OK, I love my eighth grade class.  Maybe TOO much.  Last year in seventh grade we had such a good time.  I was so happy to see them walk into class on the first day of school…all 39 of them!  Yep! 39 13- and 14-year-olds!! We acquired three new eighth graders, a sixth grader who has lived in Morocco and wants to keep up her French, and three kids who had been with my previous eighth-grade class, and the class was big to begin with, cause last year there was just one section of French 1…so, it is jam-packed with kids.  Kids are everywhere.  In every seat, and two in the middle.

So, there are ISSUES.  You might find some of these familiar.

Kids are talking.  To their friends!  In English!  I stop, walk over to the rules, and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait…
And when I ask a whole-class creative question, like in making a OWI, they dither and debate so enthusiastically that it wears me out despite having a “close debate” signal and two Professeurs 2.
Kids are slumping in their desks.  A couple like to get their books out.
Kids are not answering my whole-class comprehension (not creative but just verifying understanding) questions with a strong response, even though I am pretty sure they understand.
I find it hard to go slow enough because there is just SO MUCH ENERGY in the room, with 39 14-year-olds…well, 39 14-year-olds and one 11-year-old.  Also, there are about five Spanish-speaking kids in the class and they want to go faster, while the brand-new-to-languages kid who just joined our class feels lost.
It is the last period of the day and 30% of the time so far this school year it has been just too hot to think.  On days like that I have pretty much called off class from time to time.  It’s like the kids arrive and then fifteen minutes into class it hits us all that it is too hot to go on, and we just stop.  This has not exactly set the proper tone.

One might ask oneself, WHY give this poor teacher a mixed bag of 39 kids from 2:44 to 3:45 every day?  It is a challenging class and by that time in the day I am super-tired and I can feel that my “smile at the class while pointing to the rules” smile is far from genuine.  And also that it takes like eight hundred years to get them to quiet down while I am pointing at that rule.

I have two options here.  One is to switch to more pencil-paper work.  The other is to redouble my efforts and train them up in how I want them to behave.

I will edit this more on the bus today.  Stay tuned for updates.

So on the bus I watched the video from yesterday, and I realized that class SEEMS worse to me than it actually is!

This happens all the time. I am so grateful for my videos. They comfort me. They allow me to look at myself through a fresh lens. It’s like being a visitor in my own room.

In the video, I noticed that during French time, they are mostly focused. I noticed that I am going slowly enough. I noticed that even though I’m worn out and not feeling truly like smiling when pointing to the rules and waiting for them to get quiet, that I look calm and happy.

So, it’s going better than I thought. They just are requiring more of me. They’re challenging me a little more than they did as seventh graders. That’s normal for eighth grade.

The main issues are actually classroom routines. And they’re not so terrible, actually.

At the start of class, I want them to get their books from the bin where they keep them and get to their seats within two minutes. But I’ve also taught them that good readers sometimes change books. So I’m finding myself doing mini-booktalks with my readers as they enter. That’s slowing me down and we aren’t getting down to reading time as quickly as I want. But they are working on finding good-fit books, so it’s probably actually time well-spent.

At the end of class, I want them to help me clean the room then sit quietly and let me ask a couple of questions before saying goodbye. This is different from how we did it last year so of course it’s going to involve some retraining. That’s ok. It is a chance for me to assert my leadership in class. The thing is, we get so busy in class that I haven’t been leaving enough time to execute the closing routine, and then we’re late, which makes them resentful. I just need to be more on top of shutting down class so we can successfully prepare to leave before the final bell.

Watching the video, I noticed that the One Word Image was super-engaging to them and it just reinforced my strong belief that the first component of a strong classroom management system is an engaging, creative, student-driven curriculum.

Also, it’s very comforting to know that the creative, high-energy activities just set us up for more mellow literacy activities the next day. Today we will read a text on the bat we created in the OWI activity yesterday. To keep my sanity, I plan on pre-writing the text and just doing resting options with it. Ben prefers to almost always pre-write the text. I do like doing Write and Discuss, and I see huge learning benefits in the students’ seeing the words and sentences take shape before their eyes, but when we want to take it easier in class, pre-writing the text makes for a much more relaxing, less-interactive lesson.

If I thought I had to be “on” every day, I would probably run away from Crazyville, USA, otherwise known as Room 23. With a nice mix of “on” days like yesterday and reading options days like today.

And thank goodness for the videos. They put it all in perspective. I highly recommend taking videos of yourself, even if it’s just for your own consumption. It’s like having another pair of eyes.

Self-selected reading time is not going to go smoothly all the time, it’s just a fact.  Some of us are self-professed control freaks and would shudder at the thought of 39 adolescents reading 39 different books.  But for me it is the only way to go.  I shudder at the thought of trying to make the same chapter book come alive for 39 adolescents at 39 different reading levels and with 39 different interests as readers!  BUT that does not mean it always goes off smoothly and without a hitch.

If we can reframe the challenges and classroom management debacles and issues and problems and frustrations, headaches, pains-in-the-neck, and such, if we can reframe them as teaching points, we can build stronger readers not just in world languages but generally.    It is worth it to look at the issues in a diagnostic light, and think,”What are these students asking for me to teach them?”

We can mine the class’s struggles for possible teaching points, teach into those, and then follow up with the readers who most need our support in individual reading conferences.

In reading workshop, a teaching point is the heart of a mini-lesson.  In my French two class, these mini lessons re delivered in English.  It is a SMALL price to pay for the amount of language input they will get once we get the reading train chugging smoothly down the tracks.  I would NEVER want to try to run a free-choice reading-workshop-inspired world language reading program without some mini-lessons in English.

Also, these mini-lessons are MINI.  They take about 6 minutes.

Also, they have a safe and familiar structure.  The way I learned Reading Workshop from Lucy Calkins and crew at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, there is an “architecture” of a mini-lesson.  The lessons the about 15 minutes.  But of course, they are delivered in the language the students are there to acquire (generally English as this is generally practiced in English Language Arts classes).

In World Language, the students cannot generally understand a mini-lesson delivered in the language they are there to acquire.  Therefore, for the sake of maximizing students” exposure to the language we are there to acquire, we deliver the mini-mini-lesson for about 4-6 minutes, in English, then have them work in their independent books to apply the strategy we just taught them.

The modified architecture of a World Language Reading Workshop mini-lesson that I find myself using is:
1.  Tell a story (a personal story or describe what is happening in our class)
2.  Tell them “Today I want to teach you that strong readers” and name the teaching point, and why it is important.
3.  Jot some strategies (1 or 2 maximum) on an anchor chart (a paper that hangs in the room so they can refer to it as they work).
4.  Follow up in conferences.  Check in with the kids who really needed that lesson.  Mayne even take notes on a conference record sheet.

Here is an example.  I do not generally videotape reading time but I might start.  Monday in eighth grade (my only non-first-year class and therefore my only class that is currently reading as first-years start in November) there was a general lack of focus.  I decided to teach them on Tuesday a lesson on Trying on a Book.

1.  Story:  Hey guys, I noticed in class yesterday that there were some things going on.  A shoe ended up in the trash can to much hilarity.  It took us multiple tries to get down to reading and I had to keep restarting the timer cause people were talking.
2.  Teaching point and why it is important:  Today I want to teach you that strong readers make sure that they have a good book that is interesting and understandable, so they WANT to read it.  Research shows that the most efficient way to learn more words and become stronger writers is to read.  So finding a book that you WANT to read and can focus on, even in a huge class like this, is important.
3.  Strategies:  You might want to take a little stack of books back to your seat, if you haven’t yet found a book you enjoy.  You might try different types of books.  Try nonfiction.  Try some shorter texts or some different genres.
4.  Follow up in conferences:  I sat at my desk and whispered to kids, “What books are you trying?  Do you think you will stick with it tomorrow?” and made notes.

This is my highly-unscientific reading conference record book.  It is one of four pages.  They are organized by section on the setting chart.  All it has in it so far is the books they have finished and the books they have abandoned.  I just started it yesterday.  It is crude and yours will probably look more like these.

Cause you’re awesome and I am a Pinterest failure, LOL!

You could also use the amazing app Confer, which was designed by a workshop teacher in Washington State, just for reading and writing workshop conferences.

Here are some potential teaching points for common problems that are related to engagement and book choice.  I will be working on more documents to include in the resource book that will be part of the curriculum at the upcoming World Language Proficiency Institutes.  Ben and I are super-excited, happily planning a week of PD devoted to Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) using stories and characters, and a week devoted to Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) using content-based instruction and higher-level reading and writing work.

Teaching Points WL RW Engagement and Book Choice (PDF)
Teaching Points WL RW Engagement and Book Choice (MS Word)

May I just say in closing here that working with Ben Slavic after eight years of reading his blog and watching his videos has been a major turning point in my life.  It’s not always the smoothest ride, we do not always see eye to eye on everything, our styles are very different in many ways, but at the bottom of all that, we practically share a brain when it comes to this work.  The best part is, though, that although we are so similar in the foundational things, we both have very different experiences.  Adding his long experience in CI and his long list of inventions and innovations to my training and experience in literacy in ELA and ESOL has been the source of many, many new insights and a-ha moments for both of us.  Ben, here’s to us.  I am so excited to see how these Institutes develop.  I’ve, literally, never been so excited for anything in my head to become reality as I am for these to take shape.

OK people! It’s finally here! Spa week! Otherwise known as Week Six in the Cycles of Instruction and Assessment. Assessment Week.

You can watch videos on how I organize my year into these six-week cycles here.

We CI teachers are “on” a lot. I used to teach Language Arts and Social Studies as well as French and in those classes I wasn’t always so “on”. These Assessment Weeks get us off the creating-stories train and onto the sitting-and-watching-the-kids-work train. A much more laid-back ride.

The assessments I use are aligned completely to the instruction they received in the first five weeks of the cycle. They assess listening, reading, and writing. In the first-year classes, the writing isn’t actually assessed yet. We’re putting down a baseline and we will compare it to the writing the kids produce at the end of the next cycle. When we assess reading and listening, they will read and listen to stories that we have created in class. This means that the assessment is in line with the instruction. It uses the content of the preceding classes as the basis for assessment.

In graduate teacher school, they told us that the best assessments are also assessments forlearning and not just assessments of learning. This means that the assessment should still be educative. These assessments provide more CI so they are still an opportunity to take in meaningful messages in the language. So, they are assessments for learning as well.

Today we will set up our portfolios. (I also need to change the seating and I owe them a No-Potty Party since no one used the hall pass in September, so today is already jam-packed and so we will only have time to get new seats, set up and briefly talk about the new October calendar, and make our portfolios). Then on each day of the week, we will then add in a different assessment. Listening on Tuesday, reading Wednesday, and writing Thursday. On Friday we will play the Word Chunk Team Game. I like a nice long WCTG sesh after all that hard work (hard work for the kids, easy work for me!)

The listening assessment is simply me retelling them a class story. Now, in some classes we haven’t yet told actual full-blown stories so mostly at this point in the year it’s a description of a character we did as a One Word Image. First I share the L1 Retell Rubric with them. It asks them to retell in English and say who, what, where, when, describe the setting, and infer why the character is feeling the way they do.

They have a blank paper divided into four parts and I retell the story (or, in this case, describe the character) in four parts. As I describe the character, I add in a date, weather, setting, and a tiny little plot. This is new information for them but uses familiar language. I am not much of a planner so I generally go with my gut on what to add, but some folks will want to pre-plan these extra details. (Note: even if you write out the details, it’s best not to read to them but rather to talk spontaneously using the sheet as reference.)

I tell each part twice. The first time is in a normal instructional pace, pointing to the artists’ work as I speak. They listen with pencils down. The second time, I speak slowly with good ten-second pauses between sentences to allow them to write what they understood. They write in L1 (English). They can write full sentences or use bullet points and phrases. I don’t worry if the two versions are slightly different. It’s good for them to get slightly varied input.

If a student can listen to discourse of connected paragraphs on a familiar topic and get out the main ideas and most of the details (as most of the students are able to by this point), that’s Advanced Low on the ACTFL scale. Just for contrast, PPS expects Intermediate High after two years of middle-school language. My comprehension-taught kids are rocking it.

Reading is similar to writing. I make typed copies of a class story or character’s description. I usually use a different character for this assessment. As I wrote, I add a few details. I even embed a few new words in there, nestled among the familiar facts. I number the story into four parts.

I review the L1 Retell Rubric and hand out the copies and read the story aloud to them. I read in an expressive voice, and I read the entire story. I require them to follow along on their papers with their eyes. I’m super-strict about this. I won’t start or continue till they’re all reading along.

After the reading, they retain the story and write their understandings of each part, using sentences or bullet points.

Again, most of my students are already Advanced Low on Reading. What a thrill!

Later in the year I start using non-familiar stories as more of a challenge. It’s also easier on me as I only have to write one text per level.

For writing, it’s just a baseline assessment in Year One. In second year, it’s an actual assessment. I first explain the rules of freewrites and give them some tips on writing. It’s too long to type so I’ll post a video here later of what I do on Thursday in first year and in second year, my experienced writers.

This is a video of what I did in first year.

Then after they brainstormed their first sentences, I “warmed them up” with a quick story in Spanish or French. Here’s a video of that.

They brainstorm their first sentences with a partner, draw a line under the sentence (cause it doesn’t count for their word count) and then write for ten minutes. I don’t give them a topic nor reference materials.

At the end, we share with partners, count our words, abiding by the Two Muys and Two Names Rule, and write at least two sentences in our Writers’ Diaries to describe the experience and set goals. Sometimes, if there’s time, we do Author’s Chair, where a volunteer reads their work to the class.

I assess writing only on the ACTFL scale. I made a Story Rubric that assesses the actual content of the story (does it contain dialogue, setting, inner thinking, and a problem) but it’s only for the end of Year Two, once they have confidence and the ability to think like a writer whilst also composing in L2.

Most of the first-year writers are already Intermediate Lows. This means they can produce original sentences. They’re actually more like Internediate Mid, producing connected paragraph-length discourse, but ACTFL expects them to use multiple timeframes (past, present, or future), so they’re not usually quite there yet.

Spa Week, or Assessment Week, is a time of rest and celebrating. They are already so strong! CI is so powerful. It’s like a mini-miracle each year. Our brains are truly miraculous in their ability to effortlessly and happily acquire Language Proficiency, when given the necessary ingredients of understandable interesting messages, delivered in a calm, low-stress environment, over enough time.

Hi everybody, it’s me. That YouTube video gal. The one that all the spouses are asking about. “Why are you always watching that lady?” “Should we de-subscribe to Netflix?” “Please don’t bring her on vacation with us!”

Yesterday at the CI Midwest conference, I was surprised to have so many teachers tell me that they’ve been watching the daily class videos I’ve been posting. Several said they watch in bed every night. One said she watches on her commute. I thought, “Nice, she uses public transit.” Not so fast Hargaden. She drives. She assured me it was with the sound only. I hope so! One said she’s watched every video of every class all year! She knew all our class secrets! I thought, wowiee that’s a full-time job on top of a full-time job! Maybe she watches on her commute to save time. Then I thought like, “Let’s not make that a thing!”

Needless to say, I was totally floored. I mean, it’s not like I can’t see the views on my YouTube channel getting higher an higher. But I guess I pictured people watching a vid here and there, not enrolling in the Room 23 School for CI. Those videos have really meant a lot to people. It is certainly motivating as I do spend hours per week uploading and cataloging them. It’s a labor of love at this point. And now I’ll think of all those teachers in bed, so committed to learning CI or improving and refining their existing practice that that’ll spend time with the Room 23 crew on the regular.

A couple people were like, please don’t think I’m a stalker! I assure you, folks. I get it. I used to watch so many teachers on YouTube! I still do! When I’m not watching myself!! LOL!! I love it! Until 2016, I never went to a national conference and only had one two-day Blaine Ray workshop with Donna Tatum-Johns in 05 and one two-day Carol Gaab BER workshop in 08. I spent most of my PD money on Reading and Writing Workshop trainings at Columbia University Teachers College in NYC. All I had was the More List, YouTube, blogs, and Ben’s PLC. Videos were IT for me! I learned so much watching others teach. It helped me conceptualize what CI looked like.

So I guess now I’m paying it forward in a big way.

I thought I’d explain how the video bonanza came to be, in case people are curious. My hope is it might inspire folks to post videos of themselves. Believe me, there’s a MARKET for it. You too can teach loads of your colleagues and rake in the invisible cash! 😂

I kid, I kid. But you can really help a lot of people. I’ve learned that. I certainly didn’t set out to do that. I just set out to share with 22 people in California and to leave a record of a nontargeted year, an experiment as I jumped off the cliff to see what would happen.

It was literally a snap decision made on the spur of the moment at the last minute. Ben and I had been in Mike Peto’s classroom in Southern California in August of 2016. Or should I say Ben had. I was just tagging along helping him at that point, trying to absorb from him and provide logistical support. And at the end, on Friday afternoon, some folks said, Tina we’ve never seen you teach. So then the day I went back to my classroom, to begin the school year, I was biking past the Starbucks up at the top of the hill and I had the thought, “I’ll record myself and send it to them.” So I did. But at first, it felt like taking medicine.

At first, I was petrified to watch myself. I had had to watch myself teach in grad school and it had been really really hard. The weird thing is, after about two days I ended up not even thinking twice about it. I began to see myself through a different lens. Now, it’s strange. I watch myself teach, like, pretty much every day. And I actually like it now! It feels more like reading my own writing.

If you’re scared to watch yourself then think of this. You’re watching for all the times when you’re HAPPY in class. Watch your happiness. It will help you get through those first awkward moments of Oh My God My Hair and I Need to Start a Diet Yesterday!!

I was just making the videos and posting them and watching myself and growing a lot from that. And then I started getting messages and questions and pictures of roomfuls of people watching my classes on screens in PD sessions. I started to realize that there’s a real need for virtual visits to another teacher’s room.

It’s strange going from Lil Ole Teacher Me to Video Lady so fast. This time last year I was just starting this video posting project. I literally pictured Mike and crew watching them and maybe talking at their monthly CI meetups. And now twelve months later I just met like at least 20 people who were raging about the videos. And a few superfans. It kind of plays with your head. Like, I wonder, “Do people think I’m some kind of egomaniac?” But then I remember that so many people have said the videos help, and I just stop caring. At some point, I suppose, anyone who wants to go on a mission just has to stop caring what they look like, and focus on what they’re DOING FOR OTHERS.

So, “stalkers”, please never feel awkward! I stepped out of my comfort zone –waaaaay out – to help a group of teachers. I’ve stuck to the project ONLY because it’s helping people. I did debate a lot, “Should I do it again this year?” It’s motivating to know there are real teachers with real students who might get a new idea to make class more efficient and joyful. Cause ultimately it’s for the kids, right? I mean, it certainly ain’t for the invisible dollars!

The more the merrier! Come on in; the water’s fine…once you get used to it. You don’t hafta go hog wild like I did and video every day. Just post a little. The more the merrier! Brett Chonko is on YouTube as Comprehensible RVA and Scotty Jimenez is on YouTube as Sr. Mississippi. Mike Peto is on Vimeo. And there are tons of other classes to watch.

Now please drive safely and tell your spouse that you’ll use headphones in bed. It just makes me feel better about the whole thing!

Just went to the CI Midwest conference and got to spend time with old friends and make a good number of new ones. Last night in Jolly Spanish Teacher Jeanie’s gorgeous, well-appointed (two pianos!) vintage home in downtown Ripon, Grant Boulanger gave a moving talk to the organizers and presenters and then people shared their thoughts. I was so grateful, sitting in that room with all of these beautiful, heart-filled teachers on the same mission.

I had said to Bryce Hedstrom earlier, as we hovered by the veggie tray with some of the brightest teachers I can think of squeezing past us, that there would be no other house on the planet where I’d rather be at that moment. That house contained precious cargo – a good number of teacher leaders who have dedicated countless hours to developing their own craft to reach their own students so they can now devote countless more to helping other teachers develop their own practice and turn our profession into a beacon of success, inclusion, and equity.

Just a few of the beautiful people!

I was fixing my mouth to say the following when last call was announced and we had to stop. So here goes, party people.

I feel strongly that educators who are drawn to CI have a double calling. First, we are called to work with students, to be teachers. Second, the vast majority of us CI teachers were called again, after teaching traditional, to deepen our practice, to reach all kids, to transform our classrooms into a new paradigm that is unlike that seen in almost any other classroom in our schools.

Yesterday at Comprehensible Midwest, where 90 out of about 180 attendees were new to CI, a full 50% new folks, in Haiyun and Laurie’s beginner session, Haiyun said, “CI is a long journey but it’s a fascinating journey.” Fascinating indeed.

It’s a journey that fascinates the mind, sure, but I doubt a Vulcan could understand how it also enchants, melts, and transforms the heart. CI changes our classrooms, to be sure, but if we truly follow the journey all the way to its core, it can also transform our hearts. It can be a path to a different you.

We were called to this transformative journey together, as a group, with all our kaleidoscopically-different personalities and talents and gifts. We, as a group, the seasoned and the noobs, the bouncing-around-the-room and the quiet-and-dignified, those with well-manicured planbooks and the fly-by-the-seat-of-the-trousers types, we are all called to a shared adventure of personal and social transformation.

Here are seven things that might just transform for you on your journey.

One. Your personal life. Yesterday, I heard two people tell a presenter, You changed my marriage. They have more time for their loved ones. They have far less paperwork, far fewer “lost weekends” of marking and correcting. This increase in free time will allow you to be a more centered, calm person who is more present to the people in your life – inside the schoolhouse and out.

Two. Your appreciation of children’s creativity. Kids are stunningly-creative. Engaging CI runs on their ideas. You will find yourself listening to and cultivating children’s imaginations like never before. You will find your own imagination growing. You will develop unexpected skills as a storyteller. You will get in touch with the magic of childhood imagination. You will marvel at how your students’ creativity, oftentimes long-dormant by the time they reach high school, awakens, stretches, blinks in the light of day, looks around, sees that it’s safe, and runs out to play.

Three. Seeing every kid. In most classes, kids are herded through the experience with little opportunity to be “seen” by others. It’s an individualistic, dog-eat-dog world out there, with a thicket of pens, calculators, dictionaries, and the like between people. As you grow more and more proficient at making the kids your curriculum, as you train yourself to go slow and look in their eyes, in each pause between each word, and as you unearth more and more fascinating details and startling creativity from the people in class, you will have an uncommon privilege – knowing them as people. You might give them jobs, and thus be able to acknowledge their work, performed voluntarily, in service to their classmates.

Four. Getting into a success-oriented growth mindset. It’s hard to fail in a CI class. It’s hard to fail at a process you’ve already done before, effortlessly, whilst wearing diapers or toddling about your childhood home. Everyone in class has already been highly successful at acquiring at least one language. So then in a CI class, every last one of them can do it again if you provide the two necessary ingredients (interest and comprehensibility) over enough time.

Yes, EVERYONE. Even the slow ones. Even the poor ones. Even the unmotivated-by-grades ones. Even the ones with learning disabilities. Even the annoying ones. Even the shy ones, the hurting ones, the ones with the hoodies over their eyes. Even the friendless ones, the weirdos, the quirky ones, the outcasts, the don’t-wanna ones and the not-gonna-try ones. Everyone. Everyone can do it. They might not all get the same words at the same time, so it is my advice not to try to test them on it, but they are all, simply by breathing the air in our classrooms, going to construct their own unique mental representation of the language.

After a while, when you have them do free writes, and IEP Hoodie Kid can write a paragraph or even a story in a brand-new language, you’ll start to trust that underneath the soil, in the dark, with nothing but interesting, understandable messages plus time, language is growing. Then, like lifting a potato out of black sandy loam, out comes language. And then more. And then more. You learn to trust in the human capacity to learn and grow.

Five. Your adult ego relaxes. You start to loosen up. You start to discover that going off-script is usually more engaging, and you start to crave engagement. Maybe you’ve finally experienced the magic of being in flow with your students. Most likely this is not something you felt often without CI. You start to crave it. And to satisfy that craving, you start to do whatever it takes to get that feeling of flow, of engagement. You start to find that being silly, being expansive and theatrical in your movements and speech, that being self-depreciating and believing, truly believing, that your students are the World’s Most Coolest People, that loosening up helps you achieve that very pleasant state of flow. So, over the years, you loosen up. You get more playful. You get less self-conscious. You can’t sing, but yet here you are, singing. You can’t draw, but you make squiggles on the board that mean something anyway. You are guarded, but you’re finding that your gestures take up more and more space with their theatricality.

Six. You grow into a stronger advocate. You get more fight in you. As you stand up for CI, you experience conflict differently. Maybe for the first time, you can’t hold your tongue when you need to defend something you know to be true. It’s not really “standing up for your beliefs” because you have evidence. It’s more like standing up for the facts. And because you have seen the results, you find the inner strength to not give up and not give in.* You might find yourself talking to your admins and colleagues with more strength, passion, and conviction than you even knew you had.

Seven. You have more soulmates. Like I said, we are called together. When I was fifteen, I discovered the Unitarian Universalist tradition. By sixteen, I had a car and a license to drive, and I was gratefully transporting myself to the tiny UU church in Macon, GA. It was a tiny congregation of 125 people. The feeling was one of extreme solidarity, a tight-knit community of liberal religious folk in a sea of fundamentalist conservative Christianity. CI feels like that to me. And when we get together, for me anyways, there’s always a spiritual component, always a feeling of mission-driven work to liberate people and elevate each other.

So there’s my next-morning “ésprit d’escalier” toast. Cheers to us, the rebeldes, the merry pranksters, the misfits and dreamers and Fools. The visionaries, the frontrunners. The changemakers. The movers and shakers. Here’s to the future. Here’s to you and me!

*as Eminem put it

We are grown adults. We are professionals. We are fairly responsible public servants.

And we need to take a lesson from a bunch of clowns.

When I first began my CI journey, I had already had a good deal of vocal and body training through theatre and improv work in high school, college, and community theatre. I’ve only recently, through training and coaching other teachers in CI, come to see how insanely valuable that training was in CI instruction.

It was my secret ingredient. It provided the sparkles, the yeast that made my instruction rise, the little moments of extra humor and merriment and fun. It also helps to make me comprehensible with less effort.

My friend Rita Barrett is an actual clown and she is a beautiful example of setting her adult ego aside in the service of children – in her hospital clowning work and in her high-school Spanish classes at Portland Adventist Academy.

Theatre people call our bodies our “instrument” and use it to support the fiction we create onstage, making the imaginary real and the invisible take shape as if it really occupied actual space.

Many teachers have not had the body and voice training that we theatre geeks had. And so when many of us teach, we do not access the potential of our instruments. Many teachers confine their use of their bodies and voices to a small range of what I would call “cocktail-party” appropriateness. They teach like they’re at an adult function, and a pretty sober one at that.

They keep their gestures small, their facial expressions quiet, their voices in that normal adult range of emotions.

We CI teachers could take some lessons from clowns, mines, and comedians. Slapstick, physical humor, improv could teach us valuable lessons in making optimal use of our instruments, our bodies, one of our most important tools for humor, levity, engagement, management, and comprehensibility.

But it does require a surrendering of our adult egos. It does require what Ben calls “feeling like a biscuit” – chanting, singing, pantomiming, gesturing into the often-sullen faces of a nation of ironic, jaded, internet-savvy, social-media-addled adolescents. Radiating out an example of an adult who is not afraid to be expansive, silly, and expressive. This is hard for some of us, being the upstanding pillars of the community that we are.

Baby Steps to Feeling Like a Biscuit.

The Power Stance. There’s a TED talk on how your body language shapes your personality. The presenter talks about how doing a power stance (spreading your legs and holding your arms spread above your head) for some minutes prior to a speaking engagement or other stressful situation literally makes you feel more powerful.

The Invisible Clay Move. One Word Images are a nice training ground for using your body to establish meaning. Imagine there is a pile of invisible clay on the ground in front of you. “See” it there. Stretch it, shrink it, run your eyes over its invisible contours, pat it on the head, chuck it under its adorable little invisible chin. Coo at it or stand back and gaze upon it in mock astonishment. Use a “big voice” for big or happy facts and a “small voice” for small or happy facts and a “cute voice” for adorable facts. (Hint: they’re mostly adorable facts!)

Try making a OWI without pointing to any words except the name of the object in L2. Ask about its size, its color, its happiness/sadness, and perhaps if it’s rich/poor or intelligent/dumb. I promise you, you can actually build a OWI without a poster or list of words. If you use your body like a mime, you can tell a whole story without speaking. Of course, as a language teacher, we do speak. It’s Spanish class folks, not mime class. But if we think of our work as mine with an overlay of language, that’s about where we should be.

I’m starting to realize that this is one big reason that I prefer non-targeted input. When I used to target and focus on the words and getting repetitions of the words and the mechanics of circling, I was in my head. In order for us to truly use our bodies and voices and our emotions in our teaching, We need to be in our hearts. Being able to focus only on the message and not on the words used to convey the message has allowed me to drop into my heart more than I used to be able to when I was thinking about parts of the language as I was teaching. I recently took a class at Portland Actors’ Conservatory called Body and Voice and in that class we worked to get out of our heads and drop into our hearts and our bodies. Only by getting into our hearts and in touch with our emotions are we able to bring those emotions out in a way that other people can feel through the way we use our bodies and our voices.

The Zuh-Zuh Language Technique.

Once in a workshop, someone asked me how to use their bodies to make their speech comprehensible. So I had this idea, that if I just spoke in nonsense language I could demonstrate to them that we don’t actually need to say any words to convey meaning. You might try this too. Pick something to teach. I chose the calendar and weather. And instead of speaking in the language speak in gibberish sounds I recommend making the zuh-zuh sound. You will be surprised how creative you get when you don’t have language to rely on to convey the meaning you’ll find yourself. Teen drying gesturing smiling using your hands your face your whole body to get the meaning across. I highly recommend it.

When we talk to the class, we can say whatever we need to say in order to keep it comprehensible. But that doesn’t mean that we can just talk normally. Establishing the meaning of what we are saying is the most foundational skill in comprehension-based teaching. Here are six ways to establish the meaning of our utterances.

1. SLOW. This is the absolute most foundational skill of them all. It’s hard to master, though. I’ve been watching myself on videos for a year now, on the daily, and so I’ve seen myself go fast and I’ve seen myself go slow. I’m so happy when I watch a vid in which I’m achieving the ideal slow, calm, unhurried pace. The feeling in class is just different. Calm. Happy.

One way to train ourselves to slow down is to get in the habit of taking a breath and sweeping the room with our eyes between words and phrases. Their eyes can tell you, if you’ll let them, if they’re with you or not. But in order to connect with their eyes, you need those long pauses. You need those silences. You need those deep, calming breaths.

It is easy to respond to their energy with frenetic, fast speech. It is natural. It’s a trap though. We must fight human nature. We’re not just talking naturally. We are teaching artists. We are providers of comprehensible input. We must learn to speak Motherese to entire groups of children. We must learn to parent the next generation. We must treasure their comprehension above all else. Above our own comfort. Above our own egos. Above “getting to” or “getting through” or “covering” or “teaching”. We. Must. Go. Slow. Slower than is comfortable. Slower than we thought possible. And in those -precious pauses, those golden moments of silence, we can monitor their comprehension.

Management is easier when we go slow too. In the spaces between the words, we can let ourselves sweep the room with our eyes, check in with the students’ eyes and posture, gesture to them to sit up, lean in, get their eyes on us. Because it’s super important that they put their eyes on us. Considering the next ways to establish meaning, it’s of the upmost importance. Because we will rely on those visual cues to establish meaning.

Management also undergirds their comprehension. We must, absolutely must, find the personal power to keep them focused. We must, absolutely, without fail, cease speaking and saunter over to the rules and point to them and smile calmly, each and every time any child even thinks about speaking over or blurring out or having a side conversation. For more on that please see a video I made at Ben’s request.

Visual skills to support SLOW.

So you’re speaking slowly. You’ll also need to think “Say the word, show the word.” Here are four visual skills to establish meaning.

1. Concrete visual aids. This is a pre-chosen visual aid that literally shows meaning. It could be a calendar. Or a weather chart. Or the kids’ name cards on which they’ve drawn something they like. Or a picture that you plan to Picture Talk. Or a drawing your class artists made. Or a moment in a video you’re using for Movie Talk. An object you brought in for Show and Tell. Someone’s outfit. An infographic. Anything that you can point to and describe. Point to the visual aid and speak about only that which you can see. That which you can literally lay your hand on. “This is a table. This is a woman, a mother. This is her daughter, a girl. These are their

color pencils. They are drawing on paper.”

Say it, touch it.

Instead of planning lessons, plan compelling visual aids. Make them, print them, draw then, find them.

2. Gestures. I use a lot of gestures for verbs and concrete nouns that can easily be assigned a gesture that we can perform seated in our chairs. Whenever I need to establish the meaning of a new word, I say, “Ella come. Come means eats. Show me come [gesture here]. Come.” Then I cycle through some previously-established gestures. Then I always try to end with the new word so I can flow into the utterance I was in the middle of.

I used to have the classes come up with their own gestures but now I just assign a quick little hand jive and establish meaning in my own way. Makes it easier to keep up with what gesture means what.

3. Body language. Think of a mime. They can convey a whole story using no words, just gestures, body language, and facial expression. You can do that too. Narrate your speech with your voice and your body. The kids will follow your body (Ben is fond of saying that 90% of the human experience is visual and I’m starting to agree with him!) and make meaning from that and the language will support your body language, if you can allow yourself to loosen up enough to be a mime in your own classes. It takes humility to strip away your adult decorum and use your body expansively, aggressively making meaning with your face, your arms, your hands. But if you can do this, you will find you can say so much more, as long as you say it slow and narrate with your body.

4. Writing on the board. I used to write everything on the board. But I don’t do that anymore. If I can establish meaning (and check in with their eyes and posture and get a strong choral response) without writing, nowadays that’s my first choice. But if I can’t point to it and I can’t gesture it and I can’t use my body to establish meaning, then I write on the board. When we write on the board, we can write in L1 (English for me in Oregon) and L2 or just L2. When to write both and when to write just L2 takes some thinking.

If it’s an obvious cognate, like spelled almost-identically, then I write it in just L2. Oftentimes I spell it as I’m writing it. If it’s a new word that isn’t a cognate and I can’t establish meaning with a visual aid or gesture or my body, I’ll write L1 and L2 together on the board.

I used to write everything on the board and limit myself to using just a few words in class each day. But now I’ve changed my approach. I’ll use whatever words are needed and not work too hard to get repetitions on the new words, as long as the conversation is flowing and the students are grasping the message I’m conveying. Therefore my board might have ten to twelve new items on it by the end of the period -which I used to think was anathema to CI – but if I’ve spoken slowly and checked for comprehension, and used visual aids, I no longer worry. My goal now has shifted from teaching parts of the language to using the language to convey whatever meaning is needed.

One thing I would never give up, though, is the practice of pointing and pausing. When I write a word (or words) on the board, I put my hand under it as I say it, then leave my hand there as I take a breath and sweep the room with my eyes, and perhaps redirect wayward students’ attention, and after they tune in, point and pause some more, and THEN, once I’m sure everyone has gazed upon the words, then I move on.

5. Sketching. We can make quick sketches on the board to establish meaning. We don’t have to be major artists to do this, either. We can draw quick stick figures or smiley faces, frowny faces, etc. if you’re particularly challenged, I suggest the Draw a World books by Ed Emberly or the book Chalk Talks. Both books have easy-to-follow rough sketches for the artistically-challenged.

I used to fret that some kids might infer the wrong meaning from my visual aids, drawings, or other extralinguistic supports if I didn’t write L1 and L2 together but rather relied on drawings and such. I’ve rethought that as well. I now think that if they gets slightly wrong idea about a word at the time, but can still follow the general meaning of the conversation, it’s ok. In fact, I’m starting to think that it might even aid memory when the emotion of “Oh! I Didn’t Think That Meant That!” kicks in.

This last way to establish meaning is sneaky and utilizes your fast processors for the benefit of your slow processors.

6. Whole-group questioning – “X in English” or “What did I just say?”

If have a hunch that a good percentage of the class might not understand a word or longer utterance, then I will ask the entire class one of these questions. If there’s a string choral response that’s correct, I will state in L2, “Yes that’s correct. X” (where X is the L2 restated for the word that just said in L1). It sounds like this.

T: Clase, la chica era muy guapa. Clase, ¿guapa en inglés?

S: pretty

T: sí clase. Era guapa.

This allows the fast processors who understood the meaning to establish it for the rest of the class. Because you verified the meaning, it’s like a definition.

If there’s a weak or incorrect response then you will want to go back to establishing leaving through other means.

Bonus strategy: synonym stacking. This is what I called the practice that I noticed Beniko doing in a Story Listening demo. It is a way to enrich the language students hear, using known words to “stack” synonyms that might be uptaken to increase their vocabulary. She would begin the utterance with a new word such as “cruel” and then use a known word such as “mean” and then circumlocute to say something like “he killed innocent people. He kicked his dog” then repeat a known word and conclude with the new term, “cruel”.

When planning for a CI class, or week, or month, the basic ingredient is comprehensible language.  Simply the language, made comprehensible.  That’s like the water we are giving to the plants, our students.  The activity/method/lesson plan, then, is like the container that carries the water.  Some may prefer sprinklers, others hoses, others watering cans, and others perhaps a dainty teacup.  The goal is the same no matter what container we use to carry the water – feed our thirsty plants, our students, the water of  language that they can understand.

We have gone and made the simple so complicated.  We have gone and made all these rules and parts and different factions and schools of thought.  We have somewhat bought into the idea that there is One Way to Do It…when in reality there are many ways to water a garden and many ways to deliver understandable language to our students.

Of course, people have their preferred ways of watering a garden, and in a gardeners’ club or professional landscapers’ convention, there might be heated debates about how best to water, what nozzle attachment is ideal, what kinds of hoses are best, or most durable, or whatever.  But the goal is the same – watering the plants, giving them the ingredients they need to live.

It is natural that people who are passionate about gardening would debate passionately about something as important as keeping their plants alive.  And in the world of comprehension-based teaching, we also have these heated debates.  It is normal, and natural, and desirable, even, for it leads to growth.  It is also uncomfortable.  I get that.  But even the most hated of these debates are simply about how best to get the water from the spigot to the plants.  They are all about the merits of different delivery systems.

The goal is the same – watering our students’ minds, giving them the ingredient they need to build their very own unique mental representation of the language.

So some people are clutching their hose, and others are waving their teacups, and others are fashioning a watering can that they say works better for them.  And yet, at the end of the day, we will all water our students’ minds.  Our students will all leave our classrooms far stronger than they entered.  They will all feel our love and passion for the language and the commitment we made to their acquisition.  We really cannot go wrong.

No matter what container the CI comes in, students in a garden where the language is being fed to them constantly will all be stronger than they would if they had been planted in a garden where the teacher only sometimes sprinkled droplets of water – perhaps reading a dialogue for the textbook or describing a picture in a workbook or learning the words to a song or doing some TPR here and there- and mostly just delivered powdered water – textbook pages and grammar explanations in English and drills and fill-in-the-blanks verb charts and vocab flashcards and the like.

This bears repeating, people.  If we are watering our gardens with language that is comprehensible, if the students are engaging with speech and text that convey messages they can understand, that is ALL THAT MATTERS.  The rest is the esoteric infighting of passionate aficionados, the Garden Society of CI, about the nuances of different sprinkler heads or drip tape versus sprinkler hose.

WHAT MATTERS is that our students her a lot of language and that the language is comprehensible and somewhat interesting, as close to what Dr. Stephen Krashen calls “compelling” (see this article) as we can get.  If we are just starting out, or we are not feeling it that day, or we are coming down with a cold, or we have a substitute teacher, then “somewhat interesting” is OK.  I mean, people, I can talk about the weather and calendar for, like, twenty minutes with my first-years for the first month or so of class.  It actually seems riveting to them.

So, if you are madly trying to follow this blogger and that blogger, this flavor of CI and that, and you are confused, or if you watch the sparks fly in debates about different ways to deliver the language, please take a deep breath.  And think, I can choose the container that works for me.  I just have to get the water to the plants.

Imagine the CI community like this.  You are in the gardening store.  It is the “professional-grade” kind of gardening store that has, like, a gazillion different sprinkler heads and watering cans and hoses and drip tape and sprinkler tape and water wands and things you did not even know existed, to get water from Place A to Place B.  You know you need to water your plants and you want to choose the best item to do so.  So you stand there, reading the backs of all the different products, wondering which one is the best to get.

And, at the same time, there is a convention of super-passionate gardeners and landscape professionals and even the people who invented and are selling the very products that you are comparing.  And this convention is going on, right there in the aisle.  And, because these people are super-passionate, they sometimes get out of hand.  The product developers wave their particular kind of watering can and insist that it is superior.  It looks messy, but these people are all talking about the same goal.  They all just want to keep their plants alive and help you get water to your plants too.

And so as you wonder which product to get, because you also feel passionately about keeping YOUR garden alive, it feels like a big decision.  It is.  You have limited money to invest.  You have limited time to learn how to use these different things.  Really, your end goal is to sit back and look at some beautiful lush landscaping in your yard.

Here is the secret, though, and what I want you to take comfort in.  You are already a winner!  You FOUND the SECRET AISLE!  It is like Platform 9 3/4 at this point.  Muggles don’t even know it’s there.  You made it!  You found the aisle!  And no matter WHAT hose or nozzle or bucket or even teacup you decide to begin with, you will deliver water to your garden.  It will begin to grow a lot lusher than if you were giving it that powdered water from those dusty worksheets.

YOU HAVE ARRIVED!  Pick a container.  Use your intuition.  You know what looks good to you.  It might not be the “perfect fit” and you might not use it till you retire, but if it is a container, it WILL DELIVER WATER.  That is what containers do.  If it is a way to present messages in the language to your students, it will deliver the one ingredient needed for acquisition to happen – comprehensible input.

Even if you only water your garden here and there at the beginning of your garden-watering adventure, it is going to help your plants.  Even if you decide later to get a different watering can, or to trade out your sprinkler hose for drip tape, your plants are still getting water through it all.

Congratulations on finding Aisle 9 3/4.  There are a lot of products to choose from.  It’s all good.  You can’t really go “wrong”.  Take a deep breath.  Use your intuition.  And know that the garden club will keep debating, but at the end of the day they will go home, and they will turn on a spigot, and water will get delivered from Place A to Place B.  And you will do the same, in your garden.  And all our plants will be better-off because we are watering them, using the tools that we intuit work best for us.

This summer I was with Annabelle Allen and Jon Cowart at the Cascadia CI Conference, and we had a big high-fives-all-round moment when we realized that we were all home-grown CI teachers, in that we haven’t ever used the textbook or taught traditional.  We were so happy to find others who started the CI journey right out the gate.  And a journey it is!

Stage One.  OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!  I learned some French at that demo and it changed my life – I laughed, I cried, the story was SOOOO CUTE and funny and I want to teach everyone, all the time, everywhere, ALL THE THINGS!  You get input!  You get input!  Everyone gets input!  I am so excited, I think I just farted a rainbow!  I CAN’T WAIT FOR MONDAY MORNING!  Why is it only Saturday night?  Go AWAY, weekend!

Stage Two.  I TALKED TO MY CLASS IN SPANISH…AND IT WAS INSANE UP IN THERE!  So, I ran back to my room and I talked in the language cause they told me at the workshop to just talk to the kids, they told me that acquisition was the kids making meaning out of sounds, they said it is an unconscious process and the human brain is a beautiful thing and we naturally acquire the language when we comprehend messages, and I am an educated person, I get that, and also the FRENCH I acquired, I can still say “Le burrito géant est plus riche que Bill Gates”!  So I talked to them, and I said a lot of things, and I wrote a lot of things on the board, and I had kids get up to act, I know they said not to do that till a few months of CI,  but it was SOOOOO FUN in the workshop, so I figured just a teensy-weeny bit of acting, what could go wrong, right?  So then I look up and Susie is smacking Johnny, and Bobby is passing notes to Frenchie, and Sally is sleeping and Billy is eating and I don’t even know WHERE Larry was cause Larry went to the bathroom and I was so caught up in the story that I didn’t notice till the end of the period that my hall pass had never come back and neither had Larry.  This sure looked easy at the workshop!  I wanna do this, but what am I doing wrong?  And WHERE IS LARRY???

Stage Three.  No, these big dark circles under my eyes are not from mainlining heroin.  I was up till 4:36 AM last night.  Mainlining blogs.  Have you written anything in the last twelve years about CI?  I prolly read it last night!  Chase Manhattan bank is prolly gon put a freeze on my credit card, cause I think I just maxed that sucker out buying teacher books and webinars and I think I just ordered everything Ben Slavic ever wrote.  Even the ones he said were outdated.  And don’t even get me started on that Martina Bex!  that woman was, hand to God, sent to this earth by ANGELS just to help ME!  I never knew there was so much to buy!  And there is so much FREE STUFF too!  I think I joined like eight Facebook groups and followed fifty people on Twitter and read like eighteen blogs.  Not blog posts.  BLOGS.  Like, as in, the WHOLE BLOG.  And also those Brain Breaks.  Annabelle Allen is, I swear, truly a unicorn in human form.  At 4:35 I looked up from her video about Rock, Paper, Scissors with your feet (I swear, don’t that just BEAT ALL?  So fun!) an I was like, OMG girl, GET TO BED cause even if you take the car to work and skip flossing, you will only have time for two and a half hours of sleep!  I go to bed and then of course I lie there planning out the day tomorrow.  So anyways, I got like one hour of sleep.  But it’s ALLLLL GOOD!  I got this!  I have SOOOOO many IDEAS!  Where’s the coffee?  I am raring to go, I HAVE SO MANY IDEAS, but I could use just a teensy-weeny little cuppa.  Or three.  Also, where is my hall pass?  And I hope that little Larry is OK.

Stage Four.    So, Larry came back.  Sans hall pass but that’s the least of my problems.  Today was utter HELL.  I was so tired, but the quadruple-shot Dutch Bros really helped, FOR LIKE TEN MINUTES.  By fourth period I was DONE.  I swear I almost pulled the textbooks out.  But I willed myself to stay strong.  Mama told me there’d be days like this.  OK, breathe, they told me in grad school to be a REFLECTIVE practitioner.  After I finish this margarita Imma reflect the hell outta this one.  OK, so I had no lack of ideas.  And I had a good lesson plan.  I mean, we were going to start with Calendar Talk, and I had five new Brain Breaks planned, or are they Brain Bursts, whatever, I was freakin prepared.  And then I planned to Write and Discuss, then a One Word Image, then another Write and Discuss.  And a Running Dictation, then I had this reading from Martina’s website on baseball in the DR.  And then at the end of class I was going to teach them the password for the week and have them fill in this metacognitive survey and explain the Interpersonal Skills Rubric to them, and have their parents sign it.  And if time permitted, I was planning to do some book talks.  Yeah, the books haven;t arrived yet, but I was planning to use color printouts of the covers and pretend like they were here.  As I sip this margarita and reflect, I think maybe I had a little too much to cover?

Stage Five.  Pacing myself here.  I have limited my online time to just five hours a night.    By two AM I have a STRICT no-internet policy.  I just take Look I Can Talk to bed and read, you know, to decompress.  And on the weekends I limit myself to just ten hours a day.  Gotta spend some time with my family, sure.  I kinda forgot to do laundry this weekend, but I still have two pairs of underwear and I ordered another pack of panties offa Amazon Prime Now, and so they should be delivered to the school before lunch.  I am also trying to pace myself in the classroom and only plan for a couple of activities a day.  I am also trying to pace myself with my talking so I take deep breaths and speak slower.  I think I can, I think I can.

Stage Six.  My family started a Twitter account to communicate with me.  So that is when I decided to limit myself to three hours a night and I am trying this thing where I take a day off on the weekends.  Cause in that one month I spent like $260 on new undies for the family, and now we can’t fit all the clean underpanties in the drawers.  Gotta go do that parenting thing more.  I am not tryna raise free-range children.  My spouse is starting to send me sulky tweets regarding household chores.  

And I think the dog forgot my name.  I am a little bit worried about limiting my online time cause I feel like if I start that blog I wanna start, I won’t have time to follow OTHER PEOPLE’S blogs.  But I have learned SO MUCH in the last months, should’t I be documenting the journey?  Should’t I be sharing?  Should;t I plan a presentation for my colleagues?  No, for my state organization, NO FOR iFLT!!!  I mean, I feel like I have a good handle on a few go-to strategies and routines.  And I have a few favorite Brain Breaks that the kids like, and I am getting some kinda handle on classroom management, and I am teaching to their eyes and they did their first freewrite and THEY ARE SO GOOD!  I wanna spread CI to everyone, everywhere, all the time!  Well, not when I ought to be washing underwear.  There is SO MUCH of it now.

Stage Seven.   I made a presentation to my colleagues at inservice!  And they looked at me like I was crazy!  Except Marisol!  Marisol emailed me later to say she was going to look at my “List of 375 CI Websites and Resources” I handed out!  And my kids, well, they do not put their heads down anymore.  I have a good variety of activities we can do, and I breathe in the classroom, and I do not really need to take work home, and, BLESSED BE, I have stopped planning!  Sometimes I go days without looking for activities online.  On Facebook I can now answer others’ questions.  And I am writing a proposal for my state conference!  Wish me luck!

Stage Eight.  I need a part-time job to fund my travel to conferences.  But other than that, life is good!  Seriously, I am thinking about doing after-school classes, which WOULD help me to get to all the conferences.  Cause I want to be REAL-LIFE friends with all my INTERNET friends!

Stage Nine:  Like Edward turned Bella, I have turned two colleagues!  Marisol and Kelly!  We do Happy Hour, Saturdays, we are going to iFLT together this summer, and rooming together, we rode up to Ellensburg to take a workshop together, we might start a blog together, I would honestly MOVE IN with them if I could.  I have real-life friends AND internet friends too!  I had my first back to school night where I explained CI to the parents, and I didn’t feel too nervous.  I feel confident and calm in the classroom and outside.  And I think my dog remembers my name now.

Stage Ten:  TBD, I am not sure if anyone has achieved Stage Ten.  Scientists are still debating its existence.

Brett Chonko shared his book fundraising letter that netted his program over 1300 bucks last year!

Source: Book Fundraising Letter

I just also sent out a similar letter over email so that I could send the link to Donors Choose.