Erica McCurry sent this today with my response below: Hey Ben – Today would have been a perfect day for my principal to observe but alas, he did not come AGAIN. This has been going on for 3 weeks now. He just came and told me that now he will be observing me Friday. I […]

wants to cut down a Christmas tree nothing happens (In this story, a student plays the tree.) Mattie goes into the forest. She wants to cut down a big Christmas tree. She takes a little ax. She hits the tree 54 times but nothing happens. She calls Lumberjacks R Us. Fonzie, a big bruising lumberjack,

The background on this article is that over the past few days in the comment fields we have been looking around for the right response to Jason’s question about managing jerks. I thought that Erin’s comment today pretty much summed up in a few lines what classroom management really should be in a comprehension based

Here is an edited and updated post from 2012 on R and D: We can personalize R and D of novels just by asking a student a bunch of questions that parallel the information we are reading. This is not a new statement, just a reminder to myself to remember to do that in R

Many of us experience a kind of constant struggle as we try to figure out how to do comprehension based teaching. It’s time to let go of that. We won’t find the right strategy. In these pages we will find strategies that work for us, with which we resonate, but, as we have often said,

Below is a conversation I had with Jason (our Gaelic teacher in Scotland) over the past week. He had asked me for advice about dealing with oppositional kids. I told him to confront the kids in class using jGR and the Classroom Rules, but that may have been the wrong advice, as revealed in the

I apologize if in the previous article on repetitions I offended any of the more data oriented readers here by suggesting that a person needs more like 28,000 reps on a structure to acquire it, and not 2,000. How do I know, right? But how does the data person know? It’s impossible to measure the

Stephanie has a good question for us: Hey Ben – Perhaps you can recommend something to help me with a huge dilemna I have right now. I teach in a very small school. I have been using TPRS for seven years and am totally sold on it. However, we have had some serious enrollment declines

Jim Tripp, in a recent comment on a question by Andrew Snider here, wrote: …Andrew, I think narrow and deep is best with stories, instead of trying to do “too many”. When you finish the story, have the students draw it, mime it, or some other way of piling on more CI. Then go back

Dear PLC members, I am the “administrator” of the PLC Map. If you are having any difficulty with the Map, please don’t hesitate to contact me by email (seanmichaellawler@gmail.com), no matter how small the question or concern. ¡Ciao! Sean Lawler

Annick explains how she holds kids accountable using World Language Games. This is a rough transcript of a conversation I had with her today: Annick: If a student is absent, no matter the reason, including excused absences, I give them an automatic zero for that class. They can miss the class that is fine but

Hi Ben, Thank you for all the great videos posted in the PLC – I’ve already improved my classes tremendously because of them. I’m writing to give an update from the field and to ask for some help troubleshooting a course plan. I teach Spanish I, II and III at two separate community colleges in