Matthew Webster and Nathaniel Hardt have written in defense of jGR, or the Interpersonal Communication Skills Rubric (ICSR), the following. Teachers new to this powerful rubric can use them in discussions with parents about its enforcement in their classroom. I have also placed these two statements in the Primers section (hardlink above) for ease of […]
Here’s an update from Inger: Dear Ben, Before last school year, I read your materials, scoured your website and watched many of your videos. I taught five level 1 French classes in two middle schools. I ditched our textbooks and did my own thing. It was awesome!! My kids did just as well or better
It is clear that we are not going to get any good discussion going from the members of the ACTFL Language Educators group. Every time they read something they don’t like, they disappear. Ben Lev made this excellent point: …the longer posts take a lot of time to digest, and don’t lend themselves to interaction.
Many group members who have been reading here for the past seven years would agree that the basics have been hammered out. The hammering is done, in my opinion, and the time for decorating – putting frills on strategies that we knew worked – arrived a year or two ago. Not all will agree with
This is a suggestion for the teacher who is finding that stories are not working right now. The suggestion is to experiment with some little one word images at the beginning of class. It is often true that stories fail because the students understand far less than the teacher thinks. That is always the first
Now there are three ACTFL threads. They two new ones resulted from Eric’s explosive and original question about research behind a main tenet of ACTFL, on which tremendous amounts of instruction and cash sit perched, that of building a curriculum around thematic units. Some PLC members have even chosen to contribute directly to the discussion
I got an email from a teacher who is having a hard time right now in his classroom: Hi Ben, Hope you doing well. First of all, I want to thank you all that you do. Secondly, I am in need of a little hand holding as I am becoming tired. I have done stories
I like reading these bios. It is always nice to be introduced to people new to the group. Send stuff in if you are new to the group and haven’t done so already and maybe we can we can rekindle the bios. And don’t forget to put your pin on the map so we can
Elissa asked the group for help in planning a teacher training she has coming up soon. (We have a category for that now.) This is a response to Elissa from Chris Stolz in Canada. I really like the part of pushing the Movie Talk or what Chris calls the picturetalk aspect of this. I think
OK we are finally starting to formulate a concrete plan for teacher trainings. Many of us who present on the method have done so kind of by the seat of our pants, usually drawing information from the blog in general or from the Primers hard link across the top of this page. There has been
My new mission statement about our work is: “Damn the research. Look at their faces. It will tell you everything that you ever needed to know about what they are learning. They learn because they want to. It has nothing to do with thinking.” Watch this video by our own Elissa (Express Fluency): In this
Melissa Sadler sent this video. Once you see it you’ll get how it explains her point below: …I just received this and thought this is sometimes how language teachers feel when they are forced to follow textbooks but know the power of CI. Plus it’s a cat video and it’s French…. http://blog.theanimalrescuesite.com/henri-halloween/#s5klPRH5BIIPqDxq.01 Melissa
