[ed. note: I met Doug Stone in San Antonio last year. He is in the L.A. area and has worked with Blaine, Robert, and others to retool his teaching as per input based methods. He recently sent me a few emails that are quite powerful statements. They reflect a ton of hard work over the past year] First […]
Some teachers speak English as much as 90% of the time, others as little as 10% of the time. But sometimes, oddly, on year end assessments, students from the second teacher’s class – the kids who rarely hear the language in class – often show gains that are not too far away from those of the teacher whose
In the past people have mentioned the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie as a good way to learn how to relate to the students. I know that this has worked for me in tremendous ways. But I think that the book can also be used to work with our
Thomas Young – Dealing with Opposition in Teaching Read More »
So many of the recent comments here should really be blogs so that they can be categorized. Oh well. At least I can trap this gem by Laurie on output into the new “output” category on the right here. (However, since I can’t keep up with the categorization process, I would suggest just using the search function most
Today a kid had a head down. Red flag. I was either going too fast, or going too wide into new vocabulary that was not part of my lesson’s objective, or maybe both. I was also possibly not checking for meaning often enough. And I probably wasn’t putting enough air between chunks of sound. So, if I
I want to start from the bottom of my list. The enormous chasm between low-achieving students and teachers who fail to reach them starts here. “Students who do not invest themselves in school work are making an irrevocably bad decision and should be blamed for their own failures.” This is something that most teachers accept
Some of us have had a lot of success this spring working with student generated texts, thanks to Michele. Having kids generate written texts is but a natural extension of having kids make verbal suggestions during stories. If verbal suggestions in stories work to personalize our instruction, then if follows that their written material can do
Four legs on the floor. Wooden seat. A back. It’s a chair, just a chair. Is that so? I asked my sixth graders to give me their thoughts on “the chair”: Antonia and others: It’s cool. It’s different than any other chair in the room. It’s higher. You can swing your legs and they
Jody Noble – The Special Chair/La Silla Especial Read More »
I got this email a few days ago from Haiyun Lu, and am happy to print it here with her permission: Hi Ben, This is Haiyun Lu from Wisconsin. I’m a Chinese teacher in a local independent school and I teach 8-12 graders Chinese. Last year, I bought TPRS in a Year! from you after
DIGESTING INPUT and OUTPUT This is a hodgepodge of recent thoughts on the benslavic.com blog that I have tried to organize to help me think more clearly about input and output: Susan Gross: “My really BIG ERROR (How did I forget to put it down as number one or two???): Output. I thought that
Hi all, I’m pretty thrilled about this…a five-hour interview got almost everything right! Go to: thttp://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:c9kxm45_UTwJ:www.neaalaska.org/nea/sites/default/files/maraprilaktivist10.pdf+NEA+aktivist+michele+whaley&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESg4BoF42ao2_ZGeMgLJRDNjlNbQXQB3hLgKqk7rMgmKNHNQZkrEoudRXaGBj_FdP3QogFYoC9ftLjUf1KNYhAM-63gF_Yf2BFpsdXkgxJ07KDsrX0_tu1pbWjOThFlqlTR1oScm&sig=AHIEtbSHcF8M51EtVoDwkWvXT8rYCtdrDw and check page 5…or google “NEA Aktivist Michele Whaley” and the same thing will come up. The part that is particularly wonderful about this is that Katya presented at our local Bilingual Conference last week. I’d never been before,
Katya Paukova just spent four days teaching in Anchorage. If you haven’t watched her, find a way. She’s going to be a little less available for a while now, because of a full-time teaching job at DLI, so the moment there is an opportunity, take it. Katya taught an auditorium of 300 people Russian for
Michele Whaley – Learning From Katya In Anchorage Read More »
