[ed. note: I met Doug Stone in San Antonio last year. He is in the L.A. area and has worked with Blaine, Robert, and others to retool his teaching as per input based methods. He recently sent me a few emails that are quite powerful statements. They reflect a ton of hard work over the past year] First […]
Some teachers speak English as much as 90% of the time, others as little as 10% of the time. But sometimes, oddly, on year end assessments, students from the second teacher’s class – the kids who rarely hear the language in class – often show gains that are not too far away from those of the teacher whose
In the past people have mentioned the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie as a good way to learn how to relate to the students. I know that this has worked for me in tremendous ways. But I think that the book can also be used to work with our
Thomas Young – Dealing with Opposition in Teaching Read More »
[ed. note: stories from Anne are always reproduced here with her permission. This one is designed for upper levels]: lonely pat that hurts Lene is lonely. She wants a pet. She goes to the Humane Society and sees a cute little ferret. “Awww! Isn’t that cute! May I pat it?” she asks the employee. “Of
So many of the recent comments here should really be blogs so that they can be categorized. Oh well. At least I can trap this gem by Laurie on output into the new “output” category on the right here. (However, since I can’t keep up with the categorization process, I would suggest just using the search function most
Today a kid had a head down. Red flag. I was either going too fast, or going too wide into new vocabulary that was not part of my lesson’s objective, or maybe both. I was also possibly not checking for meaning often enough. And I probably wasn’t putting enough air between chunks of sound. So, if I
I want to start from the bottom of my list. The enormous chasm between low-achieving students and teachers who fail to reach them starts here. “Students who do not invest themselves in school work are making an irrevocably bad decision and should be blamed for their own failures.” This is something that most teachers accept
I really appreciate Nathan’s kind response to my request that he expand on a comment he made here about using pictures in our CI classrooms. Here is a nice text that really lays out a lot of details about this thread that Jim started last week: I love having my students surf the internet to find
Some of us have had a lot of success this spring working with student generated texts, thanks to Michele. Having kids generate written texts is but a natural extension of having kids make verbal suggestions during stories. If verbal suggestions in stories work to personalize our instruction, then if follows that their written material can do
In our department we have been wrestling with the question of what to require when in the curriculum. Do we agree that first-year students should only be asked to demonstrate comprehension? At what point can/ should we require output, at what point should we assess it, and by what means? I suppose we could refer
Four legs on the floor. Wooden seat. A back. It’s a chair, just a chair. Is that so? I asked my sixth graders to give me their thoughts on “the chair”: Antonia and others: It’s cool. It’s different than any other chair in the room. It’s higher. You can swing your legs and they
Jody Noble – The Special Chair/La Silla Especial Read More »
I got this email a few days ago from Haiyun Lu, and am happy to print it here with her permission: Hi Ben, This is Haiyun Lu from Wisconsin. I’m a Chinese teacher in a local independent school and I teach 8-12 graders Chinese. Last year, I bought TPRS in a Year! from you after
