We are all just panning for gold. We are searching for nuggets lying amidst the skills of TPRS/CI and the daily practice of teaching. We seek flashes of gold, something, the right idea, the right technique, the right way to personalize, that will help us teach better. But focusing on skills is only part of […]

I laughed (out loud) when Drew said yesterday: …I did my first movie talk today…we spent about 5 minutes on just the first 2 seconds of the video and 30 minutes on 20 seconds…. Then I thought about it. I paid attention when James said: …we don’t need an infinite number of activities, just a few heavy hitters

John Piazza shares this as he starts his academic year today: I am thinking out loud in order to psych myself up for my first day of instruction, which is tomorrow, so please bear with me. Ben has said, echoing Krashen, that if we consciously approach a class with any sort of linguistic ulterior motive

Here is another training video! I am so happy. There is such a need, especially, for elementary discussion. What impresses me most about this excellent video is that Diane has clearly been able to integrate all the information she has heard from middle and high school modern language teachers and bridge them back and apply

James reports in on a MovieTalk class on this Tuesday morning: Ben, Talk about serious minutes of intense CI: MovieTalk can take a long time. Today in my 3/4 class we started the “Mickey Mouse in No Service” clip that was recommended a while ago. We must have spent 15-20 minutes on just the first 15

So here’s my effort at a video on CWB made from my basement as per recent discussion:

Jody made a comment about four days ago that has stayed with me. I think it is one of the most important observations I’ve ever read about comprehension based instruction. To start, I had said this: …in terms of CI gains, we start slowly but soon gain great speed, like a freight train – which

Karen’s bio: I am new to your PLC, and so grateful for finding this wealth of information and guidance. I am a 7th and 8th grade Spanish teacher from Ithaca, NY on a full year sabbatical to explore TPRS. I am spending most of the year in the Bay Area of San Francisco, where I

The degree to which a comprehension based class succeeds or fails is often determined by the number of socially capable kids in the class. This success or failure can be a function of the social makeup of the class, which can take many forms depending on the school we teach in. In schools where many

In my opinion, there are two reasons kids don’t engage in our comprehensible input class: 1. We don’t engage them. We get going too fast, we get nervous about the method, we just haven’t got the experience we need with it yet, we don’t really understand what comprehensible input means and so we’re going about

A report from the Chevalier: Hi Ben, I will have a student teacher for the first time ever this semester, and I’m looking forward to it. She has attended several COACH workshops and seen Jason Fritze in action, has gotten and started reading not only “Fluency through TPRS” but also your “TPRS” and “PQA” books,

I am happy to report that in the past two days I have received via email five reports from the field from these people: Kath (published) chill (published) jen (published) Rita (published) Chris Vancouver (in queue) I’ve also received and published field reports recently from David Young and Bob Patrick. Many, for example the one