From Craig West: This is a great tool for creating writing prompts with random emojis. Some of the combinations look pretty hilarious! https://goo.gl/NUqx61

A repost from last May: Today my sixth graders took over for about 3 to 5 minutes in French. I couldn’t believe it. I just sat down and watched. Half of the class was trying to decide on a story and the other half was really involved in listening. It was important to them where

As regular readers here know, Tina is having quite the year. Strongly attacked by traditional colleagues at the high school level, to which her middle schools students must matriculate and then be met with a the equivalent of Beethoven’s 9th symphony but in the form of grammar, Tina met those attacks with courage. Some of

What Tina wrote here is important. It points to the direction we want to go in: The hardest part about this job is teaching to the eyes – looking at a kid who is in pain when you are in pain and you have to act like everything is just fine.  In fact, whatever your

The following is from a response by Tina to Carmen over the past weekend. I have made the comment into a post because of the subtlety of points made: First Carmen said: It is like magic when you just tell them a good story with a slow pace in your speech, simplified in a way

The Director of Education of ACTFL, with whom we have tangled before, has recently written the text below. Thanks to Alisa Shapiro for sending it to us. Note the hefty list of references. Hmmm. Who are those people? What are their credentials? How do they teach? Do they teach to the few or to the

My principal was coming in to my classroom last year for a required unannounced observation. Beforehand, she asked me how she could be of help, what to look for. I responded: Hi Beth – I thought of something for you to look for when you come in. Look and see what the kids are focused on.

Here is another thing Tina said in our conversation last weekend: …now the introverts in the class feel very safe doing stories with the Invisibles because I don’t “make them participate” anymore. What I am seeing in my classes is introverts running the class and defying in their own quiet way the power of the

Craig reports from Los Angeles: Well I was totally demoralized before thanksgiving break. We had just started a new trimester and they had given me a mixture of students who had taken my class and failed it, taken it and passed it, native speakers, and novices all in the same class of like 17 kids.

Here is something else worth sharing from when I talked to Tina last weekend: I have recently found out that my students will trust me, that they can learn to trust me to bring the fun in a calm and consistent way, if I just ask them simple questions and not get all like a

Why are people advising that we all do this work in the same way? What we do with comprehensible input is our choice. Some like story asking. Others like story listening. Others like PQA all the time. Others like to focus on the high road of reading. Others like to describe pictures. Others like to

There is no right way to do this work. We all do what resonates best with our internal teaching artist souls. Why deny what we feel is best for our students because someone said that there is some right way? And how could there even be a “right way” when the putty we have been