Sharing and presenting this method is very weird and it is very difficult to reach people, honestly. There seems to be an energy against it, if you know what I mean, and the work of reaching people is much more difficult than I would have ever thought.
The reasons for the privacy of the blog are even more apparent to me now due to the fact that, maybe because it is an authentic shift of paradigm, confusion reigns when we try to share it with others. That’s because it’s not a method, but kind of a style, a process, that must be unique to each person who tries to tame it.
Last year in my former school, the team there didn’t want it. The principal didn’t get it. It was pure hell because I clearly was a target. Moreover, I just got an email from a colleague in another state who, explainging what the process has been in her district, said:
…it took two solid years of hard work to build consensus to go ahead with it. And now that it’s been approved, everyone’s terrified of the change ahead and afraid of starting….
Another example of how confusion is tearing things up: I just got an email from a colleague in another state, a member of this group, was was fired over the summer, and, from what I can figure out, I sense it was because his talent is so sky high with this stuff that he rocked the boat way too hard just by rocking on in his classroom.
In fact, this kind of thing – this firing or re-assigning, or riffing of teachers – has happened before in the TPRS community. The list goes on and on – we all have our stories, as it were. When we decide to embrace this method we are doing so at great professional risk, and new teachers, especially, need to know that.
My mentor, Susan Gross, made a mean dig here last night, calling what we are doing in this group “secret blather”. It was in the form of a comment to something Bryce had written. She wanted us to all go be members of the other list, the new one Scott started. I deleted the comment and deleted her account to the blog. Why? Because we can’t afford any little bit of criticism here in this work that is already such a slippery slope to get up. All we can afford here is positive unconditional regard.
Why am I saying all this? It is for the most important of reasons. We have to keep in 100% open contact about every detail of our work together or the work will fail. It will fall like a house of cards.
For example, and this is the real point of this blog entry, the four videos I have put up in the past two days, hastily and in the spirit of just throwing up work so that we all can get to into the feeling of just letting down our defenses and throwing up what video we can get, and therefore do some real work – those videos have not had the desired training effect in introducing storyasking. I sense that.
Nobody came out and said it, and I wish they had. Nobody – in the spirit of honesty that we need to cultivate here so much – came out and said, “Ben, these videos are not clear.” But nobody did.
So I will say it – the videos are not clear. But, the good part is, I know why. Those kids in that particular class, it turns out, are ALL fluent in Spanish. Moreover, and this is very important, we PQA’d the three targets which are about all you see in those videos well over 200 times for three days last week. The result is a beginning class in it’s fourth week that is not really a beginning class at all. The combination of fluency in Spanish and all that PQA sped the class way up.
So, today I am going to teach three brand new structures, all of which these kids don’t know. I am going to teach them because the kids don’t know them and they are needed to go further into the story. Here are the structures I will target and video today:
1. va/est allé – goes/went
2. frappe/a frappé – hits/hit
3. ouvre le paquet!/a ouvert le paquet – open the package!/opened the package
Now, this gives us insight into the method. All we do in using comprehensible input is – the bottom of all bottom lines – is that we choose a structure or a few structures that we want to teach (I need to teach these because they are in Matava’s story script and the kids don’t know them andwe want to finish the story so that we can do a reading) and we repeat them in a comprehensible way over and over and over and over until the students comprehend the input that we are delivering.
That is all there is to it, the entire enchilada. You pick something you want to teach, you tell you students what it means, you gesture it, you use it a bit (PQA) – maybe not 200 times because then if you make a video for your friends they will think you are going too fast and they won’t understand what is going on – and then you put it into some kind of comprehensible input, like a story but it doesn’t have to be a story, and you’re done.
Hopefully today, since the kids don’t know, have never heard, these expressions, the people who have been following this thread can get a much clearer idea of how we work with stories. If not, I will try again with more video. My commitment is to you, many of whom can’t get to workshops because some are up in Canada and two in Russia and on and on and we have to do this in spite of all the lovely confusion and negativity and pushback that we get.
I just wish I had the newly edited DPS footage of my French 1 and not French 2 classes from last year. That would help a lot. But we work with what we have. We work with what we have in a spirit of non-judgement and unconditional positive regard, and one day at a time.
That made me think of an idea. I have access to some of the best new DPS teachers doing level 1 classes from last spring, when we went on this big video initiative in the district. It’s good stuff. I will ask permission to use that here. We are going to do this, and we are going to keep the group small and private. We have to have that to do the real work.