Scope and Sequence
Our PLC member Frank James Johnson has said this about the Star Sequence: Scope: "Whole Language Instruction" Sequence: "Spiraling Expansive Recurrence of Comprehensible Input". Of course, these blanket terms would freak out any admin who is not familiar with the Star. But then,
Middle School vs. High School – 6
Here is the letter that Danielle and I crafted, which you are of course welcome to copy and paste and rewrite if you are finding yourself in this kind of situation in your own teaching: Good evening (name of parent), Happy New Year!
Middle School vs. High School – 5
One of our PLC members received this email from a parent the other day. I asked and received permission to share it with the group. Hello Senora (name of teacher) - Hopefully things are going well for you during these crazy times. My
Middle School vs. High School – 4
Far too often, we CI teachers get challenges from our peers - teachers with whom we are supposed to be working on toward common assessments, high frequency verb lists, thematic and semantic units, etc. We also get challenges from helicopter parents,
Middle School vs. High School – 3
So the reversal of instructional priorities is moving now in favor of middle school teachers who use CI in their teaching. The high school teachers are being "outed". It's got a lot to do with Covid but we won't get
Middle School vs. High School – 2
When I arrived in 2015 to use CI to teach middle school French at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India, I was met with choruses of "Can we just do worksheets?" or "We learn better with worksheets!" Hmmm
Middle School vs. High School – 1
High school language departments usually anoint themselves as judge and jury of the middle school teachers who feed them their students. Their message is and always has been that if rising ninth graders show up at their doors "unprepared" to
NBA
I was watching "Inside the NBA" with Shaqille O'Neal and the "Round Mound of Rebound" Charles Barkley. On their Christmas show they gave away about 40 bicycles - placed on the set - to disadvantaged kids in the Baltimore area. The
Chris Farley
Let's do a good job of being language teachers, because we certainly don't want our kids to end up living in a van "down by the river"
It’s Cracking – The Traditional Textbook Teachers are Cracking.
OK. Everybody knows that for at least a decade and more like two decades here there has been a kind of cold war between us (CI teachers) and a new breed of CI teacher who tries to mix traditional instruction
Vlog 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maR3DmGeA0Y&t=23s
BLM – 3
Our bosses profess to want REFORM in education. We all looked to CI. That was the right place to look. But to our shame we largely ignored the equity/inclusion side of things. Maybe it's because George Floyd hadn't yet been
BLM – 2
To repeat the main point of the last article: how our students do in terms of language gains and how we do at our jobs is directly and deeply connected to how we address the concept of inclusion and equity
BLM – 1
In recent years, the focus here on the PLC has been not only on CI but also on how we can use CI for better mental health. How can we plan less, rest more, have more time for loved ones,
We Focus on the Message
I just made about twenty TikTok videos that all focus on one thing – that we learn languages by focusing on the message and not on the form of the language via worksheets and other clever activities that purport to
What Have You Got Planned for the New Year?
Certainly, 2020 needed to go. The big world was a disaster, and our small world of language teaching took a major hit as well, with most of the damage being done by the new online Zoom settings, for which we
Ultimate CI Books
This product is so good I decided to guarantee it. If you buy the first book and take the Zoom training on it and are not happy with the results in your online or classroom language teaching, I'll refund the
Ultimate CI Training
The Zoom training on Book 1 of the Ultimate CI series begins this coming Monday, for those interested. Go to benslavic.com and click on "training courses". If you want to really access what is in these new books, the Zoom
Reading in CI Classes
Here I'm talking about how I do reading in my CI classes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C26mp5NGTAk
Too Much Junk?
One of the most severe things we can do to ourselves as teachers is to collect so much information, so many different strategies and activities, that we can't manage all of it. This is actually a form of self-harm. When
Questions for Textbook Companies – 1
It's odd that the big textbook companies have held dominion over our profession for so long. It's even more odd how the annual ACTFL conference, in spite of their statements about proficiency and use of the language in the classroom,
How I Feel About Language Teaching
How I feel about language teaching is very simple, and has been expressed perfectly by the pianist Alice Sara Ott, when speaking about music: “Music is art, and art lives from creativity, and there cannot be any creativity if there is
Equity
The rise of elitism in our society is paralleled in our schools. It would be unreasonable to think otherwise. When the few take over a class then that class becomes their property. One thing that I fear about our field in
On Student Engagement
Some kids engage at the right amount. Some too much. What about the kids who withdraw? It is my position that, generally, kids who withdraw from interacting in a CI class have good reasons to do so. We all know that
Stick to the Plan with Stories
Carol sent this in a few weeks ago but it is just making it to through the queue. I think it is an important reminder: Dear Ben: My French 2 class has been a little blah lately. With a forty minute period,