I think that since we have decided to take a break, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to, if we feel like it, write, in the comment fields below:
- one thing that we feel we learned here last year that has REALLY changed our teaching.
- one thing that we intend to make work better for us next year.
- a list of the two or three new things from this that are the BIG things that we feel we would share with someone new to the group as being game changers for us in our work with comprehensible input.
I’ll start:
1. The biggest thing that really changed my teaching this year was what I learned from Von in Las Vegas as per:
2. The one thing that I intend to make work better for me is the injunction against extremely limited English as per the ACTFL 90% Use position statement. I want to move from my current 95%+ no English use to 99% . (I know that 100% is impossible and in fact is very detrimental with comprehension based instruction.)
3. The big things that have been game changers for me in general in 2012 have been:
- Von’s idea as per the above.
- jGR.
- the JOBS!
- stopping FVR in favor of SSR (I don’t think that 10 min. of FVR in a school setting is what Krashen had in mind).
- bWT.
- Read and Discuss as a force. I knew it was good prior to this year, but not that good. Snowplow reading as per Susie Gross combined with R and D as per Blaine. Great stuff. There is a category on it for all the details. If a teacher ever gets into a funk, and the kids have been doing stories for at least a few months, take out Pauvre Anne, read about the various aspects of R and D here in the category by that name, and prepare to experience teaching as pure relaxation. Well, you know what I mean.
- my new schedule as per https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/11/18/time-spent-on-reading-level-2/
- the entire mental health piece that we’ve come up with this year to the point of even having a category about it.
- the new categories called Bullying of Teachers and When Attacked, both of which Jeff is getting maximum use of right now but which we all will need or have needed at some point in our careers, if we are to stay in teaching. Also in this context the category on Administrator/Teacher/Parent Re-education which is so tied to those other two categories.
- making contact with Mark Knowles at CU Boulder. Finally, someone in academia who gets us whose initials are not SK!
- the whole piece about simplicity and most especially grading simply.
- Essential Sentences (Robert Harrell).
- the whole movie thing from Judy that chill and Michele and others are into.
- the fact that we can just pray here together sometimes, without starting a big discussion about it, just to pray, because we need to, especially on Sunday nights sometimes.
- how the Rebar category continues to inform my teaching with new insights into how the method works, with each new completed story.
- Textivate (thanks, David Talone)
- learning how to use reading novels and teaching writing as options to when we need a break from the PQA/story thing bc it can get so whackadoodle, esp. when we are just learning it.
- Teaching as process and not as a set of activities as per https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/12/12/a-tprsci-writing-template/
Well, that wasn’t exactly three or four game changers but, as everyone knows, I’ve never been one to use five words when fifty will do.