One skill maybe to focus on after the break would be to milk statements more. Anyone who has done CI knows that roughly every tenth thing a class says, or maybe every twentieth, is different (i.e. funnier, more interesting, of a higher quality in sound or meaning, etc.), and gives us pause and makes us […]
A repost from 2009: Susan Gross has said about personalization: … the BIG PICTURE is the relationships among those in the classroom. That’s what real teaching is all about. If the relationship is healthy, the kids will learn better. If the relationship is shaky, the learning is shaky. Only the teacher has the power to
I just took Julia’s survey on NTCI and it only took about 15 minutes. I embrace this attempt by her to record opinions about NTCI. The thing is, I don’t know how many of us here actually are even doing NTCI as described in A Natural Approach to Stores (ANATS) and in A Natural Approach
I just got a student in my class. Came from conventional high school with an “A” transfer grade. I think that means that this student had looked up all the worksheet answers online and the teacher gave him an A. He doesn’t actually know any Spanish at all though. None of the question words, not
We want complete buy-in from our students when creating a one word image with them. This requires that we are 100% understood when building the image. Here is one way to accomplish that goal. The process is done in English: (1) First, point to the space with respect. Convey the idea to the students that
I can’t think of a better reason to go through the insanity of teaching languages than the one about uplifting ourselves and others. And what is the best way of teaching languages that uplifts us and our students the most? It’s through comprehensible input based storytelling, everybody agrees on that these days. We don’t hear
Are there any other reasons why we teach, something not so obvious? Personally, I believe that a not-so-obvious reason we teach is to uplift ourselves and others, so we can find work that at least has some potential to make life fun and interesting, which many jobs don’t have. Making life better is one subtle
We must often revisit our motives for going into teaching in the first place. It will keep us heading down the right road. We spend a lot of time doing this work in very difficult buildings with lots of opposition, so we should know why we do it. Do we do it for the following
The next time you want to sit on the pity pot and complain about what a sucky job this is, go read this article in the 2016 issue of Time Magazine: http://time.com/magazine/us/4547305/november-7th-2016-vol-188-no-19-u-s/ Then go into your classroom and at least try to get a story going doing whatever works for you. We have work to
I am working with a teacher who is unfortunately in one of those “dramas” this week that we sometimes get into with parents when we try to teach according to the standard. I thought I would share some of my communication with him here: He wrote to me: Ben – I received a parent email
This is what Beniko Mason shared with us a few summers ago in Agen on the topic of reading. With respect, and acknowledging the crushing daily opposition to the work we are trying to do, I wonder how many of us could check off all of these seven points as something we actually do in our
