Udo has a question. If group members can each respond with one or two sentences we might be able to collectively craft a decent answer. The question is obviously too big for one person to answer. It could be a book! So let’s just all throw in a few insights: How can we teach culture […]
Questioning is the enemy of FLOW. FLOW is necessary. Therefore, questioning is not as welcome in our work as we may have thought in the past. However, if certain questions slide by and are not noticed by the listener, or if they are part of the flow, as in the creation of a one word
I propose that the practice of “circling” is independent of the T1/NT+T2 debate. Steve asserts that circling can be used to provide T2. Yes I can see myself doing some light circling in my own classes, just to expose them to a word needed to understand the story. Circling is a tool independent of the
CI Liftoff, the company that Tina and I have formed, has many goals: to further Beniko’s work in Story Listening, to communicate to others what we think CI can be (not T1), to do regional workshops and conferences, to produce books that may be controversial in subject matter for all kids to enjoy reading during SSR. This
This is from our group member Carmen Suárez in Chicago: Hi Ben, I want to share something that I did for my students (K-2). I found a book in the library of one the kindergarten rooms, the book is Mouse Paint, it may be very popular in some Kindergarten rooms but I had not read it.
Martin in Germany has done some of the most courageous work in the past year that I know of. He shared with us his decision to retire from the profession for mental health reasons, and did so this year, one year away from his scheduled retirement in 2018. Here is an update on the situation from
This weekend Tina wrote three “proposals” about our work. Here is the first one. It’s about the NT/T1/T2 controversy, which Dr. Krashen is looking at with a microscope this week. So is Dr. Mason looking at it. Both are very supportive of the points Tina is making in this and the next two posts on
Today we reached the amount of 50,000 comments. As promised, I have given to the person who made the 50,oooth comment – Jen Schongalla – a lifetime membership to the PLC and ecopies of all my books. Plus in Portland at the Cascadia Conference in June jen can pick up hard copies of these Teacher’s Discovery books
Indeed, this is a most fortunate month, this month of March, 2017 in our history as a community of language teachers. It is the month in which Dr. Beniko Mason’s new book on Story Listening, currently in its final stages of preparation, will come out. We are about to be gifted with a book that has
This brings us to the data piece. If we are to make our students actually want to be in our classrooms, we must also lower our desire to constantly collect data on them. Why? Because collecting data on students judges them. The idea that collecting data on our students “better informs our teaching” is a
We must look at what our students really would want as they come into our classrooms each day. They do not come in wanting to learn the language. That comes later. They first come in wanting to feel included. Therefore, we must learn ways to talk about our students in ways that draw them in. We
