I don’t understand why people are so against it and so caught up in criticism of untargeted input. It reminds me of legacy methods teachers fighting with CI and TPRS teachers. Prior to this year, and prior to attending the workshop in Portland with Ben and Tina this summer, I had been wanting to implement […]

Q. Do you read the novels with the Invisibles program? The novels are great additions to any CI program. My problem has been that we introduce them too early, before half the kids in the class can effortlessly read them. That word “effortless” – it is such a key word in Krashen’s research – doesn’t

Diane sent some video clips of about 14-15 Chinese teachers doing various styles of CI teaching, including people not easily found on video (like Linda). I recognize my long time friend and colleague, Annick Chen, in her classroom at Lincoln HS in this image right below. Annick is a true pro at this stuff and I

You know, we’ve been talking to each other for ten years and some of us don’t even know what each other looks like. Sean and I were talking and we decided to share pics here at the holidays so here is one from Sean to start things off:

This is from Sean: I currently teach at one of three high schools managed by a large charter school district called UNO Charter School Network in Chicago. (I know. Charter schools can be awful. But rest assured, our teachers are unionized! That’s right, we are unionizing charter schools in Chicago!) Every student in all three

Jeanette Borich has launched her website and it’s a refreshingly honest statement in favor of comprehensible input. It’s just getting off the ground but I wanted to make sure we all know about it. One thing about Jeanette’s point of view is that she shares with many of us a wish to go deeper into

Tina gives a personal slant on what administrators must be going through: My sincere hope is that my own administrator could see her way into working with me to trust my professional judgement and somehow fit my vision into the rubric.  My sincere hope is that she can begin to see the rubric for what

I know we are busy but if anyone has time to do only a few of these, I would be grateful. I am currently writing about how to use Director’s Cues for actors to do during Readers’ Theatre (probably the most used poster in my classroom next to the Classroom Rules) and need the following

We’re moving in on 50,000 comments here. Right now there are 48,949. To the person who makes the 50,000th comment I’ll send all of my books electronically and Anne Matava’s three volumes of story scripts as well as provide lifetime membership to the blog, plus you get an ecopy of my newest book due out

Does anyone in the group have any examples of moments such as what I describe below? I need one for something I am writing: Insights that create higher-quality action in a story can come at any time from a student or the teacher. Such moments can make good stories great. Since we cannot predict them,

This is about the time when a lot of level 1 classes start reading, so what chapter books does anyone recommend for lower levels, mainly Spanish 1?

All lack of comprehension in our classes by our students is entirely our responsibility. If we ask too many questions, the sounds overwhelm them and they bog down. If we speak too fast, the speed overwhelms them. We are the only ones in the classroom who can control these things. A few fast-processing kids will