I had an email conversation with a teacher about assessment this past week via email and would like to share some of it here: Teacher: Hi Ben – I have been following your work for the past several years and I was hoping you would give me your opinion on how you would tackle this.

From Dana: Good morning, Ben, This isn’t a new article, but it’s timely given what you’ve been posting on the PLC. I think it reinforces your belief of teaching to the eyes and the need to create a classroom community. http://blog.ed.ted.com/2014/09/10/how-to-teach-a-young-introvert-2/

The unpardonable distortion of the science in order to protect corporate profits is well known in the tobacco, sugar and GMO industries. In the textbook industry, as long as teachers, even TPRS/CI teachers, connect their instruction in some way to the table of contents of a textbook (which – to a hysterically inaccurate degree –

In the insightful question below, Dana Miller-Kitch calls out ACTFL. The fact of the matter is that ACTFL’s wording in their web pages, things like the 90% use position statement, much of what they say, is completely inaccurate and unachievable in the real world. We do not prepare our kids for anything in American schools

Without the equity piece, we don’t have community in our classrooms. Without community, the inclusion of ALL of the kids, then we can’t make comprehensible input work in our classroom. it is because of the nature of language as per: https://benslavic.com/blog/lart-de-la-conversation-and-tprs/ I know I link to this post a lot. It is because I am

In the following image, the iceberg mass that is breaking off represents the  S/S docs, pacing guides in the world of language instruction. It’s time to deep six them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsAqqHQcJyU

A repost from when I was in India: I’m meeting with my curriculum director, who wants to talk about vertical alignment of foreign languages among the 10 teachers in our K-12 program here at the American Embassy School. If anyone is interested I am sharing what I sent her in preparation for our meeting later

For about the past year and a half, Tina and I have been under a lot of fire – since we started talking about the value of non-targeted input in the TPRS/CI community. We have criticized targeting words from word lists, backwards planning of awkwardly written novels, aligning CI instruction with the teaching of grammar/pacing guides/scope and

With the activation of the conscious mind via circling, targeting, gesturing and overly simplistic novels written to satisfy high frequency lists while generating little student interest, teachers miss a golden opportunity to really connect with their students.  With the increasing interest in non-targeted input, the teacher can now discover new and exciting ways to reach their

I don’t think that we can manufacture a really high quality language fabric from targeted input. The strongest and most beautiful colors and patterns and the best community building come from non-targeted input. It is because there is more compelling input in non-targeted input, because it is easier to talk directly to kids about their

I want to repeat a point made in the last article here. It is a point that I feel is among the most important points we have every made over the ten years we have been sharing ideas here. The sentence below in bold is one of crucial importance – in my own mind at