This is from Mary Beth: Hey Ben – I am working on a paper right now about Standards for my Masters class.  I was poking around the NC Dept of Public Instruction site (NCDPI) because we were going to move there a few years ago and are still planning to retire there.  So, I started […]

Q. I’ve been trying your dictée idea with all four levels of French and see lots of benefits. I’m curious, though, about why you insist on no English during the process. Is it just a general desire to stay in French or is there more to it than that? Dictée certainly improves listening and writing

About a year and a half ago Charlotte (Germany) invented something for middle and elementary kids and shared it with us here. It’s called a Wall Zoo. Then today Eric Herman referenced the idea in a comment, using the term that best describes Charlotte’s idea – Draw and PQA (DPQA). It is another blue chip

Sabrina sends this: Ben, I found this link reading some posts on the TPRS list. It’s an interactive storywriting software. I can totally see this as another technology tool to add to Textivate and such. It is called inklewriter. This is how the creators describe it: “inklewriter is a free tool designed to allow anyone

For every circled question in a story, there are a number of cute answers, but only one can be chosen. The kids have these kinds of “inner score cards” during class. They know who said what, and sometimes they talk about it after class. What is a cute answer? Most cute answers aren’t that cute.

Sometimes I feel a distance between me and the words I am saying to my students. I don’t feel connected to the words. When that happens, I am not connected to the students. I don’t like it when the words I am saying are just words. I have to remember that, to inspire my students,

I used to teach Gifted/Talented classes using Socratic dialogue. I continue to try to apply what I did in those classes to my language classes. From those classes, I learned that the words that I say are less important to my kids than I had formerly thought, but that the way I say those words is most important.

I suspect that by April many of us are victims of the all too common phenomenon of teacher burnout, at least on some level. It’s not a joke – it’s real – and we don’t talk about it here bc it can be so personal. We don’t know why, but we spend April and May

I heard someone say that these long, often multi-day inserves are just “efforts at micromanaging the staff and a knee-jerk reaction to the low standardized test scores and the fact that most kids are poor readers”. It needs to be said here that everything we do in terms of non-targeted input and the general approach that

This from chill: We are in a three day in-service at school on curriculum mapping. The template asks for the following information: 1. Essential questions. I was given the example “What are the days of the week?” 2. Standards 7.1 and 7.2 3. Concepts, Knowledge and Content – my colleagues write stuff like greetings, saying

I was copied in on the following discussion between some of the Latin teachers on our site and want to share it with anybody interested at getting a closer, rather funkadelic, look at what’s shakin’ in their world: James started off the discussion: I found this video by poking around the website of a person with whom

Ben, there’s one more thing to add, I think, about SBG: How it lines up with the weekly/bi-weekly schedule we all find so powerful. Here it goes. (And I promise this is it! Like with jGR I am trying to show here how SBG can fit well with what we already know works.) If you