So why not start thinking about next year already? Because some of us are barely able to drag our resistant asses into our classrooms these days? All the more reason to do it! My firm

Tina and I (CI Liftoff) have a few books now on teachable.com that are very good. One is about the why of non-targeted CI instruction. It is a tremendously valuable look at the entire topic

I’m starting to be practical and think about aiming the content of the PLC toward next year. It’s because the professional feeling here right now is colored by that “Month of May” feeling of semi-despair

I am reposting this for Udo who had questions about SSR: Here is a strategy that eats up minutes; I should say gobbles them up. I would call it a bail out move but there

From Amy: Ben, Here’s my commute today. I work in the suburb of Salt Lake City and this stretch of road at the end of my commute is a good reminder to me to climb

This is from Leigh Anne: Hi Ben, How are you, mon ami? It is great to see the changes in la Méthode, to know that you are continuing the discourse and that you are surviving

Hey Ben, I did one of those class evaluations and I got some pretty good data. It basically says that 90% of students love storytelling and like 5% would rather do book work. I think

Sean describes: Driving under the Red Line El train in Chicago…. These May days can be rough… trying to get through the day. I can not emphasize enough how much you and the members of

Tina reports: I walked home and took this from the west hills:

Jen explains: This is the corner of West Bow St. and Central St. in downtown Franklin, NH. The building on the left is a rehab / recovery place. The yellow building is one of the

Diane has been with us here in the PLC for many years. She started out in Chicago, moved to Denver I think around four years ago, taught at Valor Christian High School and now has

Here is Keri’s commute in Connecticut from this morning:

This is Emeka’s “commute” down the hallway each day: Ben – I walk by this every morning and every night to get to my classroom. It’s a good reminder for me about the bigger picture

Making Krashen’s ideas come to life fully in our classrooms cannot actually be described to someone in words, one has to experience it. This is especially true if a teacher is predisposed to looking for faults, and not strengths, in things

Alisa is doing a high stakes training in NYC soon. We had this conversation: Q. My question for you and the PLC is, has anyone ever walked into a school or organization training knowing there

Ryann Campbell is kicking butt on the Invisibles out there in the state of Washington. Her commute:

As time goes by and we keep trying, we learn more and more to trust and allow ourselves during class to allow angels to push us from behind. We feel instructed by our own inner guidance and we learn

This is from John Piazza, one of the Latin Kings: Not sure if you saw my recent post on the Latin facebook group, but you have a lot to do with this. Thanks again. I

Recently someone posted on the More list asking about how and when to gesture to establish meaning, and their query was met with a strong assertion that establishing meaning through gestures is just not to

Scotty Jimenez teaches high school Spanish in Oxford, MS. He shared with Tina and I at our recent St. Louis workshop that he’s wrapping up his tenth year of teaching and apparently has done it

Alisa wrote a cool sentence today. In working with a group of traditional teachers, when they realized what is possible with CI instruction, she said: … [they] immediately felt that rush of wind through their

Here’s Carmen’s commute: Hi Ben, I took this picture this morning on my way to work. It was very cloudy here in Chicago. That’s the loop (downtown), my school is in the West Loop. Best,

In the same way that our planet is warming up, so also is it undeniable that the role of the heart in education is warming up: Chapter 06: Energetic Communication

Alisa got this message from a student, a second grade native Mandarin Speaker in her Spanish class who was in ELL during Spanish last year. It kind of says it all.

Tina throws a wrench into the thinking of those who think that they are teaching to the standards when they are really doing skill building activities: The communicative activity where they practice doing Task X

Tina made this. It is a line from A Natural Approach to Stories:

Here’s Steven’s commute along with that double rainbow he mentioned. To me it symbolizes hope for us:

A member of our community said this to me in an email today. Guess who it was? I got a free latte for Teacher Appreciation Week. The mom who delivered it is Chloe’s mom. She

When we target parts of the language, and repeat them with the goal of getting students to learn them, we inevitably leave some of our students behind. Some get left behind because they are not

Tina took this photo today in Portland:

Alisa adds a few most profound thoughts about how we are doing this work: Many of us can’t teach all day, pouring all we’ve got into relationships with kids, and then fight all night justifying

This from our Alisa is the best way to look at data collection and admin requests that I have yet seen, and we have hundreds of articles on this topic here on the PLC.  This

We are nervous because, though we hope for the best, though we know that at times our skills and training allow us to hit the stories out of the park, we are always fearing the worst

In non-targeted work, we are freer to think in terms of activities and topics, and not worry so much about finding that Perfect Activity to Teach Colors.  We thus can give up the pressure to

Just as every student can acquire a language by hearing and understanding messages, every teacher can learn to speak slowly and understandably to convey compelling messages.  But expecting students to gain control of targeted structures

To my understand as well as Tina’s, delivering compelling messages in a relaxed community is all Dr. Krashen is recommending. The two of us have talked about this topic non-stop for over a year now.  Krashen

Natural speech using language that emerges from the need for communication allows us to focus more completely on students’ ideas. This has built incredible community and student engagement in our classrooms. When getting repetitions of

Just focusing on delivering comprehensible messages to our students helps us ease into a state of flow in our classes.  Dr. Stephen Krashen suggests in his Forgetting Hypothesis that students should forget that they are

Just focusing on delivering comprehensible messages to our students helps us ease into a state of flow in our classes.  Dr. Stephen Krashen suggests in his Forgetting Hypothesis that students should forget that they are

Our goal is to make acquisition effortless for them. Thus, if the sentence is: Jacob was born on Sept. 29, 2006. Walk to Jacob.  Touch him on the shoulder.  Smile big.  Say his name.  If

We become adept at becoming aware of what we are feeling intuitively as teachers. We learn to feel our way creatively and expansively through a class without a lesson plan. We learn that good language teaching

Have the researchers figured out how many combinations of words there are in languages? Have they figured out the form it assumes in human speech? Can they predict the form that language assumes? I’m thinking

Back in 2011 Robert Harrell offered this advice: One of the things we are supposed to do each day is write down a goal and agenda for every class every day. The goal is supposed

We did well with our quick responses to Keri’s question a few weeks ago. Now we only have, really, one day to help Steven Ordiano in Fresno with the following: Hi Ben, I would like

This article first appeared here in June of 2008: Jody Noble sent me, some months ago, a text written about foreign language education in our country by Dr. Jack Richards. Here is a portion of the

I was asked via email about the content of the Bite Size Books – what it looked like. I sent the person this example from our Bite Size Book of Student Artists, and share it

Hi Ben, I wanted to give a report about how yesterday’s Open House went. Overall, it was a time to show off my French 1s freewrites with some supportive parents. However, harsh opinions were not

Are there any AP teachers in our group who would briefly address the current state of the exam in terms of writing/grammar/essay requirements?

A teacher wrote and expressed fear that with Story Listening we might go from too much transparency (TPRS) to confusing the kids (SL). My position is that any confusion that the kids might experience in