John Lewis has said that when you see something wrong, you not only need to say something about it, but you also need to DO something about it. Over my own lifetime in language education, I have seen and said a lot about the abject state of language instruction in the United States over the […]

The idea that CI will save the day and reform foreign language education in the U.S. got a bit of a makeover from Robert Harrell in an article he wrote here in 2016. As Robert implies below, he is not dissing the effectiveness of CI but rather he is questioning its ability to function in

The short paragraph below sums it ALL up. But what if we had a way to break through the dynamic she describes? I do, actually. Here’s what really happens, as per Kate: It is the blank and overwhelmed look on students’ faces that teachers trust. They know their students are not comprehending them and so

A repost from 2008: People don’t get that unpredictable words come up in class. They don’t trust that ideas will occur naturally during the conversation, and they try to be in control of the class, so that they can teach certain words. Thus, the natural flow and emergence of the content of a story is

Some kids are seriously rude these days. What do you do if some really power-hungry sophomore (it’s usually sophomores in high school) chuckles when you try to make the Classroom Rule process work for you? Such a thing would rarely happen in the first week. Usually the oppositionally defiant kids wait and hide until going

Here is the website for a new kind of school, one that says they do CI but don’t. They are talking the talk without walking the walk. http://www.wmmhs.org/academics/academic_departments/world_languages Please take the 95 seconds needed to watch their promotional video. Here are my comments on it, because it raises all sorts of red flags in my

Let’s just say it.  Bullies are alive and well in our schools. They often call themselves administrators. They are not in all schools, but in many of them. They’ve been doing it for a long time. They are not always white men – there are women bullies too. And not always white, either, but you

I got this from one of my Zoom group members who really gets the new Ultimate CI Book (1 of 6) concepts on how to use the Star Curriculum: Hello, teacher! I wanted to share my first experience working with the Star. This morning I got an idea while talking with my sister about how

A repost. I think this is an important read, though lengthy, to get teachers clear about what they are going to do this year in terms of classroom management. Or not do. It is a kind of pep talk on classroom management. If we don’t internalize and apply in the first two weeks of the

Have you ever noticed in teaching that there seems to be some kind of unwritten rule that we’re not allowed to really know what our kids are thinking? I mean, it would be so easy to just ask them, if the world were an honest place and direct honest discourse between teacher and students could

The point about being happy – everyone in the classroom being happy – is at the crux of our work. For many in the CI world, it isn’t. The work has been too much focused on student gains and how the teacher can focus on how their own skills and wonderfulness can bring them about. 

I’m posting below something that Sean sent to me via private email this morning about this whole racism thing, and then this can be the final post on it here so we can get our focus on where it belongs – on good CI teaching. What Sean expresses below pretty much sums up my position