When children come to us to learn the languages that we teach them, they come to us in trust. But we do not always honor that trust. We do that unintentionally of course – but the result is the same. Why is this? It is because of the way we think about curriculum. We think […]
Very often we have kids who only speak the language plopped down into our classrooms and we don’t know what to do with them and it’s a pain for us to deal with. I have already addressed how useful the Word Chunk Team Activity is in occupying these students. But we can’t use WCTA very
Sublingual Output is a term I made up because I don’t know the proper research term. It’s when the kids seem to be repeating stuff you say to themselves but you can barely see their lips move. the term conveys the idea and that’s all I care about. Anyway, in those trainings, when you are
I’m writing a book to offer questions and answers about my new UCI books. Here are some examples: Q. In the videos, you used a different poster than what I thought was supposed to be used. I thought I was supposed to use the question words poster but when using a student card to build
I got this important question: Hi Ben, I was wondering what you do if a student or parent wants a syllabus for the year. Thanks! Tanya My response: I recommend teaching the traditional curriculum for 1/3rd or 1/2 or 2/3 of the time in our classrooms anyway. This is in order to avoid having to explain
I’m writing a new book about the state of our profession after Covid-19, which is not very attractive right now. The name of the book is The Ultimate CI Book 3 on Classroom Management. That might seem like an odd title for a book on the state of our profession, but if we can’t connect
My new book which will be out next summer is Book 4 of the Ultimate CI series. It will include lots of questions I typically get about Books 1 and 2. This morning I got some good questions about the first 83 pages of Book 1 and if you are working in that book and
Many of us never think much about the high number of kids that we end up confusing more than helping. The result of that confusion in our students’ once optimistic minds is defeat. We defeat them. We fail them. That’s why most of them quit and our jobs are always in some sort of jeopardy.
Sean reports: Mike Peto is a great source on teaching heritage students. He helped create a Facebook page called Teacher of Spanish Heritage Speakers. It’s a good page. I used to be much more involved there. I faded out, though, because so many teachers became members who didn’t have a background in CI or Krashen
Human beings are different in that we can create anything we want to create. So think of what we can do in our language classes if we just remember that. Combined with active and aggressive community building (see the attached TikTok), we have in the Phase 1 activities of the StarChart the answer to boring
I love the deep thinking that Laura expresses below: Hi Ben, Yes, the forces of darkness (lying, cheating, bullying, etc.) are dominating our times in this swing of the pendulum. Not everyone has the determination and strength of will to battle administrators, parents and colleagues constantly, who don’t seem to get how simple it would
