e. e. cummings has said: …I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance… This makes me reflect on the notion that we can learn from the pure birds/students in our classes how to respond to them with respect in our teaching. Such kids are […]

I moved the text below from the comment fields to be a post: Jack you are right the main problem we face is how do we take action to mitigate the facts that though we say everyone has equal protection we as a larger society do not act in a way that those who have

There is a a system of popular psychology called Transactional Analysis (TA). It is based on the idea that one’s behavior and social relationships reflect an interchange between parental (critical and nurturing), adult (rational), and childlike (intuitive and dependent) aspects of one’s personality. All people, even children, have these three aspects of personality within them.

I’m having something of a renaissance with Vygotsky. I personally have mined all I can from Krashen and see Vygotsky as perhaps the one researcher who can help us more with the new challenges brought by COVID. Frank James Johnson has said, “A Zoom CI WL classroom has much the same potential for language acquisition as its

Someone once asked this truly important question a few years ago, so this is a repost: I need help! I have a VERY challenging group of Spanish 1 at the worst time of day. They are energetic but compulsively talk chatter and joke with each other. They came with a reputation. Anyways their card talk

Rule 2 of the Classroom Rules has been getting a lot of attention, but Rule 1 is of equal importance: Listen with the Intent to Understand. Such an obvious behavior is rarely done by students in schools. They listen with the intent to get a grade. If your students think that school is a game

This is an individually created image (ICI). The post is directed to Maya and Sean. ICIs to me are better than OWIs and student cards to move to increasing in our language classroom social awareness and lead to discussions about inclusion: Name: Daisy the Flower Job: To wake the family in the house next to

I remember how I had to fill out forms that detailed what I was going to teach in class that day. I should have just written that I was going to use the language to try to build community, so that I could address the standard of Communication. But I couldn’t just teach Communication –

I worked myself into a frazzle for twenty four years in South Carolina before moving to a middle school in Colorado where, thanks to Susan Gross and Blaine Ray, I found the treasure of comprehensible input instruction (then in the form of TPRS) that instantly brought me  a relative degree of joy in teaching. Back

A repost: Our national parent organization, ACTFL (the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) says on their website that “the ability to communicate with respect and cultural understanding in more than one language is an essential element of global competence.” It may be true – global competence may be a worthy goal, but

It is the very lack of ACTFL’s providing teachers with ways to implement a curriculum that leads to the building of community – real human communication – in my classroom that caused me, over many years of teaching, to feel somewhat crazy all the time. I wanted to communicate with my kids instead of just

Our national parent organization, ACTFL (the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) says on their website that “the ability to communicate with respect and cultural understanding in more than one language is an essential element of global competence.” It may be true – global competence may be a worthy goal – but doesn’t