Just to announce that I am making some changes to our site: (1) The Forum is gone (we never seemed to have the time to go there anymore but it did have its heyday a few years ago, so thank you Forum!) (2) Hard copies of my books are no longer available on this site. (3) Hardback […]
The Question of the Day, or maybe more like the Question of the Decade or even of the Century, is put in succinct fashion below by Emeka: Hi Ben, Just share with your that our district (Kalamazoo Public Schools in Kalamazoo, Michigan) just bought the whole world languages department The Big CI Book. We got
A teacher is trying to learn how to “do TPRS” from the internet and has gotten confused. It is probably because there are so many forms of it now, a form for every expert out there. So now we have a problem because the experts are arguing; each is saying that they have the right way
Diane and I have communicated recently on Mandarin here on the PLC lately. It is a subject I know nothing about. I have spent, however, years teaching across the hallway from Annick Chen and Linda Li in two different schools. Annick was the Colorado 2015 TOY and Linda has been described by Stephen Krashen as
This work is not difficult. It is just different and we must change internally. All the drama about NT vs. T is just froth. The real broiling right now is happening in the soup below. What is in the soup below? It is that place in our teaching where we must train ourselves to know
In working with one word images, it is useful to imagine that we are sculpting the character out of invisible “clay” in the space in front of the students. We have to be very specific about the space and its boundaries there in front of the students. The more specific we can be, the more
This is from Anne: One of my classes has gone completely NT. About 2 months ago they created a character and the whole thing has exploded into this long, drawn-out epic story in installments. We have been continuing the story on one day, then reading the latest installment and taking a T/F quiz on it
I recommend starting any school year with this simple, fun, and powerful strategy. We would of course have Questioning/Circling with Balls involved in a big way in our first weeks of instruction, but the potential to bring great instruction all the way through to May by using one word images as a launching pad for
So far Tina, Steven, Carmen and Ryann have shared photos taken on their commutes to work. Only teachers know what those moments of going to and from the battlefield (but it doesn’t have to be) feel like. There is something poetic about the two images that have so far been shared with us. PLC members
Ben, Here is my commute down a back country road, the kind you always hear about in all of those country songs you listen to! While Oxford, MS is fairly busy as a university town, once you leave the city limits, it feels like rural Mississippi again. It’s the best of both worlds, especially for
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 belief is that with a new focus on NT starting on this site now, we will arrive in May next
