Again, I would never try anything like this back in my big urban classes in Denver. However, since the classes are small and the students very highly motivated college bound kids, I can give homework as described below. I had previously published these homework guidelines here, a few days ago, but these have been updated. […]

I would never have assigned homework during those years when I had 35 students in a class, but now my classes are small (in the teens) and so I am able to do this for free write homework: Two Free Writes: Students in Foundational French are required to do at least two out-of-class five minute free

Clearly I have too much time on my hands to be thinking so much about the standards. But I have always wanted to clear up the soup on them that has always existed in my mind. Also, it’s a rainy Sunday in India with heavy monsoon activity and I still have that feeling that I

A Block Lesson Plan That Is Effort Free There are days when we wish we could go in and be mindless and not worry about anything at all, following a set of automatic steps that still hold our students’ attention for the entire class period. Below is a 90 minute lesson plan that does that.

A repost: There are more options to teaching writing than just free writes. We have Textivate and Robert gave us his Essential Sentences idea, and then we have Bob Patrick’s OWI idea, and of course we have good old dictee, and there is also this writing idea from Andrew. His idea for combining teaching writing with doing backwards

We are not in our classrooms to do anything more than deliver L2 in an understandable form. We call that CI. We personalize to the degree that we can that day, in that class, and we do not fault ourselves if the story is not all crazy and funny. The crazy and funny thing is a myth embedded

OK I can just imagine what Diana would say here because she already knows all this edu-babble but I don’t. So I am using stream-of-consciousness writing here to try to figure it all out because all the standards-babble has confused me for a long long time. But it’s good if we figure it out for

I just thought about it. Those numbered thingies can’t be the standards. The standards are the five C’s. I had to take a nap to figure that out. I guess we can call the numbered thingies little impressive sounding things that describe the standards. OK – I’m learning! Communication is the overarching standard that bring the

A repost: We don’t get many erudite points about culture here – three are below. Because it is included as a standard, teaching culture has become an excuse by many teachers to include a large social studies component into their teaching, sacrificing vast amounts of time from the language. Mark Knowles shares: A lot of

Unless I am wrong, and I must be, below are the more advanced standards that we are asking students across the land who are in second or third year courses to meet. I put the verbs in red that ask, against the research, for output: 1.1.7 Ask/answer [questions]. 1.1.9 Engage in [conversations]. 1.1.12 Exchange detailed

In every department somewhere there is probably a list of standards that the teacher is ostensibly teaching towards. Here are the ones in my current school, which obviously need to be changed since 3 of the 4 teachers in our (middle school) department are now using comprehensible input methods. I apologize in advance for the

In the post about Dr. Stephen Camarata, Robert said that the big take away for him was this: “If you want the brain to become wired for spoken language and for reading, then the input has to be real, functional, spoken language and dialogic reading. … And if you want the spoken language to serve