Our new colleagues in Australia Ian and Caitlin have a story that is just what we all need to hear as we get ready to crank out the CI in the next few weeks: Hi Ben, I’d like to tell you a story about something that happened recently. A bit of feedback. Caitlin is my […]

This work is so multi-layered. Peeling the layers of an onion is truly appropriate to describe what we do. John made reference to this idea once in this comment: …there are SO MANY THINGS about CI that my head wants to explode. The depths will not be plumbed…. Yes. The TPRS/CI onion is many layered.

I’m going to take a break. We all need to. Continue to make comments, of course, go to the Forum, review the primers, read back articles (8 years worth!), watch some video, etc. See you in a week or so!

Below is a list designed by Alisa Shapiro and her elementary CI team in Chicago. Alisa explains: “This is a document that many elementary TCI teachers have shown interest in. We included it in our (Denver 2014 iFLT) workshop on Transitioning to TCI: a Toolbox for Newbies. We culled the structures from Carol’s elementary materials,

Catharina and Bu are coaching each other. Catherina is in New Jersey and Bu is in Australia. Someone in Canada is coaching a teacher in France. It’s called 1:1 Coaching. How does it work? 1. Teacher A teaches her language to Teacher B using TPRS. 2. When Teacher B feels that she has had enough

Bob Patrick has a question: I am writing to the PLC because I think I have an insight, but I am also writing because this is a group of people I would trust to tell me that this is just insanity. It’s Friday, the last day of exams and the semester.  All my work is

Bob Patrick shares this valuable link with us: Dear all, See this blog post from my friend, Greg Sanchez.  Greg is doing consulting work, but this year has taken on a long term sub position.  We met last summer and talked CI strategies after he attended one of my workshops at the Foreign Language Association

Jim I cleaned this up a bit. Feel free to change it since it is your script. It is just one possibility. I just felt it was too complex before. I left out “what she wants” as a target because in French at least it is one of those relative pronouns that are not really teachable

I was communicating privately with a group member who is new to this work in an attempt to clear up a few confusions of the kind that naturally appear when first trying to learn how CI works, all a part of the steep learning curve required to completely change how one teaches. After we cleared

Ben Lev formatted Diane’s speaking self-assessment for us. Thank you Ben and thank you Diane! Speaking Self Assess Ben added that he would use this as a pre-test and post-test each term, which I think is a good idea. We haven’t talked about the self reflection piece for about a year now.

This is from Diane Neubauer: Hi Ben, I thought this rubric might help other teachers find a way to give a required speaking grade if they have to do that in their buildings. My students knew they did not need the “top” rating on a question to get an A on this rubric. Ex: Chinese

Jeff asks a pretty big question: Ben, Could we get a discussion around the efficacy of backward planning vs. stories and other CI activities?  Do we find that it is equally effective to focus on high frequency verbs etc. and then begin to “backward” plan later? I can admit that I suck at backward planning.  I