Why on earth didn’t I do jGR before? It’s like a left jab boxing glove on the kids’ unruliness. Loving wallops that MAKE THEM SHOW UP FOR CLASS. Amazing. jGR has significantly made my teaching better. We’re in week four and we have the same excellent focus that we had in week one. Unexcused absences and tardies […]

Here’s a riff you may want to add in when your actors are doing dialogue. Ask the class (Professeur 2 breaks all class stalemates on answers) if the policeman or whomever said it or yelled it or whispered it. The whispering is really very effective. Don’t have them just say something, have them yell it

As per Nathan Black, the Sound Effects Guru is the kid with a Smartphone and scrolls through the different sound effects available on that app. It is often hilarious to be in the middle of a sentence and be interrupted by a sound that perfectly describes what just happened in the previous sentence. Often I ask for applause – all

I have to add this Anne Matava story to my list of favorites in terms of basically kicking ass: Let’s Start! were just about to eat Let’s start! started to The Smith family were just about to eat. Dad said, “Let’s start!” They started eating, and there was a knock on the door. Britney Spears came

I think we get unnecessarily fooled by the method. It’s not all that hard. Circling is overated, in my opinion, and not as big a deal as everybody makes it as long as we have these other three things of SLOW, Staying in Bounds, and Checking for Understanding. I think that our focus should be

I’m working on some absolutely kick ass lesson plans that use all the jargon and yet align with CI instruction. When they are done I will publish them here.

In French, “À vous la parole” means it’s your turn to speak. So what I do often in class now is just say that and if anyone wants to speak, like to repeat what I just said, they can do it at that time. Or anytime – they can just say whatever they want. No

A graduate student from the University of Denver is spending time in my class these days. She saw the SSR going on of Houdini that I described in the previous article here. She asked how I hold the kids accountable for that. I told her about the test on Friday and basically how FVR didn’t

The old way of doing 10 minutes of FVR didn’t hold the kids accountable for anything. It is definitely a concept  with a firm foundational footing in Krashen’s research but, as Kevin pointed out to start that thread on FVR a few days ago (and I agree with him), the fact is that the kids,

This report from Bob was written mid-week last week. I should post reports from the field sooner, I think, so that they are more current. I can just bump them up in the queue. My experience here mid-week seems to be a good place and set of circumstances to report simply because I would be

Notice the war comparisons. Not an accident. We are in a war. We are being wounded. We get most wounded when there is a combination of philosophical attack from within the department (in my case 8 of 10 of were against me), and administrative attack from the top when they find out (wrongly) from the department that there is

Robert wrote in a recent comment about DLI: …[At DLI] if someone misses more than two or three days of class, they are dismissed from the program (I know of people who missed because of illness; that doesn’t matter, they missed and therefore were dismissed.)…. While reading those words I suddenly, in proustian fashion (I just wanted to