Hello hello, I hope you find yourself well :). I wanted to share with you a couple of things and ask for your opinions / the opinions of the PLC. 1.) So, great news! I’m winning my own battles for CI-based instruction in my school, which is very exciting. (I teach in a small school […]

Having been a victim of my own need for approval from others for my entire career, I strenuously suggest that we avoid using national scores on any kind of exam to evaluate our work in the classroom. Such exams are nothing but competitions, and competition has no place in language acquisition. For one thing, the

Last year we didn’t get jGR operational in our classrooms until later on in the fall. Next year, I plan to spend the first part of the first class explaining to the kids how they’ll be graded –  short quizzes – 2 to 4 per week, and jGR – every day. From the opening minutes of

John sends us a student comment template with pre-fab options to be cut and pasted into the student comment. James take note as we may want to add this into our templates hard link: Ben, I was hoping that the members of the PLC could take a look at a comment template I’ve created. A

Miriam is Bob’s daughter, also a Latin teacher, and she shares her bio* with us: Salve! My name is Miriam Patrick and I am a Latin teacher in a public school in Georgia. I have been teaching using CI methods for three and a half years (I was hired mid term). I have my Bachelor’s

We’ve talked about how a follow up email to any observation is a good idea in this article from a few months ago: https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/02/03/the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense/ Just remember to cc yourself in, because the whole idea is to address any dings by the observor in the email and then when the person returns for a follow up

Last week Jennifer wrote a question about curriculum mapping. Here is a link to that thread: https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/03/17/curriculum-map-question/ Then I asked Diana Noonan about this. She was very kind to respond with the information below: “There is no short answer. Here is the definition of curriculum map from Wikipedia: “The curriculum mapping model as originally defined

Before helping the group address this question about writing from James, you may want to review what Robert has written about his Essential Sentences idea at: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/11/16/essential-sentences/ https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/01/30/essential-sentences-2/ Ben, I figure this might be helpful to us during these dog days as we get into more reading and writing. I have been thinking about getting students

While we are celebrating Chris’ big win in Ohio, we have reason to celebrate more happy news from Ohio. Jeff Brickler has been refreshingly transparent and very honest with us this year in sharing what he has been experiencing, as he has taken a lot of hits, to put it mildly. So, enjoy reading this recent letter from

More from Chris: For my masters project, I gave my Spanish 1 class the Natl. Spanish Exam.  I’m comparing my output, grammar based last year to my CI class this year.  Last year I gave the test in MAY, this year I gave it last week, TWO months before the previous group.  The class average

Lately we’ve had some stellar reports from some of the group. Here’s another one, and one we’ve been waiting for, about how Chris Roberts’ presentation went at Central States last weekend. I give this young teacher a 10 for courage and an overall 10 for walking into the lion’s den and basically kicking some major

The new corporate model when fully applied to education will change the culture of professional review. In the past, there was a more collegial approach, which had its flaws, but at least educators were evaluating educators. Now, the evaluation model takes the educator out of the observor, and so there are changes in the nature