You may want to consider joining our Zoom training group on the Invisibles. It’s a way to be able to meet the challenges that the coronavirus has brought to us and therefore a good way for you to keep your job over the massive changes of the coming years in our profession. Let me know […]
I am astounded by the implications that the coronavirus is bringing not just to our profession but to society in general. Of course, I am only qualified to speak about our profession, but I do feel that for every bad thing that happens in the world, 99 good things will also happen. They will just
How Does it Work? We take journeys around the star. The basic pattern for each journey is the same: Step 1: Start in the Create Phase (12:00 on the star). Here you create an image. Step 2: The Review Phase (2:00 on the star). Here you review the image. Step 3: The Write Phase (5:00
This is a repost from 2014. I ask the language community: “Who is going to orchestrate the obvious changes needed in ELA to get them up to speed with the research?” Someone has to do that. The chasm between WL and ELA pedagogy needs to be bridged: We have 2000 ELA instructors in Denver Public
We as teachers are generally strong people physically and mentally. We have to be – just because of the nature of the job. So let’s just stay strong mentally and physically during this crisis! Good things can come from this. Indeed, they WILL come from this. For one thing, so many of us who now
As many know, our long time group member Ryann Campbell was caught by the coronavirus about two weeks ago in the Washington hot zone. Here is her report as of today: “I got a bit worse, and had to go to the hospital. My oxygen saturation was dropping dangerously low. Last night was better than
Here is the third installment of the new Invisibles book: A Spatial Curriculum Let’s expand on the idea that we learn languages by focusing on the message only. In the past, language instruction has largely involved isolating parts of language in the form of grammar or working from word lists, and then breaking everything down
Here is the second installment of the new Invisibles book: Introduction We want to free comprehensible input (CI) as a pedagogy from its current cage. In order to do that, we must begin with a renewed look at the concept of what a language curriculum even is. We who embrace CI are like the early
I would share the Table of Contents here but it doesn’t format very well when pasted from the actual text – it’s a whopper of a table of contents and reveals a collection of every single good TPRS/CI idea I’ve ever had in the past twenty years, all rolled into a single passage. Here is
Got this from Jake: Hi Ben,I’m curious about ideas you or any other teachers on the PLC may have for long-term online activities as whole states are shutting down schools. This doesn’t affect me yet, but we’ve been told by our admin to be planning for this. Thanks!
Here is the newest version of the Interpersonal Skills Rubric. It has been known and used as “jGR” for the past ten years and used by thousands of teachers who have been working out of the Big CI Book. It is now known as the In-Class Communication Rubric and it’s just just better. It contains
Dana Miller-Kitch is the Canadian CI teacher who replaced me at the American Embassy School in the fall of 2016 in New Delhi, India. She had trained up over that summer on the Invisibles since she knew that she would inherit kids who were taught using them. I consider this article important enough to repost
