Teaching is the only field I know of where the people who employ the professionals they hire don’t really believe that they can  do the job, so they keep on forcing education on them in the form of ongoing trainings. Professional training is necessary in all fields, but what happens in teaching is that most of the trainings […]

Here is Ben Lev’s bio. Ben is a very valued member of our group, always totally professional and always right at the front of the change: I teach at Credo High School in Rohnert Park, CA and Summerfield High School, in Santa Rosa, CA. I grew up in New York and my best friend was Puerto Rican. I

I would like to make it enthusiastically clear that the only games and activities that actually work with students who are learning a language, games that don’t waste time,  are games that delivery hefty amounts of CI without the use of L1. That means dumping most if not all of the games and “learning activities” that we have developed

Here is the second link to the Yoshi story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWjXzeiKjP4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui0Ypfe8_aU (voiceover)

I made a video of the classes (1 story, 1 reading) that I did with that group on Friday. This link is to the first ten minutes only of the story class in regular and voiced over forms. Then I will try to get the other three ten minute segments of the story up here, along

I teach in English in France and have a different outlook on the “battle” that I’d like to share. Firstly, school administrators in France are not allowed to tell teachers how to teach. They can’t even come into your room if you don’t invite them. And they don’t hire or fire teachers either. They can make

I got this from a colleague: Hi Ben, I was thinking a lot last night about TPRS and the intellectual battle we are all in the middle of with establishment, traditional teachers. Then I read your blog post “The Truth Will Out” along with the comments that followed and I felt a need to email

Just to say we’re feeling for Chill’s Phils and Dziedzic’s Diamondbacks as they lost excrutiating games last night. Especially the way Howard went down. Now that is the second time in a row that your Phillies, Carol, have been the best team in baseball but didn’t win the Big Dance like they should have. However, Carol, an ardent

We’re getting great stuff from Alaska beyond the wonderful cooler weather we’ve been having. This just came in from Michele: Ben, you have got to watch this video! It’s about the Alaskan network, so the first five minutes are teachers telling what it means to them to be connected to others. Then there are sweet little

In a response to Skip Crosby about how groups of structures can be used to create a story even without a story script, Laurie Clarq wrote: The most “natural” way is to pick a high-frequency phrase, just one, and then build your story around that. Very naturally another phrase will occur. Then Laurie went on:

Nothing like a good night’s sleep. This stuff is so complex! It involves not just work on a conscious level but also on an unconscious level so that the method can be fully integrated into our deeper minds. If we are to truly learn this method, we have to be willing to work hard. I

Laurie offers a perfect image to help us understand what our students experience in our CI classrsooms: For [our] students, students, [L2] is a giant green screen. [L2] is green. “New” [L2] and “old” [L2]  are all green and cannot be separated in their minds. On the other hand, acquired [L2] is now a recognizable