Julia’s kids have been doing claymation w their characters as per this 2019  report from the field: Hey Ben –Today was way exhilarating. Allowing the kids to be creative, as you say, and giving them purposeful jobs engenders so much goodwill, even among the formerly disengaged punks. There is so much buzz in the halls […]

The slow shift from real adult leadership to adult children being in charge of our schools and much of our government is underway. There seems to be no mechanism in place to prevent this takeover of confusing and divisive leadership. The result is that our schools are now more than ever being led by unqualified

Are we stuck in our minds with our students’ attention on the form of the language when we teach? Or are our students experiencing the meaning of the language without being focused on its form? In the former, things feel heavy, in the latter they feel light. I have added “heavy” gesturing to the list

This article is only for those doing the Ultimate CI approach: Of the six questioning levels used in the Ultimate CI approach, QL5 is always going to be the longest, the most complex and the most important. It is here where you build levels of dramatic tension that are impossible in the tableaux, where you

A lot of what we talk about here involves our newly unfolding consciousness that is centered around the Black Lives Matter movement. Schools are just little microcosms of society and it is where a ton of social change happens. So if we don’t have built into our curriculum the most pressing issue of our time,

Here is another poem by Hafiz, translated by Dan Ladinsky: DIVIDING GOD The moon starts singing when everyone is asleep and the planets throw a bright robe around their shoulders and whirl up  close to her side.     Once I asked the moon, why do you and your sweet friends not perform so romantically like that to a larger crowd? And the

Here is my favorite image from the Ultimate CI trainings last summer: “Two Men Dancing on a Beach”. I think what Danielle achieved in this drawing is the perfect amount of 10% new embedded material (with the rain). In this one word image we see a good example of the level of SIMPLICITY we want

In a recent exchange with a department head who is trying with mixed success to point her teachers in the direction of CI, she said to me: I miss the days when teaching was truly teaching and we didn’t have to check off items on charts, prove that we’ve covered the standards, show test scores,

Here is a cool testimonial from Cynthia Tann: Hi Ben! – I have followed your work for the last 5 years or more.  The strategies of CI work!  I am looking forward to refreshing the details as I feel like I need it.  Using ONLY CI for the last four years, I have a story

We must push our profession forward right now. At stake is not just the self-esteem of millions of children (which the traditional ways of language instruction did not honor, preferring to focus instead on intellectual achievement), but also at stake is the fabric of the countries of the world and the ways in which they