…why do we think that if a child puts X amount of time in a seat, he or she will learn X amount of material…?

Today I mustered up my courage to tell Annick Chen, our gifted superstar TPRS teacher of Mandarin at Abraham Lincoln High School, that I am done with the composition books. It suddenly hit me how useless they are, really. They are one of those vestiges of the past. Annick didn’t bat an eyelash. She said she completely

I have a bunch of quotes from over the years that I never could get myself to throw away. I don’t even know where they came from now. So apologies for not citing the author – some of them sound just like Krashen. They are still worth reading. Here’s the first one, and if you

Got this from Drew: Hi Ben, I think I remember hearing that there was a document for peer coaching (checklist or evaluation). Do you know what I’m talking about or have I mixed up my forums? I have a teacher at my school who wants to do TPRS. She is already starting and we talked

I got the email below from Skip today. I know that Robert and maybe others in this group have done work in this area. The first place to go, Skip, is to the Robert Harrell category here – find it here among blog posts from about two years ago. I value this inquiry because it sounds like

We won’t know that they all understood until we teach a class that ends with great enthusiasm expressed by most of the kids. It can’t be called a successful story if it was the creation of the instructor and a handful of fast processors. We must ask ourselves, I must ask myself this year, “Did MOST of the kids get in on

Estimados colegas, This is an icebreaker activity that I plan on using in the upper levels starting next week: Students will draw two pictures (templates below): 1) Something that makes them special, and 2) Something of which they are afraid. I will use their drawings for all of us to begin to know one another

So what is the other way besides personalization to make sure that ALL of the kids in our classrooms have a positive experience with us? It is by going slowly enough that they all get it. Personalization and SLOW – two heavy hitters in the comprehensible input game. When we are new to teaching using

Our group member Melissa said: I’m starting the year with the Circling with Balls activity.  It’s going great in Spanish 1, but with Level 3 I’m a little more concerned.  These students haven’t had a TCI teacher before, but I’m starting much like my 1st years while mixing in different tenses (did you play ___

There was a girl who was failing all her classes. Her demeanor was just plain mean. But she was thriving in my CI classroom. She was actually the class superstar. She told me, when I asked once if I was going slowly enough, “Mr. Slavic, do you know how you can ride a bike so

I don’t believe I have ever done a comprehension check when I haven’t said to myself, “So and so’s lying there with that 8.” 8 is merely the cut off number for avoiding the radar, for flying under it. In that way, ten finger comprehension checks are flawed. It’s because we go too fast. But

This is some stuff about beginning the year I shared with Libby Whitesell recently and I thought I would just put it up here and add it to the Beginning the Year category: Libby: Is the word wall that you use in your classroom and brought to St. Louis on your site? Me: It’s not on the