On the first day back after this vacation, check in with your students in English, like you do in the town meetings with the invisibles. Throughout the year, this check-in period at the start of class will be a good time to talk about any changes or new developments in the class, and this is […]

(Note: This was published after Thanksgiving but will work equally well after the Winter and Spring breaks as well. In my opinion there is no better way to start in with CI after a vacation than with some variation of Two Truths and a Lie as described below.) We must make the re-entry process after

The end of Christmas break signals a time of depression in many of us. We have five hard months in front of us. The question invariably comes up, “Can I do anything to get the kids to bring more respect now in January or is it too late?” For me, the answer has always been

Robert addresses rigor in this question: How does the textbook support the following constituent elements (according to the US Department of State) of rigor? Sustained Focus Depth and Integrity of Inquiry Suspension of Premature Conclusions Continuous Testing of Hypotheses Doesn’t the textbook’s deductive method (presenting the rules and then asking students to practice specific applications

Over the years, there seems to have been a unique theme, or maybe two, that we as a group have kept at the forefront of our collective mind for discussion here on the PLC for that particular year. For awhile, about fifteen years ago, over a long period, we engaged in public idealogical or philosophical

We’ll take a few weeks to break now for the holidays. There is no shortage of articles to read. All you have to do is pick a category that you want to work on next year, some area you want to improve in, or type some key words into the search bar and dive into

What happens in schools over the years with our students is that everything becomes increasingly based on performance. Beginning in the latter part of elementary school, everything starts to become based on success and tests, and if a child can’t perform at the “required level”, they are labeled as deficient in some way and that

Let’s not mince words about going back into our classrooms after a vacation, esp. the summer vacation. The purpose of this post is to help us get mentally ready to go back to school AFTER the fast-approaching winter vacation. The education system is designed, certainly unintentionally but with no less damaging results, to wear down

Obviously. The outage was caused by malware. Thanks for your patience. Rest assured that the new company protecting this site is very highly rated, so we should not have any more hacking problems, fingers crossed. Apparently hacking of all sorts on the internet is now at an all time high. If you need to protect

I got this from a group member today. It seems like this is a tough part of the year: Hi Ben, A student came into my room yesterday upset about his grade.  He disagreed with me about some jGR grades I’d given him in November.  He got heated and walked out.  Then, he came in

Craig has a question for the group: I’m realizing finally that I have a problem. It is this. I am far too accommodating to students. Especially to ones that don’t make any effort to accommodate my requests. Any of you do this? 

Q. I know that in the Invisibles book you offer lots of ideas for sub days. Could you summarize some of them here? A. Here are some: (1) Give the students translation tests of previous readings from the star. Doing this serves two purposes: (a) you get you a significant grade, and (b) the sub