Professional Obligation

Robert Harrell writes below on the topic of professional obligation. I like reading this passage when I have a chance during my current three days of parent conferences. The parents of my students are wealthy and in the British/Indian mode of push harder and learn more grammar, and it is hard to keep my shoulders

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Advice Needed

Craig West describes a situation that can only be described as gnarly: Hey Ben – Well I thought I had come up with a more interesting way of doing a reading about the MovieTalk we’ve been working with for the past couple weeks. I made a dialogue between a mom and a little boy about

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Happiness

I found these ideas as very applicable to what we are trying to do in our classrooms: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/little-gestures-to-show-love_us_56cf45a3e4b03260bf75d7c2?ir=Healthy+Living&section=india#gallery/55a93e82e4b065dfe89e3276/11

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Sample Story D

This content is far too long, taken from TPRS in a Year! but I post it here, for those who have the time and are inclined to read it, because I feel that a kind of tension has made its way into our discussions among those who feel the need to target vocabulary and those who don’t.

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Artist Breakthrough

Laura Avila in Maine has shared a breakthrough idea on the problem with the artist. As we know, they get so caught up in drawing that they fail to hear much of the language. Here is Laura’s solution and one that I will immediately adapt in my own classroom: Hi Ben, Here is a power

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Claire Ensor on ESL/TPRS

Another timely post from Claire. We’ll be looking for more as some of us here continue to see double on the ESL/TPRS thing: I think we can all be in the TCI thing together. We all do assessments and give feedback, but some times it is less obvious, more informal. That’s fine. I think you [TPRS]

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Defend Blaine’s Vision

To the degree that I may be responsible for bending Blaine’s original vision of TPRS, I apologize. My intent was honorable – to help other teachers like me who were blown away by the magnitude of the change and wanted some stepping stones to help them along. But it’s getting out of hand. TPRS is

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A Test for Burnout

A February 2016 repost, just when I was beginning to deeply explore the no-planning, non targeting approach that is now what I consider a better way to do CI: This burnout test requests that the reader do something a bit odd as they read further into this post. There is a short paragraph below. Don’t read

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