A nice report from Leigh Anne in Los Angeles: Hi Ben! My, how time flies… Almost two years have passed since the summer conference in San Diego. Getting to know you and the others was so amazing?. Thank you for all your hard work. I had only a small hope for my district ever supporting […]

I always wondered about proper dress at work. A Huffpost article found that clothing had a significant impact on cognitive processing style. More formal clothing resulted in more abstract cognitive processing. Hmmm: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/02/wearing-a-suit-psychology_n_7188356.html

A reprint from 2013: Why would anyone anywhere anytime, let alone we who are innocently trying in the midst of an almost impossible situation (education in our schools at this time), doubt or find fault with anyone else? There is no room for that. We must have one goal and that is to be in

Actually Craig kind of answered his own question. This is an email from him two days after the question I posted earlier this morning. Here it is: Yesterday I was trying to force this story on my kids cuz I came up with it and I thought it was funny. Introduced it in class and

Please let’s give Craig West as many responses as we can to this super important question at this time of year: What do you do if you don’t own any novels and you have a class that won’t settle down and focus enough to do story asking?

Her is a Dropbox link to folders with charts that Diane Neubauer has used with middle schoolers: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pp5qehu691dkmzo/AADML6qwtOH2sxVPBSqG1LpIa?dl=0

I got this great question on vPQA from Keri Colwell, whose name is now Biron as Colwell was her maiden name. This question needed to be asked: ….the vPQA seems wonderful. However, does it take away from the spontaneity of it all? I tried it once and it seemed to be a bit restricted since

This month’s PLC Teacher of the Month is a fountain of courage in confronting anyone about best practices in language education. I find it ironic that in a recent comment here, just a few days ago, he admired Nathaniel’s (Teacher of the Month in March) courage while calling himself chicken. It’s just not so. Those

This is from Robert Allen in Hong Kong. Can anyone in the group help? Hi Ben, Do you know if any large schools using TPRS would be willing to share a curriculum document or scheme of work detailing what is taught in what class in what year? It’s for trying to convince a head of

We talk about personalization, but do we really know what it is? In spite of knowing how important it is to our overall success with TPRS, do we consciously make efforts to convey our feelings of joy that we are with those certain kids that day in that moment? We must absolutely choose discussion materials,

By limiting what we choose to read with our students to only certain paragraphs that have energy and skipping over the rest, we give new meaning to the term “narrow and deep”. When we limit the amount of text we choose to read, we can expand the same sentence or structure much more than we

This is a post from 2009, from Carla. It is a great reminder for all of us about what is at the heart of PQA, as many of us are doing nothing but talking to the kids right now, getting them ready to read and write with confidence as soon as we can get that great auditory foundation