Another Parent Letter
Much of what we focus on here in our group is our mental health - it is a major topic. A big aspect of protecting our mental health on a daily basis is dealing effectively with "concerned" parents. In one
Our Students Are Young
There are a lot of readers here who are just getting started with CI. That's great. But there are also many of us with strong CI experience to whom I would like to direct a comment: We work with kids.
Intuition – 1
This is a repost from 2008. Are the ideas expressed below still true? What is actually going on in our own districts re: CI instruction? It is not a pretty picture. The four percenters who became teachers because they were four
Love – 5
The point about being happy – everyone in the classroom being happy – is at the crux of our discussion, or should be. For many in the CI world, it isn’t. The work has been too much focused on student
Better to Teach Out of A Textbook
When we think about our roles as language teachers, the most important aspect of our work is to love our children and give them hope in what they can do in life. In my opinion - and I'm not trying to
Soren Kierkegaard
Personally, I don't like the pressure to create a great story in every class. There is the idea out there that the teacher has to walk into the classroom and create with her students a great story, as long as they
Balance
How to get structure and still retain what one might call an "intuitive" curriculum? So let's say we have a choice of our basic types of non-targeted strategies, for example Small Talk (Calendar/Weather), Card Talk, Word Chunk Team Game, etc.
It’s Not About Language Gains
We must remember to have empathy for our kids, for how hard it is for them to even live sometimes. I want to try to do three things when I teach kids who are hurting: their desire to be heard, to have
Business as Usual
This is a repost from 2007: If new teachers, in their efforts to satisfy some kind of benchmark on some pacing guide, forget the kid, they will never effectively teach the benchmark anyway. The kid will only do enough to pass
Tracking Acquisition
I am not a research scholar, and so this may be way off, but it is what I have experienced as a teacher in the classroom. There is this term, "tracking acquisition", that has come into my mind. Can we actually