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John just won the Classical Association of Massachusetts Excellence in Teaching Award (aka Massachusetts Latin Teacher of the Year) ?

Kristen asks a question and gives us a nice report from the field in the process! – Hello people that I deeply admire! My admin is thankfully loving the progress I have made this year. I owe most of you a HUGE amount of credit for this wonderful change in my teaching. I was wondering

More important than teaching well is keeping our jobs. In this report, a teacher in our group shares with us a topic that is almost never discussed, and yet is one that is in my view the single most important thing in teaching – keeping things from getting too real and personal in a classroom

Jen just sent this, a photo of her with Grant Boulanger and Robert Harrell in Boston this week: Some of us will be disappointed to note that Grant was not chosen as ACTFL TOY. A traditional teacher was. I don’t think that a single one of us who was involved in helping Grant make his

Here are the images in Mindee’s two stories from last week with her 2nd and 3rd graders. Looks like she is a fast learner! First story, 3rd Grade: 1. There is a pencil.  She is a girl.  Her name is Bobita and she is happy.  She is 7 years old. 2.    Bobita wants a pokeman cat for

Aiming for 100% transparency is just another fence between you and the students. I watched a teacher once who was aiming for much more transparency than I had been. As I watched her it felt annoying. She wrote everything on the board when I just wanted to know what came next. I realized we lose

Tina is getting observed by PPS Lincoln HS WL team later this month. She asked about possible lesson plans. I suggested this: So you want to create a short story and then move to the big four of the 22 strategies in the Reading Options, starting with Choral Translation/Discussion of Grammar and moving to Reading

Readings are of a much higher quality when they are made from stories about Invisibles. In fact, the readings are so compelling that I now believe that in first-year classes, we should stop our forced marches, stop plowing through leveled readers, or novels, or knocking ourselves out trying to make whole-class novels comprehensible and fun,

Hi Ben, I was asked about assessment by my beginning teacher supervisor/coach. He suggested having students write and apply 3 or four language structures about the story. Then take data how many students “Got it” and how many “didn’t.” Below is my email response. Hi Chris, I had the long weekend to contemplate the role

This is from Robert as promised. He is in Boston as I would assume others in our group are. Anyone wanting to rendez-vous with him he is at this email address: harrellrl@aol.com Here is the article which is now a Primer article as well: a-short-history-of-grades-1 Here is an example of one of Robert’s educational products being

Tina and I were talking this morning and she told me about this story below. I publish it here because it shows just how cool these kids can get with their creativity: …there was a killer story that French One had made, about a ghost who is in a haunted Goodwill with this floating nose

So when I woke up I was having this illusive dream state idea that we really have screwed it up for about 20 years by shifting Blaine’s original focus (as per Russ Albright’s post here last week). And then I go and read this response to Steve by Tina in the Ryan McArthur thread on