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Today we reached the amount of 50,000 comments. As promised, I have given to the person who made the 50,oooth comment – Jen Schongalla – a lifetime membership to the PLC and ecopies of all my books. Plus in Portland at the Cascadia Conference in June jen can pick up hard copies of these Teacher’s Discovery books

Indeed, this is a most fortunate month, this month of March, 2017 in our history as a community of language teachers. It is the month in which Dr. Beniko Mason’s new book on Story Listening, currently in its final stages of preparation, will come out. We are about to be gifted with a book that has

This brings us to the data piece. If we are to make our students actually want to be in our classrooms, we must also lower our desire to constantly collect data on them. Why? Because collecting data on students judges them. The idea that collecting data on our students “better informs our teaching” is a

We must look at what our students really would want as they come into our classrooms each day. They do not come in wanting to learn the language. That comes later. They first come in wanting to feel included. Therefore, we must learn ways to talk about our students in ways that draw them in. We

One must want to learn. If a student is intimidated, or if there is a possibility that she can be wrong, or that someone may laugh at her, or observe that the clothes she is wearing that day don’t measure up to the clothes, or shoes, or something else (perhaps her face is not attractive

We also must lower the stress levels in our classrooms. How to do that? We can only do it in one way, by making our classrooms into places where stress is not allowed to enter in. This is not an easy thing in what may be, as Tina Hargaden recently observed, some of the “darkest places on the

So also is it true that, in our language classrooms, no matter how much we put our students through their paces in the form of circled and targeted “workouts”, we will not see the kinds of gains that we wish to see unless we create in our students a desire to want to be in

It is like the training of a distance athlete. She can train hard every day getting reps on the track, circling away, formatively targeting certain outcomes for each lap that she runs on the track on a certain day with the summative goal of running a certain time in the big race. Over time it is

Only by increasing interest can we shorten the distance between people which alone can bring language gains. Bringing people closer together so that they really want to be together is not something that can be accomplished in our classrooms in a robotic way. Dr. Krashen has said as much in his famous observation that robots

About a week ago here Udo asked why we don’t discuss the TPRS mainstay skills of Circling and massed repetitions of target structures much any more, like we used to. It is because some of us here have come to the realization that massed circled reps of pre-chosen targets cannot in themselves make our work with

Tina on what is happening in our schools: America has two big problems. A poverty problem and a mental health epidemic. The kids are reeling under these two big problems. No amount of instructional changes is going to solve these problems obviously. But the more acceptance and love we can get into our classes and