Making Krashen’s ideas come to life fully in our classrooms cannot actually be described to someone in words, one has to experience it. This is especially true if a teacher is predisposed to looking for faults, and not strengths, in things that they do not fully grasp. They only see the toenail of the elephant. Coming from a place of control […]

Alisa is doing a high stakes training in NYC soon. We had this conversation: Q. My question for you and the PLC is, has anyone ever walked into a school or organization training knowing there were some smart but ignorant skeptics/teachers in the audience? These are places where the principals are convinced, since the parents

Ryann Campbell is kicking butt on the Invisibles out there in the state of Washington. Her commute:

As time goes by and we keep trying, we learn more and more to trust and allow ourselves during class to allow angels to push us from behind. We feel instructed by our own inner guidance and we learn to follow along when neat things happen. We need to be open to the inherent creativity of the process, while we let

This is from John Piazza, one of the Latin Kings: Not sure if you saw my recent post on the Latin facebook group, but you have a lot to do with this. Thanks again. I just want to share some data, in order to encourage those of you out there who are teetering on the

Recently someone posted on the More list asking about how and when to gesture to establish meaning, and their query was met with a strong assertion that establishing meaning through gestures is just not to be done. The person with the question said that he did not want to lead anyone astray so he rescinded

Scotty Jimenez teaches high school Spanish in Oxford, MS. He shared with Tina and I at our recent St. Louis workshop that he’s wrapping up his tenth year of teaching and apparently has done it all – six years of traditional teaching out of a big name publisher textbook and three and a half years

Alisa wrote a cool sentence today. In working with a group of traditional teachers, when they realized what is possible with CI instruction, she said: … [they] immediately felt that rush of wind through their hair from not pulling Hebrew out of a box, but rather cooking it up in class w/fresh, organic & locally

Here’s Carmen’s commute: Hi Ben, I took this picture this morning on my way to work. It was very cloudy here in Chicago. That’s the loop (downtown), my school is in the West Loop. Best, Carmen

In the same way that our planet is warming up, so also is it undeniable that the role of the heart in education is warming up: https://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/energetic-communication/

Alisa got this message from a student, a second grade native Mandarin Speaker in her Spanish class who was in ELL during Spanish last year. It kind of says it all.

Tina throws a wrench into the thinking of those who think that they are teaching to the standards when they are really doing skill building activities: The communicative activity where they practice doing Task X in Language Y using Phrases A, B, and C is skill-building. Recently Dr. Krashen said on FB that the real