-explain-how-to-stop-overthinking-everything-e527962a393

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. I once asked Joe Neilson (the unrecognized co-founder of TPRS)

In a comment here a few days ago, Annemarie wrote: …I felt that I couldn’t have any moments of quiet, that I had to fill every single minute. I realize that I still feel that

This is an update on the new Invisibles book. What I did was combine the two older books into one updated 410 page masterpiece, if I do say so myself (I’ve never said that about

Students are always exactly where they are, and if we express something in three seconds, and they need four, it is up to us to slow our speech down to their level and not expect

In general, one could say that one of the primary reasons for many of the overall failures in the American educational system is that teachers routinely speak to their students, in all subjects, using rates

One day I was watching my classes being taught by a teacher new to the method. I was coaching her from the side of the room. Being new to it, she went extremely slowly. The

This is a repost from many years ago. The information in it cannot be repeated enough. Many of us fail to look in the right place for the solution to the problem of not reaching

You must accept that you are never going to come close to teaching your students anything more than a fraction of the language, in spite of what the College Board would have you believe to

Below is a video link to a Story Listening example (in German) by Kathryn Shectman. It’s a very simple story with lots of repetitions. Notice how she brings her pacing and vocabulary content completely down

Craig had an idea that at this time of year if we create a one word image of a turkey we could have fun riffing on it. He explains: Hey Ben – ….I had each

Regarding distribution of instructional minutes in Story Listening (SL), I asked in a 2016 phone call with Dr. Beniko Mason, the originator of Story Listening, if she thought that Story Listening and the Invisibles would

There is one specific activity that I suggest we throw in from time to time as a break from the Invisibles. It is another way to teach using comprehensible input that is tried, tested and

The words in French, Spanish and English – Mais/Pero/But! – can be bleated. This is one of the funniest thing that occurs in my classes, and it occurs all the time. But it is hard

Knockathon gets us repetitions on “How many times?” Ringeroni gets us reps on “For how long?” Ringeroni happens in a story whenever an actor approaches a house not to knock on the front door but

Knockathon happens in a story whenever an actor approaches a building to knock on the door, which happens more often than you might think: A girl wanted a boyfriend so she left her house and