May 14, 2015
Forgive me while I brainstorm in public a moment. Almost four years ago I created this rubric, based on the ACTFL guidelines and the Jefferson County (KY) Public Schools’ world language rubric. I loved it. It’s one of my most requested resources. I used it for years. But as I wrap up my first year […]
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May 11, 2015
Every once in a while I come across an authentic resource so amazing I have to give it its own blog post to tell you USE THIS RESOURCE. And then there’s this one, which makes me shout #addthis and #bookmarkthis and THEN it leads me straight into an example of something I was just asking […]
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May 5, 2015
If you know me you know I love a good research book, particularly one that tells us in lay language what it’s going to take to help kids succeed in a world we can’t even imagine, one that’s vastly different from the one we grew up in. The other day, Zoe asked me, Mami, what’s […]
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April 23, 2015
As promised, here are the “Three Before Me” posters for German and French. Big props to some good friends who helped me out with these translations, Wendy Farabaugh, Don Doehla, and Thomas Sauer. Download the free posters via Teachers Pay Teachers: German Bevor du anfängst mit der Fragerei, probier doch erstmal diese drei: 1) dich […]
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April 21, 2015
Three before me
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What could you get out of #langchat? You never know! No matter how many years you’ve been teaching, everyone’s bound to come away with some treasurable, profitable nuggets from #langchat. I’m not even sure which recent #langchat this came from. It could have been when we were discussing grit, how we could help learners persevere […]
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April 17, 2015
Recently on #langchat we were discussing interpretive and interpersonal tasks and someone asked whether interpersonal also functioned as interpretive, since the listener is interpreting auditory information. I thought it was Lisa Shepard, a lesson to me to note my sources right away, but I can’t find the conversation. So while I can’t credit my interlocutor, […]
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April 15, 2015
A few weeks ago the topic for #langchat was about timing and transitioning activities in a class. Then, shortly after, I was teaching a novice-high class of sixth-graders as part of an interview to perhaps go back to teaching next year (MAYBE). (Lesson plan coming soon.) Anyway, it made me think more about this issue […]
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I’ve had a burr in my saddle for a little over a year, probably longer, a problem that pricks me and try as I might to find a solution, I just can’t put my finger on it. On the one hand, we’ve got a robust body of research coming from both applied and theoretical linguistics […]
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April 6, 2015
What do you do when you’re being forced into a textbook adoption that’s stifling the creative community in your school? Sometimes you turn to someone with a generally poor opinion of textbooks for advice. One of my favorite parts of doing what I do is the conversations I get to watch and sometimes even facilitate. […]
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March 28, 2015
Ever feel behind the times? I just caught the current #1 song on Latin Billboard and it struck me as having two golden ingredients for a good class song: high student appeal and a couple of high frequency structures repeated. (Though I wanted to say, Dude – she moved on, she’s happy, get over it! […]
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March 26, 2015
This post is primarily for parents wanting to raise bilingual children and educators in elementary immersion programs, but perhaps the rest of you will find something useful here as well. I have three children that I am trying to raise bilingual in Spanish. We started out fully committed to the one-parent, one-language method, in which […]
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March 24, 2015
Do you sometimes feel like we’re working in an all-or-nothing profession? I’m not sure if it’s an artifact of social media, of tweets and blog posts designed to be punchy and petite at the same time. I’m not sure if it’s a desire to be the next big thing, the acronym everyone’s talking about. I […]
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