Some years ago one of our group members had a chance to move to another school. I delayed publication of this to protect the group member in the unlikely event that my thoughts about the school got back to them. There is no chance of that happening anyway bc we are a private group. Anyway, […]
Well, I’m feeling good about myself tonight. Not a very well attended back to school night but four kids came, the ones tucked away in a sea of heritage speakers, and each told me they love my class, it’s their favorite one and that they feel like they’re learning whereas in previous other traditional Spanish
Hi Ben, So, here was today. Yesterday was a crisis, today not. Today was my first tableau with my hardest class. I was pretty nervous. My stomach was in knots all day, and I I also had 2 admin coming to observe the class for 15 min to see the behavior, as I’ve expressed to
We have addressed this topic of common assessments in hundreds of ways over many years here. My thinking has evolved to keeping them separate from your CI instruction. Mixing the two doesn’t work. This is the opposite of the TPRS model. My recommendation is to take the first half of class to teach and test
If we are to truly grasp the magnitude of Dr. Krashen’s Learning vs Acquisition Hypothesis in order to fully implement it in our teaching, we must guide our students away from using their conscious minds in our classrooms into greater use of their intuitive faculties. Mike Peto teaches this way. He knows from experience that
The advantages of WBYT as a CI teaching skill (over the batch of skills we used to have to remember) are great. Instead of having to consciously remember to do all of things listed below in class, which I found impossible given all the other things I have to remember, WBYT allows us to do
Card Talk/Circling with Balls is an activity that can last all year, and we only want to use maybe one card per class, or even one card per week, as we milk all the information we can out of a particular card before going to another one. Because of Card Talk, we are free to
This is a repost from 2008. Are the ideas expressed below still true? What is actually going on in our own districts re: CI instruction? It is not a pretty picture. The four percenters who became teachers because they were four percenters rule. Most districts are filled with beaten down, conflicted foreign language educators. Had
Here is the letter to my assistant principal that I wrote to express my position about the situation that prompted the previous 9 blog posts about how Pigs Can’t Fly. The principal got involved. The result was that this kid and another were removed from my class at Thanksgiving. Since then, my class has healed,
A teacher on the Invisibles FB page has written something about the value of non-targeting that I’d like to share here. Sean Griffin writes: I am enjoying being relatively stress free these first few weeks of school, thanks to just going with creating tableaux using…whatever. First, I photocopied the pages 192-194 in The Invisibles to
I am always pushing the case against using CI to teach lists of words, a la TPRS. However, right about now kids can get really rude and we may not have enough bad grades on them to keep them humble. Need some bad grades to keep them humble? Do something. Give more quizzes. Grade them
What else can we say about those really rare rude kids who challenge us at the deepest gut level and even cause us to lose sleep at night? 1. The student seems to be not at all interested in learning the language I am teaching in my classroom. 2. The student seems very interested in
