I am glad we are trying to cobble together things about the upper levels and we now even have a category for it. I got this while I was away this weekend from a colleague who has been struggling with TPRS at the upper levels and thought I would share it here:
What makes me believe in CI again are the level 1 classes. They are just magic. This thing gets harder to do as the kids advance. You have decisions to make about when to start to assess output, how to choose appropriate reading materials, what, if anything, to do about the grammar…There is no primer written for this and it is trial-and-error on a daily basis. By the end of last year it felt like mostly error, but lo and behold! many of those students have come back, and can still understand and speak. Maybe the problem is me and my expectations…
But give me a roomful of crazy first-year students and a stack of filled-out questionnaires, and I’ll go all day. This year I have, in one class, the principal’s son, the superintendent’s daughter, and the offspring of two colleagues. At first I was afraid that these kids would be like spies, reporting back that we don’t have formative and summative assessments and all of that other standards stuff. But when I looked into their eyes I saw that they are just kids like any other, and they want me to know them and like them and celebrate them, and they want to learn German.
Thanks again for everything. I love the new, private blog, and am glad you are finally in a decent school.