A few weeks ago Robert wrote the draft of a letter to eventually be mailed to parents. It appeared as one of the comments to his original blog post at: https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/05/08/robert-harrell-on-assessment/comment-page-3/#comments I just wanted to put it here as a formal blog post to ask him its current status. I wish I could capture all of the […]

I got this from a Native American teacher of Creek language in Florida – Kate Taluga – who is a member of our group.  “I’d like to suggest a book you may be interested in reading. Heartmath! I avoided it on my shelf for years because of that word math – but the actual premise is

I believe in keeping everything involving storytelling simple. Otherwise, I would get too confused to be effective. In my classroom world everything must be simple so that I can relax, as per: https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/06/12/the-flailingly-prepared-teacher/ The more I plan, the more I scheme, the more I think that the next cool idea in CI to come along

Bryce sent us a potpourri of four posts that I have been wanting to get up here and there are a few from Michele as well waiting in the wings. Here is the first of Byrce’s: Here is a collection to get us talking about what songs students should hear and be able to sing

I cannot possibly express how weird these past few days have been to start the summer. Oppositional perceptions of TPRS and heavy helpings of ignorance seem to reign supreme these days. Then my computer crashed. Then Dick Cheney said that about Paul Ryan. But I got a new Dell! It’s fast. I still love the idea that

In this second blog entry about Sauk language revitalization, I want to talk about the master apprentice to the four elders. His name is Jacob. He has 85% of Sauk language. There are three others with him doing this work – Twiggy, Katy, Mosiah. That group of four meet daily with the four remaining pure

It was more like ten or even more tribes down there these past two days at the Inter-Tribal Council of the Five Tribes Native Language Summit in Durant, Oklahoma. It wasn’t life changing but it was up there. It may become life changing. I don’t know. I had chills up my back every ten minutes or

Mark is another Iowan, like Jim: Hi Ben, I currently teach adult ESL classes at a community college in Iowa.  I am currently experimenting with a number of comprehension  based techniques though I have used TPRS exclusively while teaching English in the past in Guatemala.  I speak fluent Spanish and my wife is Guatemalan.  I got interested in Krashen when

Here are some things that we have to deal with in our classrooms: – being observed by unqualified people – differentiating instruction when doing so is not a practical option in a CI classroom,  especially at the lower levels – kids cheating – heads down – writing on desks – depressed kids – hyperactive kids –

This is a repost from December. The link is from Skip. A close read of the article reveals serious flaws in many teachers’ own opinions of what they are actually accomplishing and whom they are serving in their positions as language teachers: Hi Ben, This was in an email from ACTFL entitled “Spotlight on Language”   I

Drew also had some new ideas for summative testing with CI. This posted here last December. Drew explains: I am thinking out loud here how I could incorporate Drew’s recent description to jen of how he evaluates his level two students on the semester exam into my own end of semester assessments. I don’t think that any of

We did some filming of an Anne Matava story called “Lazy” (Story Scripts Vol. 2). The structures were travaille/works le patron crie/the boss yells paresseux/lazy but since we had an entire extra second day block to film (we decided to try to get as much footage of the story as possible), I added in two other structures that had made