Angela’s bio for the group: Hi Ben! I’m so thrilled to be a member of this community. I’m new to the TPRS world; I found out about it over Christmas break, and have been researching and learning since then. I currently teach Spanish at a K-8 school in southeast Georgia. This is the first year […]

In New England, about fifteen years ago, there was an initiative to get heart surgeons throughout that area to communicate via email, shared video, videoconferencing, workshops, etc. At the end of the study, heart surgery deaths had gone down something like 35% percent. The heart surgeons didn’t get better because their work was observed by

Drew’s bio: My name is Drew and I’m finishing my fifth year as a teacher at Rancho Cucamonga High School in Southern California. I currently teach 4 sections of Spanish, three sections of Accelerated level 2 and one section of level 3. I’m crossing my fingers that admin lets us start our German program with

Lori recently asked in a comment to the post “Dinner With People I Don’t Know” (https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/07/07/dinner-with-people-i-dont-know/): …where in the ACTFL guidelines is the part about “90% of instruction must be in the target language”…? Well, Skip and Robert found it. I think everybody on this blog is going to want to have access to this text

A “game” to consider that we do every once in a while in my classes is “Señor dice..” or “Simon says..” While we were doing TPR the first few weeks many students said many times we should “play” Simon says”. So we did after I felt we had enough vocabulary built up. The students loved

Another gem from Krashen’s Foreign Language Education – The Easy Way: ,,,there is good evidence that “rival hypotheses”, other hypotheses concerning the development of language and literacy, are not correct. The “instruction hypothesis” claims that we acquire by first learning rules and vocabulary items consciously, and then “practicing” them until they become “automatic”. There are

Recently, there was a discussion here on homework and Alfie Kohn. As I do with comments that we don’t want to lose access to, I am making Robert Harrell’s comment in that discussion into a blog post below [underlining mine], so that when we click on “homework” in the categories list, this will come up (along with

I was having dinner with the head of the math department at an Ivy League school last night. He mentioned that this past academic year in his school the faculty, in spite of his own protestations, had had a contentious set of meetings in which the foreign language requirement of two years was dropped. I

I found this email from Jim Tripp in the 2009 labyrinthe: Ben, I’m reading Alfie Kohn’s book “Punished by Rewards” right now, and I just finished reading something that has left me unsure about the current Fred Jones craze that is sweeping some people off of their feet. Perhaps it is the most effective practice that

In case you missed it, this appeared in a Yahoo! News article this morning: “Award-winning gains by Atlanta students were based on widespread cheating by 178 named teachers and principals, said Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal on Tuesday. His office released a report from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that names 178 teachers and principals –

I may have at least a basic plan for bringing Robert’s assessment ideas into my classroom in the fall. It might do to start some discussion: Twice each grading period – once in the middle and once at the end, I would give about thirty minutes of self-reflection writing time in class. This is in line with

What Skip said in a recent comment here prompted these thoughts on starting the year: We personalize our classroom to start the year. What does that mean? In my view, it means putting the kid in front of the instruction. Comprehensible input without the personalization piece is not nearly as effective as personalized comprehensible input.