Ann K has a question that might be best handled by the group: Ben – What would CI look like in a concept based curriculum? That is the direction my county wants to go with all subjects.  I am supposed to come to the curriculum meeting with a list of concepts I would like to […]

This morning Sean shares a question from a relatively ignorant administrator that echoes questions from the past ten years. None of us is exempt from this. The administrator comes in, observes, then tries tries to show off what little language they have (see below) while at the same time having – just having – to

I just got this rather impressive news from a teacher: …our county won’t hire anyone who is not CI trained or willing to go through training and transition. Teachers who aren’t on board are feeling the pressure….

Greg reports from Chicago: Hi Ben,  Just wanted to share with you two of the drawings from the PERSONA ESPECIAL interview.   This is something that I don’t know if other teachers who are doing PERSONA ESPECIAL do but I decided to do the process of PERSONA ESPECIAL the same way that you say to do

Steven has added a new job. It really is clever to get class energy directed at those frequent flyers to the bathroom: “The Rewinder” signals me to recycle to story whenever someone steps out to the restroom….

It’s not just in limiting the amount of questions that you ask that you find control in your delivery. It’s like a pitcher in baseball who, if she lacks control, cannot win the game because she will walk everybody…. Now control involves the classroom managament piece, of course, and in particular command of Classroom Rule

Whenever we communicate with our students using comprehensible input, whether in building a character or a story, a one word image, etc., we ask questions, to which the kids answer in yes/no or one word answers. This is how CI works in the early years, and it results in speech output sometimes as early as

We want to be like pitching machines, which, being robotic, do not overly concern themselves with the ideas part/where the story goes. It’s like a director deciding to develop the dialogue for a film around the personality of an actor (the class) and not on a script connected to targets (the “curriculum”). There is no

Tina and I won’t repeat our 15 city workshop tour around the country next summer. It was tough. Instead we are doing this, from a recent post by Tina on FB: Planning Summer Institutes for World Language Proficiency 2018! Here is DRAFT information on what they will potentially look like. These ftrainings will set you

If anyone is feeling frustrated that their kids aren’t producing much in their classrooms right about now, consider: It has been said that a flood of input must precede a trickle of output, meaning that we delay assessing writing or speaking output until it happens naturally with our students. The rule of thumb in comprehension

This is Tina here.  I thought I might as well jump right in here and post this.  I just finished up marking the kids’ portfolios in class with them for the last two days.  It was hectic, sure, but not as bad as wasting a perfectly-good grading day.  I figure why spend that nice quiet

Whenever we communicate with our students using comprehensible input, whether in building a character or a story, a one word image, etc., we ask questions, to which the kids answer in yes/no or one word answers. This is how CI works in the early years, and it results in speech output sometimes as early as in levels