There are a lot of readers here who are just getting started with CI. That’s great. But there are also many of us with strong CI experience to whom I would like to direct a comment: We work with kids. Our “oath” to them, if you will, should be to honor their developing lives in […]
Our PLC member Frank James Johnson has said this about the Star Sequence: Scope: “Whole Language Instruction” Sequence: “Spiraling Expansive Recurrence of Comprehensible Input”. Of course, these blanket terms would freak out any admin who is not familiar with the Star. But then, you could just give them more information by showing them the Star
Here is the letter that Danielle and I crafted, which you are of course welcome to copy and paste and rewrite if you are finding yourself in this kind of situation in your own teaching: Good evening (name of parent), Happy New Year! I appreciate that you communicated your concerns with me. I understand why you would
One of our PLC members received this email from a parent the other day. I asked and received permission to share it with the group. Hello Senora (name of teacher) – Hopefully things are going well for you during these crazy times. My son, (name of student), is a 7th grade student of yours. Thankfully
Far too often, we CI teachers get challenges from our peers – teachers with whom we are supposed to be working on toward common assessments, high frequency verb lists, thematic and semantic units, etc. We also get challenges from helicopter parents, whose success in high school and college at conjugating verbs has led them to
So the reversal of instructional priorities is moving now in favor of middle school teachers who use CI in their teaching. The high school teachers are being “outed”. It’s got a lot to do with Covid but we won’t get into that here. Middle school CI language teachers are beginning to see that they were
I was watching “Inside the NBA” with Shaqille O’Neal and the “Round Mound of Rebound” Charles Barkley. On their Christmas show they gave away about 40 bicycles – placed on the set – to disadvantaged kids in the Baltimore area. The kids, all neatly arranged in their Zoom boxes, when they saw the bikes, had
Let’s do a good job of being language teachers, because we certainly don’t want our kids to end up living in a van “down by the river”….
OK. Everybody knows that for at least a decade and more like two decades here there has been a kind of cold war between us (CI teachers) and a new breed of CI teacher who tries to mix traditional instruction with CI by using CI to target vocabulary from lists (from chapters in textbooks, semantic
It’s Cracking – The Traditional Textbook Teachers are Cracking. Read More »
Our bosses profess to want REFORM in education. We all looked to CI. That was the right place to look. But to our shame we largely ignored the equity/inclusion side of things. Maybe it’s because George Floyd hadn’t yet been murdered. CI alone is not enough to solve the problem of language education. We lacked
To repeat the main point of the last article: how our students do in terms of language gains and how we do at our jobs is directly and deeply connected to how we address the concept of inclusion and equity in our language classrooms. If you can accept this, you will make professional strides that
