Michele and I were talking about what to do next year and here are some of her resolutions with my responses italicized. I think that there are more in another email she sent me and Michele you can add them as a comment if you find them. I think it is good for us to know what we intend […]
We’re not just talking about a teaching method here, folks. We are talking about employment in a crumbling economy. Those of us who chose to go into the profession did so thinking that we could earn a living from it. But, if the method we use fails us, and our enrollments keep dwindling, and no
Hi Ben, I had an amazing experience today. Our school is doing professional learning communities, starting classes late twice a week so we can work in groups. Patty, Rachel and I had to present this morning on our work in the foreign language department. We told them a little bit about CI-based instruction and I
I got an email from a colleague today. It describes the game of Gotcha! that some teachers put on their kids, as in, “Your work is to memorize lists and verbs – you must do your work at home! – and I’m not really going to speak the language in class or do any meaningful (i.e.
I didn’t want to waste any time nickel and diming my students on their final exam this year. So I took a four page embedded reading from a recent story, with approximately 50% new material in it, and, during the first fifty minutes of the 70 minute final exam, we talked around the twenty true/false questions
Friday, a Simon Constable column appeared in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal (page A13, Friday, May 21). It was called On-the-Job Straining. It reviews a book by Tony Schwartz called The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working. The entire first paragraph of Constable’s article is a grabber: “Let’s not be coy about it. At times, life inside
Michele put the following up as a comment but it scrolled out while awaiting moderation (comments with url’s get moderated), so I am putting it here in relationship to the discussion about informing administrators about what we really do. In fact, I have one AP who cares to study and embrace CI, because he thinks it can help
We pay attention to the administrators and ignore the parents. Why is this? I think it is a big mistake. Let’s talk about the parents briefly. Yesterday, I met a highly educated and articulate parent who happens to be quite pissed off at years of lack of communication with administrators about what is best for
My heart goes out to students whose learning style is predominantly visual. The reason is that languages are not learned visually – they are learned primarily in an auditory way. Reading, writing, speaking – all emerge from listening. Most students have been made into visual learners by the nature of instruction in schools (thus fully two thirds
This game I invented was a huge hit in my classes. Easy to organize. Very engaging. Might help a few teachers who are looking for ways to keep CI going these last weeks of school. Jody Fun CI Game after Reading (adapt for age group): Devise 10 (or whatever number suits you) opinion questions, which
There is a point of critical mass where, if one too many students is confused, heads go down on the desks and we lose the chemistry of the class, to which all must contribute. Then we feel like fools and blame the method. In order to avoid getting to that point of critical mass, we
People have asked me how our Anchorage TPRS group got going. They’d like to have something similar in their communities. Susie thought I should present a “how to” at a TPRS conference, but I knew it would only take about six minutes to explain. Here goes: Ben’s books gave me the concept of today’s TPRS
