One must want to learn. If a student is intimidated, or if there is a possibility that she can be wrong, or that someone may laugh at her, or observe that the clothes she is wearing that day don’t measure up to the clothes, or shoes, or something else (perhaps her face is not attractive […]
We also must lower the stress levels in our classrooms. How to do that? We can only do it in one way, by making our classrooms into places where stress is not allowed to enter in. This is not an easy thing in what may be, as Tina Hargaden recently observed, some of the “darkest places on the
So also is it true that, in our language classrooms, no matter how much we put our students through their paces in the form of circled and targeted “workouts”, we will not see the kinds of gains that we wish to see unless we create in our students a desire to want to be in
It is like the training of a distance athlete. She can train hard every day getting reps on the track, circling away, formatively targeting certain outcomes for each lap that she runs on the track on a certain day with the summative goal of running a certain time in the big race. Over time it is
Only by increasing interest can we shorten the distance between people which alone can bring language gains. Bringing people closer together so that they really want to be together is not something that can be accomplished in our classrooms in a robotic way. Dr. Krashen has said as much in his famous observation that robots
About a week ago here Udo asked why we don’t discuss the TPRS mainstay skills of Circling and massed repetitions of target structures much any more, like we used to. It is because some of us here have come to the realization that massed circled reps of pre-chosen targets cannot in themselves make our work with
Tina on what is happening in our schools: America has two big problems. A poverty problem and a mental health epidemic. The kids are reeling under these two big problems. No amount of instructional changes is going to solve these problems obviously. But the more acceptance and love we can get into our classes and
Jeff Easthon in IL gave a survey to his students on FVR. He explains: Hey Ben – I gave this survey to all of my Spanish 1 kids. 109 kids did it. The novels I have are: BB dice la verdad Pobre Anna Felipe Alou Piratas BB vs Yucatan Robo en la noche Esperanza Noche
Got this from a group member: Hi Ben, I wanted to report a rare occurrence for me. My principal came to observe my French one class. He loved the classroom structures, the student jobs and expectations. However, he picked two students “at random” to monitor during our invisibles story. One student was just eating crackers
Jen said this in a comment yesterday in a response to the “Some Questions Become Like Old Friends” post from a few days ago: I am in a very similar if not identical situation. Everything you describe is also what I have to do. Same percentages and everything. I even had to spend a whole
This is a note to us from Alisa. In my view it sheds light on a part of the instructional caverns that people w testing mentalities may never have thought of – if it’s not fun then why do it? This is especially true of younger kids Alisa’, who are basically sending the message to
I got this oft-discussed question from a PLC member. It’s like a Zen koan. It’s good to revisit it from time to time: Ben – Do you know if any of the NT hard-hitters are working in a system that is locked into standards-based education? If they have to test kids on all of the
