Lots of people are using one word images. It is because they are great to create images and images are great to create stories. So if in your department you are working on coaching each

I removed the “sit up squared shoulders” rule from my Classroom Rules this past year because it doesn’t work. Children cannot be forced to pay attention. Even if half of them do sit up and

There is a term that we are taught at workshops: “monitoring student comprehension”. It goes in the pile of all those CI teaching skills that we are admonished to learn at conferences by over-zealous trainers.

I got this question from a member who just joined our group today. A group answer is requested, to give this person, in Germany, a full response: Dear Ben, I have a question about CIRCLING

Either our district bosses and the administrators in our buildings want us to get creative and imaginative in our instruction, using all sorts of out-of-the-box strategies, or they want us to cover their curricular demands,

Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg has been doing a lot of work with non-targeted instruction this year. She is in a unique position to comment on the topic because she teaches both high and low cognate languages, Spanish

Q Do you read the novels with the Invisibles program? A. The novels are great additions to any CI program. My problem has been that many teachers introduce them too early, before half the kids

From Alisa today: I know I’m the least likely person to share a tech tool but a few years back I saw something on Scholastic.com where you could play a virtual slot machine and get

This is just my opinion: When we go for massed repetitions we just can’t get to the human side in our classrooms, not really. We can’t seem to get a decent level of community going.

Here is a good link to Justin’s fine article on NT: IJFLT-Feb-2017

Q. Why do you think that university teachers aren’t doing much of anything in the way of storytelling? A. They are given the cream of the crop from high schools. That instantly maintains the status

The change we are in about how languages are taught is not going to go away because it doesn’t align with the bland, predictable and uninformed district expectations of what language teaching should look like,

Those who have been reading here for the past ten years know that Anne Matava’s script books rock the house but as we move forward more and more toward non-targeted work, we are starting to

Many of us need to take a good hard and honest look at what we are doing, in the interest of keeping our mental health at the forefront of our work with CI, since many of

Q. I try to not introduce any new words and go out of bounds but I am not very good at it. Too many words seem to creep into the discussion. What can I do?

I once visited a Montessori school where 3rd graders were doing vocabulary worksheets. They weren’t overly enthralled, and probably would be more enthralled by this story from Alisa: Superman calls Sponge Bob (SB) and says,

Q. The idea of no planning destroys my entire concept of what my job is as a teacher. Don’t I have to plan? Don’t I have to teach? A. You can if you want to

Q. It seems like such a simple thing – just talking to the kids. Why is it so difficult? A. Actually, I recently remembered that I used to just “talk to the kids” thirty years

Craig shares a website called wordsift.org: Just paste any text into the space there and it gives you options for analyzing the text: word clouds, word frequency, thesaurus, etc. It can be a quick way

Q. So the big problem is that we haven’t been really following what Dr. Krashen says? A. I would say that the big problem is that we haven’t been trusting that the kids will learn

We’ve been making a lot of music over the years and I figured out that we hit our official ten year anniversary for this group in January. Actually I’ve been blogging since 2003 but the

This is a repost from 2007: If new teachers, in their efforts to satisfy some kind of benchmark on some pacing guide, forget the kid, they will never effectively teach the benchmark anyway. The kid

Q. At what level is all of this work with the Invisibles the most effective? A. For me it is with sixth graders. They really get into it. But I think all middle school levels

Pamela: “I made lots of copies with “fill in the blank space” exercises, so at least I can tell the parents that I tried everything I could, and their kids are just not able to

Pamela: “My students find it exhausting and tedious to answer similar questions over and over again.” Tina: I just sense your frustration here. I know the feeling! You knock yourself out trying something new, you

Pamela had said that her students reacted to Circling with this response: “Do you think we are stupid? We did understand who did what where when and how. Stop asking that question over and over

Tina continues (pls refer to the first article in this series to refresh your awareness of Pamela’s concerns): In the interest of Krashen’s ability to read the longer messages (and I am told he reads

Tina continues her response to Pamela’s concerns expressed in the previous article: Tina: I said earlier that I would provide ways to provide repetition without circling. To provide repetitions outside without having to rely on

Pamela expressed concerns about TPRS recently in a discussion online. In the next six articles here, Tina responds to her: Pamela: Maybe I’m not the right teacher for TPRS. I don’t know. It doesn’t work

Q You refer to the idea of a “group mind”. Can you expand on that? A. It’s the collective unconscious mind of the class, and is perhaps the most unifying tool in building community. We

Steven wrote this about a month ago here: …we can try our best to map the great sea of CI via systems and strategies like TPRS and circling. etc… but nontargeted CI has really been

Q. How did you not get fired with an attitude where you are advocating just talking to the kids in the target language, not evaluating speech or writing, when in fact you were supposed to

Q. You seem to have finally reached a place with your teaching where you are happy. What was the very worst part of your career leading up to this point of being professionally content? It

I hope we get some deep answers to this major question from Alisa which is very applicable to current discussion in the CI community: I am getting emboldened to dump my ‘classical’ circling and PQA

Q. How do we make sure that our students will hear the “important” words (some call them “high frequency”) if we go non-targeted? Tina responds: A. If we are teaching for whole-language mastery, then we

Here is a photo of the skype session I had the other night with my former students in India. Linda and I got a moment to talk. Linda and Doug and Jesse go the the

Hi Ben, I “remind” my students often, at least daily, of their responsibility to sit up, make eye contact, join the conversation, make class fun by offering unusual details, etc. It counts for 40% of

Q. What if the kids just keep on blurting? A. Tina recommends for situations where there is a lot of blurting of ideas, that you allow everyone to call out ideas for about one minute,

I sure would like some help answering this question. I’m not sure how to do it, since the premise of homework as I see things in this work is that it should be optional: Hi

I just now skyped with my students from last year in India. It was their morning and my evening. It made me think that the greatness of teaching is not in any pedagogy, or data,

Here is a more complete answer to a question that Keri asked a few weeks ago here: Q. I am certain that I won’t be using an 84 minute block class to create an image.

The entire thing about all the questioning, in my own view, has been overblown. Why not just use our own intuition to say things that promote the plot line and the kids get to sit

I was just thinking how the standard TPRS/CI folks always like to say how the kids need variety in the instructional process. In my view it’s not the routine that causes the kids to get

Q. How do I stay in bounds when new words keep emerging all the time? A. The students need to understand the message, not the individual words. We are teaching language, not individual words. I

Q. What about lesson plans with the Invisibles? A. The Invisibles approach is really a sequence of activities so nothing can be planned out. We just follow the sequence for building stories and for reading.

Q. You mentioned using your hands to work with “clay” in building the one word images. Can you elaborate on that? A. In the same way that a sculptor puts her hands in water and

Q. I can’t get my kids to really listen to each other. They are always blurting over each other. A. You have to use the Classroom Rules with the smile. Every time. Each and every

Q. But what if the character is really good and falls flat, even with a good emotion and a good reason for that emotion? A. I am quite happy to provide the students with boring

Q. What if a character falls flat? What do I do then? A. It always goes back to the fact that the quality of the artwork and thought that went into creating the character has

Q How would you define a balanced character? A. I would say that it would be one with four or five details. That is as much as I feel works for me. However, I do