After a long summer of traveling around, Tina and I got a wonderful statement of support from long time PLC member Laura Avila in Maine. I treasure it: ¡MIL GRACIAS! Tina and Ben. The work you are doing with NT instruction is — for me — the way to go. Last year I read Ben’s […]

We have a question from Nick about what the bathroom policy is in our classes and how we model and maintain it with our students. In the past I have struggled with setting a consistent policy on this.

Teacher’s Discovery has recognized the value that Anne Matava’s story scripts hold for CI teachers. Their plan is to distribute all of Anne’s scripts, old and new, in one massive script book to be released soon. Testimonials are needed by Teacher’s Discovery for the back cover, so if anyone has a few lines to offer

I love this idea from Bryan Whitney. Check it out: …another thing that I’m going to try as a job is having one or two “coaches”. The coaches write down when they see good contributions from specific students and positive/happy moments in class. You can then have them share what they saw during the last

In the Invisibles Star Cycle there is potential to work a lot less than we usually do over the course of a year. Here are 6 things you can do to work a lot less but get the same paycheck. Not sure about the math, but the point is clear: (1) Don’t give homework. Make

Another way we can find out who the best artists are – the ones who will get the job all year long – is to simply look at their Card Talk cards. Steven Sebald here in MN just thought of that. (Without great artists we cannot get the Invisibles off the ground as well as we

A repost from 2011: It’s like a locomotive. We shovel the language coal – the input – into their minds in class, but, once the speed is up, the train is perfectly capable of using its momentum to largely run down the tracks on it’s own – language begets more language – without us getting all freaked

I was once giving a year end diagnostic speaking test to a quiet level 2 student who listens really well in class. I really didn’t know if he could say a word or a thousand words. It turned out to be the latter. That’s how comprehensible input works. It goes in, rolls around, some of

Here’s a good thing to watch at the beginning of any year: http://learninglanguages.celta.msu.edu/sla-vanpatten/

The best way to neutralize criticism in our buildings is to flood our critics with information that supports what we do, using email, stopping them in the hallway, etc.. The other primers can be used as well: Ben: I wrote up this email to send to my principals, my district administrators, and my five colleagues

A point for those doing the Invisibles: It is non-targeted if we work from an image. This does not mean that we have to go into a story using ONLY the image as the sole point of departure with the class into the story. In the Town Meeting (Questioning Level 1) we can look through

I keep learning new things. In Maine I learned the value of adding new characters in Questioning Level 5. We usually have two characters in the story when we arrive there (QL is the creation of the problem), but then I found out that it is so much easier to solve a problem in a non-targeted