lesson plans
June 30, 2014
Well, last Friday came and went and the first official Camp Musicuentos is a wrap! I had the great privilege of working with 20 outstanding teachers from across my own region and even beyond – I was joined by teachers from Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Virginia! Our learning, for […]
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June 19, 2014
Hello this time from Merillville, Indiana, where I’m learning with a group of teachers from that school and other schools across the region. What fun! This workshop’s focus is proficiency-based lesson planning. We can say that we’re proficiency-based teachers but where the evidence of that can really be found is in our lesson plans. Do […]
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May 28, 2014
The Merrillville (IN) High School is hosting me for a professional development workshop and is inviting teachers across the region. Here are the brief details, and you can view the description more in-depth in this flyer. Where: Merrillville High School, Merrillville, IN (near Gary in the greater Chicago region) When: Thursday, June 19, 8:00 A.M. – […]
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May 14, 2014
What if a summer day changed your whole school year for the better? Come join me on Friday, June 27 and see how one day of intense, collaborative curriculum mapping will make your 2014-2015 school year feel easier and smoother and filled with proficiency-based teaching and assessments. I’ll warn you, it’s not going to be […]
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May 13, 2014
If you haven’t heard, you have many amazing professional development opportunities this summer. You can mix with the people who really know TPRS at NTPRS and iFLT. Also, if hands-on collaborative planning is your thing, you do not want to miss at least one of two opportunities to work with fellow teachers on proficiency-based curriculum planning […]
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May 7, 2014
4 ways to tweak the exit ticket
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When I first heard about the exit ticket, I thought it was a great idea. It seemed like a way to keep myself accountable to assess every student, and it seemed like a way to keep students accountable to do something to show me they’d learned what I’d taught. It also seemed like a decent […]
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April 9, 2014
Textbooks can be really helpful. Yes, I did say that. They can give you structure and ideas. They can facilitate communication among you, parents, and schools. They can provide you with assessments, sometimes good ones. Sorry, I still don’t like them. I don’t like doing extra work any more than you do, but I still […]
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March 25, 2014
One of my most popular posts last year was how to use Marc Anthony’s Latin Grammy-winning song Vivir mi vida to stage Spanish Class Idol in a novice class. A few people have asked me directly, and the topic has been brought up enough on Edmodo, about more clear directions of how to teach the song. […]
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September 2, 2013
What if the way we’ve been doing lesson plans for years and years makes no sense at all, given the research on memory and brain function? For the way I currently approach lesson planning I have to give a lot of credit to two very smart guys, Greg Duncan and John Medina. Greg Duncan is […]
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June 30, 2013
This summer I’m reposting some of the gems from the early days, partly because I’ve gotten a lot of readership since then and really, who has time to go back mulling over old blogs, and partly because my traffic is significantly slower and I’m working on other projects in the summer. This topic is from […]
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June 20, 2013
A meaningful approach to grammar
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Let’s just get it right out there that we’re grammar nerds. That’s why we majored in language and teach language, because we love language. We love how it fits together and changes and how systematic and yet unpredictable it is. And we love the little labels. Words like pluscuamperfecto send little shivers up our spines. Do […]
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April 15, 2013
No, not the latest John Gresham to while away the class period. Whether it’s for field trips, ceremony practice, or just a widespread illness, sometimes I have a class where many of the students are gone. Inevitably this leads to the same request: a free day. For some reason, my students think that because their […]
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