As a language teacher, I like simplicity and therefore I like repetition. Simplicity and repetition help my students remember and allows me to see much greater engagement from them than when I try to teach too much language. When I teach too much language my students feel – on a daily basis – the weight
From time to time, group members send me interesting articles to share with the group. Alisa has sent these two, which you may find time to read during your planning period this week: https://www.bookwidgets.com/play/AE3NJQ https://hbr.org/2019/01/data-was-supposed-to-fix-the-u-s-education-system-heres-why-it-hasnt
I’ve actually never read a comment like the one reproduced below, and the reason that that is a big deal to me is that over the past 15 years here there have been over 70,000 comments, so this is a rare one! It’s from Carly (Oct. 25). What she wrote represents in my view a
I’m beginning to see more and more that one of the biggest enemies we face in this work are the very schools in which we do the work. The CI birds wings are just too massive for too many of the admins working in our buildings these days. These admins are ignorant of the research
Below is an example of what Carly does with the rather useless and clumsy daily objectives requirement that is another way admins have of keeping control over us. In her school, she is required to write them in a specific format: I can _______ by/in order to__________. Carly explains: I also think it is unnatural
Q. We are going to have to start to have learning targets each day/week and the kids are going to have forms to fill out explaining how they have reached that learning target. I need to figure out how to handle that with this way of teaching. Here is one possible answer to this question:
I got this email question with my response below: Q. [On the topic of creating a CI based curriculum]…I just sat down and asked myself what students would need in Level I if we were just concentrating on them. So I came up with the personal interview questions online, and from there, wrote a list
Speech and Writing Output Can’t Be Taught – They Just Emerge Read More »
It took us 15 years here, but in the past year we have finally articulated our major concern in this work. It is our mental health, which in turn is influenced of course by how we teach and how we manage our classrooms. Specifically, if the method we use allows for much greater levels of
Krashen and Lev Vygotsky fifty years before him have shown that the concept of being a valued member of a community (which leads to feelings in the language learner of self-worth and confidence) play major roles in language acquisition. So before we get too technical in our discussion of what a curriculum is, let’s ask
Warning: this is kind of a long rant – if you read the contents of the link as well. Just more grist for the mill: We have had, over all the years, many questions about curriculum. The ones we’ve developed here as a group always seem to get outdated, buried back in the archives, scrolled
When we give our students a reason to be happy in our classrooms, instead of placing them somewhere on an arbitrary scale of how “good” they are at the language compared to other students, we do it right. We place the needs of children to be an accepted part of a vibrant language sharing community
When teachers don’t assess their students, even if doing so diminishes the amount of instructional time available to the students, administrators are not happy. Indeed, assessment seems to be the major goal of education, even though in languages it is nearly impossible to find out how much language has been acquired in the soup of
