People who embrace the Star – a fine example of NTCI – can’t believe how much it makes their jobs easier. They say, once they have studied and implemented it, “This aligns perfectly with the Communication Standard and the research, and the kids are so engaged!” Some people reject the Star with questions like “It […]
As we crawl under the barbed wire of Covid, keeping ourselves going, knowing we’ll make it, even – in an odd way – thanking Trump for how his darkness has galvanized us in growing sisterly and brotherly love, I have been reflecting on how much good is coming out of the crisis. One of the
Hello, I am your grade book and I wanted to congratulate you on another year in service to me. Oh, I know, I know. You thought you were working on behalf of the kids. Hah, hah! That’s funny! We all know that you can’t serve two masters. Serve me! Let’s take for example that pesky Javiar Lugo! He
This is just a follow up to our little spat – or to be more accurate the one Sean and I had with those three guys a few weeks ago. After some deep reflection, I banned all three from the PLC. As I look back, I know I made the right decision, a decision against
John Lewis has said that when you see something wrong, you not only need to say something about it, but you also need to DO something about it. Over my own lifetime in language education, I have seen and said a lot about the abject state of language instruction in the United States over the
The idea that CI will save the day and reform foreign language education in the U.S. got a bit of a makeover from Robert Harrell in an article he wrote here in 2016. As Robert implies below, he is not dissing the effectiveness of CI but rather he is questioning its ability to function in
The short paragraph below sums it ALL up. But what if we had a way to break through the dynamic she describes? I do, actually. Here’s what really happens, as per Kate: It is the blank and overwhelmed look on students’ faces that teachers trust. They know their students are not comprehending them and so
A repost from 2008: People don’t get that unpredictable words come up in class. They don’t trust that ideas will occur naturally during the conversation, and they try to be in control of the class, so that they can teach certain words. Thus, the natural flow and emergence of the content of a story is
Some kids are seriously rude these days. What do you do if some really power-hungry sophomore (it’s usually sophomores in high school) chuckles when you try to make the Classroom Rule process work for you? Such a thing would rarely happen in the first week. Usually the oppositionally defiant kids wait and hide until going
Here is the website for a new kind of school, one that says they do CI but don’t. They are talking the talk without walking the walk. http://www.wmmhs.org/academics/academic_departments/world_languages Please take the 95 seconds needed to watch their promotional video. Here are my comments on it, because it raises all sorts of red flags in my
Let’s just say it. Bullies are alive and well in our schools. They often call themselves administrators. They are not in all schools, but in many of them. They’ve been doing it for a long time. They are not always white men – there are women bullies too. And not always white, either, but you
I got this from one of my Zoom group members who really gets the new Ultimate CI Book (1 of 6) concepts on how to use the Star Curriculum: Hello, teacher! I wanted to share my first experience working with the Star. This morning I got an idea while talking with my sister about how
