Q. Hey Ben! I am presenting a PD to teachers of my school on Monday about literacy strategies. I am going to model and have them practice some strategies that I feel are high leverage with ELLs and struggling readers. I was looking for your input… A. I personally feel that there is no such […]
Here is another review of the two new Ultimate CI books, this one by Marko Sanden of Fluency Fox: The StarChart™ Is The Modern Foreign Language Teacher’s Dream Come True And It Is Nothing Less Than A Paradigm Shift In Our Field. “Ben’s methodology has taken SLA research and distilled it down into a practical
Here is a review of my two latest books. I am very happy: Review of The Ultimate CI Book 1 and Book 2 by Ben Slavic During my recent long-awaited professional development for teaching using Comprehensible Input, I realized that one of the reasons I had been drawn to the Spatial Curriculum by Ben Slavic
The old idea of “spare the rod and spoil the child” is out of date everywhere and that includes in our profession. It doesn’t align with the paradigm shift we are in. What shift? Basically, in my view, the shift is about learning to love one another – an ancient idea that we seem to
Julia’s kids have been doing claymation w their characters as per this 2019 report from the field: Hey Ben –Today was way exhilarating. Allowing the kids to be creative, as you say, and giving them purposeful jobs engenders so much goodwill, even among the formerly disengaged punks. There is so much buzz in the halls
The slow shift from real adult leadership to adult children being in charge of our schools and much of our government is underway. There seems to be no mechanism in place to prevent this takeover of confusing and divisive leadership. The result is that our schools are now more than ever being led by unqualified
Are we stuck in our minds with our students’ attention on the form of the language when we teach? Or are our students experiencing the meaning of the language without being focused on its form? In the former, things feel heavy, in the latter they feel light. I have added “heavy” gesturing to the list
This article is only for those doing the Ultimate CI approach: Of the six questioning levels used in the Ultimate CI approach, QL5 is always going to be the longest, the most complex and the most important. It is here where you build levels of dramatic tension that are impossible in the tableaux, where you
A lot of what we talk about here involves our newly unfolding consciousness that is centered around the Black Lives Matter movement. Schools are just little microcosms of society and it is where a ton of social change happens. So if we don’t have built into our curriculum the most pressing issue of our time,
Here is another poem by Hafiz, translated by Dan Ladinsky: DIVIDING GOD The moon starts singing when everyone is asleep and the planets throw a bright robe around their shoulders and whirl up close to her side. Once I asked the moon, why do you and your sweet friends not perform so romantically like that to a larger crowd? And the
Here is my favorite image from the Ultimate CI trainings last summer: “Two Men Dancing on a Beach”. I think what Danielle achieved in this drawing is the perfect amount of 10% new embedded material (with the rain). In this one word image we see a good example of the level of SIMPLICITY we want
In a recent exchange with a department head who is trying with mixed success to point her teachers in the direction of CI, she said to me: I miss the days when teaching was truly teaching and we didn’t have to check off items on charts, prove that we’ve covered the standards, show test scores,
