Mohammed is a friend of mine, the dad of two girls who were at the same middle school I taught in some years ago in Jefferson County, CO. When I go to the King Soopers grocery store near my house where Mo has worked for 20 years I always check in with him. He works […]
Sophie is a seventh grade student at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India. Last year as a sixth grader she was a part of that active group of young people who brought the Invisibles into the world. Below is an email I got from her today. She is still into the characters we
Esther Viera, a Spanish teacher at Cleveland High School in Portland, OR, shares: Hi everybody! I need to share this. I used One Word Image with the artist and the steps Ben Slavic shared with us when he came to Portland a few weeks ago. There was another group that I didn’t use the One
Here is a quote that I like in support of jGR/dGR/mGR: …intelligence plus character – that is the true goal of education…. Martin Luther King, Jr. Once we are brave enough to make our instruction more about character/showing up for class as a human being/being a contributor and not just a watcher, then we will
I was just wanting to show a final day in France photo of Bryan -Zamani Zulu- Stone from South Africa and Jason Bond from Scotland on my left and right, respectively. These two guys bring it.
OK so there are two rubrcis we can now choose from – Mike and Dave’s – great rubrics. They are similar but Mike prefers Dave’s version, explaining: Here is Mike’s message: Ben – I have included two rubrics— first mine and then David Ganahl´s version. Even if he does not want credit, the contributions that
Candace was at the just-completed three day workshop we had in Los Angeles in Lake Elsinore in Mike Peto’s classroom with 25 people. She provides this report of how her classes went this morning: Hello Ben – I wish you could have seen me in action this morning! Not gonna lie… I was IN FORM!
Mike’s new version of jGR will probably replace it. jGR has our hearts, but all things grow and change and I believe this new version of jGR is terrific and that we should all look at it closely as we consider the nuts and bolts of how we are going to assess our students this
Thank you for crediting me on this idea originally, Dave and Mike, and we always credit Robert Harrell, Annick Chen and jen Shongalla on this as well, but you and Dave are the ones who have brought this proven rubric to the next level. I am thrilled to see this appear here just in time for
I advocate years 1 and 3 to be “story input years” and years 2 and 4 to be “reading input years”. I find that the kids get kind of spoiled if given too many stories in level 2. In year 1 they get burned out on stories by spring anyway. When, in year 2, we hit them
It seems odd to me that the name Paso a Paso was chosen by a textbook company as a book title. We don’t learn languages in that way, mechanically thinking through things step by step, but by experiencing a flood of input that cannot be labeled as a step by step process at all.
The current consensus on why circling doesn’t work is that the kids, who aren’t stupid but only appear that way to stupid teachers, figure out the pattern early on and once that happens they are quickly bored and tune out. Who can blame them? The reaction of many CI teachers upon realizing this was to
