…those of us who give a “homework grade” are really assessing if a child has done work, rather than if the child has actually learned anything. Realistically, does the fact that they did the work (or copied it) mean that they have learned anything…?

Next week I plan to test out the potential of a new plan to have kids counting each PQA target in the Circling with Balls cards (“Larry is a mechanic”) in the same way that kids count structures in PQA sessions building up to stories. I may even have a kid time me and point

I lost my yellow card with the One Word Image (OWI) information at NTPRS. If anyone maybe got it mixed up in their stuff, please send me the cool new information we added to it. I want to do that new stuff this year, but the only new prompt I can remember from the list

I got this yesterday from a blog member: I’m going into my 2nd year teaching, but it almost feels like my first because last year was very traditional and textbook based but this year I am jumping into TPRS after going to a couple of workshops and reading like a maniac about TPRS.  School starts

…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