Q. Do you really believe that you can get all the kids in the group to buy into the story? Aren’t some kids just lazy? A. I strenuously object to the idea that some kids are lazy. Rather, they are blocked. All people want is to be accepted into a community. But the community has […]

Ben Lev in CA has been a member of the group for at least the past ten years. He is making a job change and needs some feedback from us: Hi Ben, hope you’re well – I need some support – I just quit my high school job to get out of a toxic environment

There is an incredible group of articles on Yahoo! News this week on teaching (see below). The basic point is that teaching is not only one of the top, if not the top, stress-inducing jobs in the country. In my view it is certainly the most dysfunctional. I didn’t say “in the world” above because

One of our group members is looking for sub plans for a 90 minute block schedule for Spanish 1 class.  Any ideas from anyone in the group? My thinking is to use part of the time – maybe 45 min. – for kids to draw individually created images in pairs or by themselves or do

A repost from 2008: The floorboards of our classrooms are rotting. How long have we waited for the final cave-in of each one! All of us will be dropped, all akimbo, each at the right moment for us, into the waiting underground lake of fluency. There, we will meet each other again in collegiality and

Some years ago one of our group members had a chance to move to another school. I delayed publication of this to protect the group member in the unlikely event that my thoughts about the school got back to them. There is no chance of that happening anyway bc we are a private group. Anyway,

Well, I’m feeling good about myself tonight. Not a very well attended back to school night but four kids came, the ones tucked away in a sea of heritage speakers, and each told me they love my class, it’s their favorite one and that they feel like they’re learning whereas in previous other traditional Spanish

Hi Ben, So, here was today.  Yesterday was a crisis, today not.  Today was my first tableau with my hardest class.  I was pretty nervous.  My stomach was in knots all day, and I I also had 2 admin coming to observe the class for 15 min to see the behavior, as I’ve expressed to

We have addressed this topic of common assessments in hundreds of ways over many years here. My thinking has evolved to keeping them separate from your CI instruction. Mixing the two doesn’t work. This is the opposite of the TPRS model. My recommendation is to take the first half of class to teach and test

If we are to truly grasp the magnitude of Dr. Krashen’s Learning vs Acquisition Hypothesis in order to fully implement it in our teaching, we must guide our students away from using their conscious minds in our classrooms into greater use of their intuitive faculties. Mike Peto teaches this way. He knows from experience that

The advantages of WBYT as a CI teaching skill (over the batch of skills we used to have to remember) are great. Instead of having to consciously remember to do all of things listed below in class, which I found impossible given all the other things I have to remember, WBYT allows us to do

Card Talk/Circling with Balls is an activity that can last all year, and we only want to use maybe one card per class, or even one card per week, as we milk all the information we can out of a particular card before going to another one. Because of Card Talk, we are free to