Hi Ben – I’m in my new school. So far so good. Nothing to complain about. There are a lot of native speakers here in Spanish 1 but there are no other foreign languages to teach here so…. Anyway I’m trying to see these students in a less contemptuous way. I can’t handle resenting them for a […]

Nobody has collected data on the number of teachers who have framed their failure at doing TPRS in terms of themselves. They thought others could do it but not them. This is a tragedy. It’s not them.

I remember years ago I was looking at my seventh graders at the start of class and I asked them, “How many of you remember having been told in the last week or two that you are doing a good job, that you are just good?” Not one child responded positively. In fact, they looked

We can’t have the mindset when we start the year that we are going to be merely teaching our students a language – that part is incidental. Rather, our mindset should be about looking forward to training them, which includes hiring the 17 student jobs (over months and months). We want to get to know

Teacher: Any words of advice on what to focus on?  I don’t want to let my school / kids down this year.   My response: You won’t. They only want to be loved, quite frankly, and you do that, I can tell. To repeat; they only want to be loved and feel confident. Love them from

Teacher: I’m mostly focused on what to do for procedures since classroom management has been my Achilles heel, and find myself overwhelmed with ideas how to structure my lesson plans.  I know you said to stick to more traditional for now because it’s a new school, but I keep writing down ideas and then trying

In this article I hope to show how two of the bread-and-butter terms of TPRS and of the CI movement in general, two terms that people really like to spend lots of time on in trainings and summer conference, are largely unnecessary and tend to obfuscate and confuse new CI practitioners. Let’s start with something

People who like to micromanage sometimes think that the Interpersonal Skill grade at 65% is too much, but it’s the most accurate grade we have. We are experts in assessing observable non-verbal behaviors and people who don’t teach a language aren’t. We see things they can’t see in kids’ eyes. If a kid isn’t able

Here’s an update on where we stand on the various topics we’ve been discussing over the summer: I haven’t forgotten our classroom management initiative (of writing the book here over the next year). I just have to accept that that (long dreamed of by me) book will get done when it gets done. We have

Craig just found this on somebody’s site online. Maybe elementary teachers could use it. Credit: not given, but I’m pretty sure those are my classroom rules.

Free Choice Reading (FCR) came up in discussion yesterday. Here is a video of Greg’s presentation on FCR at NTPRS this year in Chicago – not to be shared outside of the PLC.