A recent thread here has helped me formulate my approach to discipline next year. It is a concrete response to kids who misbehave and it has teeth in it. This is the first of three posts that address how I plan to implement discipline next year. Another poster will be required to implement this change. That poster will […]

Today during our class self reflection discussions about how we learn languages, a question came upin one class about kids who put their heads down. I said that I felt it my responsibility to try to reach them and teach them. The class overwhelmingly said to let them fail. Any ideas from the group on this

Just reposting some comments from Robert. I am searching through them and can’t find the one where you attach classroom behavior in terms of the Three Modes as very much part of an academic grade. Robert, could you either send that or rewrite something here to that effect. The attachment of behavior to grades has

I missed these comments by Robert in response to Chris’ request for models for teacher evaluations. I am just putting them here for ease of reference. I think that we need to look at these very closely for the general good of the order: My first two criteria would be something like: “The teacher speaks

Jody reminds us that doing reading classes that are too difficult for the class (instructional reading) brings fewer gains than we may think: If I know there are phrases/words/terms/whatever in the reading that the kids are unlikely “to get” from context, I write parenthetically “in bold type” the meaning in English. Hopefully, that won’t interrupt

A rebar (short for reinforcing bar) is a steel bar used in reinforced concrete structures to hold the concrete together. In that way, three rebar rods in a piece of concrete would be like the three structures we use to hold stories together. Now, we could use cheap rebar – insufficiently repeated structures before moving

Here is a link to some videos I made at East High School about a year ago: http://www.schooltube.com/channel/dpsworldlanguages/ (search “ben slavic’ to get to the videos)

Of all the threads this year that just simply got dropped, Readers Theatre got shrifted the shortest. I mean, got the shortest schrift. Or something. Yet, I hope, at some point, to get all my notes from Jason’s workshop in February (seems like just yesterday) compiled in readable form so that we can come up with a step by step

Bob Patrick made a very accurate statement when he observed that the big mystery of why teachers shun comprehension based instruction so much is that they simply don’t find it interesting: Dear Ben, Some reflections based on recent interaction with other language teachers. The real problem for those of us who are committed to CI is

Hi Ben, I’ve been asked to serve on a committee organized by our county educational service center in order to come up with some models for teacher evaluations.  They’re looking for people who are passionate about what is happening with the teacher evaluation process and changes and I bleed passion for almost everything having to

My definition of an activity is some cute lesson plan that doesn’t use CI, instead using English, or that is connected in some way to some some cool form of computer technology that does not create CI. Activities look like valid language instruction, but are not because they focus the attention on the language and not the message

Grant found these on the DPS website: Writing:  http://curriculum.dpsk12.org/lang_literacy_cultural/world_lang/assessment/Writing_Rubric.pdf Speaking:  http://curriculum.dpsk12.org/lang_literacy_cultural/world_lang/assessment/Speaking_Rubric.pdf [ed. note: In my opinion these are great and can be of excellent use to teachers everywhere, if their district doesn’t have them in place yet.]