A way to train teachers that I have found very successful is to just return to something Blaine was doing before all the fracturing of TPRS over the past twenty years, for which I am partially to blame and I apologize, is to return to Passive Mini Stories, or the infamous PMS term. Perhaps it […]

Something very coincidental happened today. Admin called a meeting to suggest an idea for scheduling Spanish classes for ’17/’18 academic year. We are being encouraged to let it sink in and to expect further meetings to discuss and share our “expert” opinions. Up until now, my school had only offered Honors level courses at Span

A colleague wrote to me and said this: …I am no longer so intimidated at the thought of sending in videos. I am starting to see them as virtual observations, like if we all taught in some big happy school in the sky where we could just pop into each others’ rooms…. This is powerful.

Worksheets are not only useless in WL education, they also waste a lot of paper. Guess what? This year I have used virtually no paper in teaching my kids French. They have their composition books for dictees and free writes, and we only use paper for quick quizzes. I don’t even do quick quizzes much

If you want to teach a demo lesson on parents night, we do have lots of ideas and articles that we have collected here over the years, but I would like to add one more. Yesterday I saw Linda Li teach a parent night group wants and doesn’t want in 14 minutes. I kept waiting

Those planning on coming to one of my regional trainings (so far Portland is confirmed for mid-August) are reminded that they get all my ebooks at no charge plus free lifetime membership to this blog if you attend one of the (three day) workshops. Tina is organizing them on the West Coast. Plus you can

We can’t talk about SLOW enough. A few teachers here have actually mentioned in various threads something to the effect that SLOW is relative. What does that mean? I believe that we are becoming so successful with our CI instruction in level 1 that we are starting to see a whole new definition of SLOW

In a comment here today Tina said: …I had a girl almost cry today because the Profe 2 said her cat is a boy. I think that the person who created the creature needs to be in charge of the details, not the Profe 2…. I think we need to think about this. To me

Kathryn Kuypers is one of our young rock star DPS teachers (of Spanish) whose scores in only her first few years of teaching using TPRS (under the guidance of Diana Noonan) were off the chart. So Kathryn last summer decided to take a sabbatical and tour through South Asia for a year. She has been on

Robert continues: The period after the eighth graders left, two teachers came and observed my class. One is a BTSA teacher (i.e. new to the teaching profession and the district, so in training), and the other was his “BTSA friend” who uses TPRS/TCI but has gotten stuck in a bit of a rut because of

I got this report from Robert. It describes how yesterday he pitched his German program to eighth graders. Ironically, in a few hours we will do the same here in our program at the American Embassy School in Delhi. Our plan is a lot less labor intensive than Robert’s – we’re just going to ask Linda

Paul Kirschling in a few recent comments here said: …we know what we know to be true. And we know that if we don’t do what we know to be true, then we betray our students and ourselves…. …I will not judge but do wonder how long one can last doing something you know is