I hadn’t heard from Bradley Donaldson (NYC) for a long time so I checked in with him last week asking for an update. Here is his response: Hey Ben, Sorry I’ve been MIA. Started off great with CI at the beginning of the year, but I fell off the wagon into my old ways when […]

This is a necessary updated repost: Classroom Management Tool #1 – The Classroom Rules On the posters page of this site: https://benslavic.com/tprs-posters.html you can find the “Classroom Rules Poster”. It is strongly suggested that you use this poster in your classroom. Why? Because it works. It is actually a collection of the eight best rules

I have chosen to take the current thread on April testing and isolate Eric’s set of excellent questions, presented by him this morning, and make a new thread out of it. So it is a new thread from an old one. We need to answer Eric’s questions, and a lively discussion on this could lead

We enter into a new era of testing when we teach our students with comprehensible input. We are at the very beginning of that era. The hero is Diana Noonan who has directed hundreds of thousands of DPS testing/data gathering dollars to creating and administering five years of pre and post tests to tens if

Yesterday in a discussion I asked the kids to write the word “connaît” (I’m doing like Eric says and focusing heavily on important verbs now before our big April DPS exit tests.) So I then orally spelled it to them in English and added, in English, that the “i” had a house on it. Sometimes

I had asked the group last week for some ideas to help me snap my class out of a kind of funk that set in with my level one class when I tried to push too much reading on them (Houdini). My very strong belief in reading novels, which started about four years ago, is

We all know that a very simple script can, with proper circling and questioning, become a really complex script and then a great reading and then a great set of embedded readings. But it is possible as well to write a complex script for upper level kids from scratch, as Andrew Snider has done here.

What if we are going along and, as often happens, things are getting flat and it is hard to maintain the kids’ interest? Usually, we internalize that and say that we are not good teachers. That is the wrong reaction. The truth is that we teach an army of largely unmotivated, electrified kids who are

Bryce Hedstrom has given us a good framework for interviewing potential candidates for WL positions. Bob Patrick referred to it here in a comment a few days ago, but it is the time of year for interviews so I post it here again as an article, in case it can be of any value to

Suzanne asks: Ok, so in good news, CI has been kicking butt in French 1, French 2 – depends on the day and the level of alertness of the class, but anyhow….I’ve set myself up beautifully for next year. Here’s the wrench in the works – but it’s a good one: I’m going to be

Is anyone still using the old six frame style of drawings like we find in the old Look I Can Talk series from years ago? Those six panel drawings? How do you use them and when in the lesson? I’d like to know what people are doing with that format these days. It used to

It’s nice to hear from Mark Knowles again. He raises a topic that is completely new to this blog: Hi Ben, I am attaching what I think is another important type of article to put on the blog – an article about international language policy. In fact, it might be useful to have a category