I’m enjoying reading some of what Robert has written here over the years. It’s a ton. Here is something he wrote in 2016 on assessment: Hi Ben, Relative to the discussion about assessment, I thought I would share the following e-mail exchange I had with a student today. Since the student asked, I decided to […]
A repost: Here are some quotes from the documentary on Mr. Rogers’ life that resonated in my own mind with the work we do. They point to the way in which we might design future curriculums, with more interest in what the child is really experiencing in our classrooms and less on the subject matter
The mental health of many people in our profession is unraveling before our very eyes. Many are retiring early, quitting, etc. There is no small amount of suffering involved. You know what is happening because you are in the middle of it. My prayer in this post is straight to our Creator who doesn’t want
Some may remember a month ago when I kicked those three guys off the PLC because they weren’t able – no blame – to wrap their heads around the truth and the new heightened levels of awareness around the George Floyd murder. There was that stink those guys brought. I chose to kick them off
Even the best scripts cannot approach the levels of engagement that are generated by a problem that emerges from the students right in front of us. If we can somehow find the courage to allow our students, through their characters, to guide our storytelling boat through the waters of metaphor and into the depths of
For those who have been reading here for years, you may remember that the pro-NTCI points in a series of articles that began appearing here about ten years ago keept growing. We’re up to 75. That’s a lot of points to support NTCI! Here’s the newest list: Below are 75 points worth reflecting on: NTCI
Nobody at ACTFL has ever said anything about you having to communicate with your students while using certain words. Try doing that in English at the dinner table. It’s not so easy! In fact, I find it impossible and after trying it for 15 years when I was doing TPRS, I finally gave up five
A teacher in our PLC community made the comment below today. We need to look into it. We need to respond. We need to help this teacher come up with a plan of action. We need to make sure that this never happens again. I will bring this to the attention of both my Zoom
What is this work really about? It’s about laughing with kids. If you spend your time in class laughing with kids, and it’s in the target language, you will probably end up by the end of the year having taught a nuclear explosion amount of language compared to what is possible in what you were
I would like to share something I wrote this back in 2007, when I was still trying to make TPRS work for me: “When we divorce ourselves from any idea of establishing meaning, defining words, teaching from a word list, keeping up with a high frequency list, connecting our instruction to a chapter book that
When I was in high school, I attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana. Classmates included a kid whose family owned 51% of Coca Cola, Ward Lay of Frito Lay, Jim Lear of Lear Jets, whose dad used to fly him to NYC for lunch on Sundays from the school’s airport, which was next to our
God, please bless everyone in schools right now. Some of them, a lot of them, are in mental pain, for so many reasons, some COVID-related, some not. We are looking for a way out. One way out of the mental pain we are enduring may be related to focusing again on how kind you are,
