Here are some excellent questions from Greg and my responses to him. He’s diving in off the high dive Monday! And it’s winter! When he succeeds, it will be the shortest amount of time – less than one week – that anyone has heard about the method and succeeded at doing it in their classroom. Others feel free to chime in with comments on any of these questions:
Q. I’m struggling to conceptualize how I will actually structure my classes for my first week using TPRS/CI (or whatever this is called). Is there a document anywhere that outlines in a step by step process how to do this?
A. No there isn’t. The history is that people would just start right in with stories. They’d go to a summer workshop, try stories, and most of them would quit and go back to the book. That was in about 2003. In 2005 I was five years into it and only hanging on because of frequent visits to my classroom by Susan Gross and going to about 20 of her workshops during those years. Then in 2006 I went on the moretprs listserve with the Circling with Balls idea. It softened the entry into stories and worked for a lot of people as a good way to start the year. Then in 2008 I was working with Anne Matava in Maine and she started using a quesionnaire process to get to know the kids and then spin little scenes out of the information she got. With the Circling with Balls and questionnaires people started more and more seeing the value of personalizing the classroom before starting stories. Kids got more involved because they had names and an identity in the classroom. They knew that the teacher cared about them and that they were an important part of the process of their language class. Lots of ideas for doing that were presented in my book PQA in a Wink! which I wrote soon after TPRS in a Year!, around 2007. All this to say that most people have adopted the Circling with Balls idea in some form to start the year. So, why is there no step by step process that we suggest? Because the method is not about that. Everything you read here including the Circling with Balls ideas and everything else is just a suggestion. There is no set form for any of this and never will be. Each practitioner does what best suits their interest and inclinations. I know that is not a reassuring thought for someone so new who is going into the classroom on Monday, but it needs to be said. And, in fact, we can give you a specific list of steps to start with as an entry device. I would ask the group to make suggestions below to that end. That was the short answer.
Q. I’ve been reading on the PLC on how to do stories, circle, PQA, etc. But, I really need help figuring out what to do first, second, third, etc. in the actual 90 minutes of class time. Knowing my kids, it’s going to be very messy on Monday (and the rest of the year) trying to start things, so I’m trying to get a basic structure on paper for how my very first classes will go.
A. There is a basic schedule you can use for starting the year and one for when you start stories a few months later. Look in the categories for “Beginning the Year” and “Weekly Schedules”. But since you are starting now, you would want to keep things simple and just do Word Associations (see below), Circling with Balls, One Word Images, and the Word Chunk Team activity in the first few weeks, or even months. One of the most accomplished teachers in our group does Circling w/ Balls or some variation on it from August to January each year – that’s skip Crosby. Why? It’s his style. He likes creating extending PQA (see PQA in a Wink! for more on that) for a long time before starting stories. That area of Extended PQA is his area – he likes it. It allows him to really personalize and get names established and build trust and keep the focus on the kids. If you have not gone to the Workshop Handouts link (broken now but will be fixed in a few days – I will send you the attachment) on my site you will happy to read what is there.
Q. Should my first day or first few days be nothing but Circling with Balls? Or should that just be the first bit of class?
A. I definitely would start each class with Word Associations. This is in the handout I sent you via email and which is a link on the TPRS resources page of this site under workshop handouts (link to be fixed in a few days). I would put up a big piece of butcher block paper or some kind of poster thing and then take three or four words, any words will do, they can be taken from word frequency lists found on the net or on this site or on the DPS WL website, it doesn’t matter. Just write down three or four words. That’s your first move on Monday.
Making associations with single words from wall charts can be considered a simple training wheel exercise that impacts everything I do in TPRS very heavily. In the same way that we put physical actions into our bodies with TPR, word associations take the form of gestures, sounds, or images that enable us to remember the meaning of a certain word.
For example, if, on the word list, I want to teach the word “voiture” in French (car, pronounced “vwature”), I ask my students, in English, if anyone can think of “some way to remember that voiture means car…”.
Different suggestions come up, some very outlandish but which are somehow, ironically, often the most effective ones, and we just discuss those sounds or images and then go to the next word. In the case of “voiture”, someone may suggest that we can remember that it means “car” with the associative phrase, “What year (sounds like voiture) is your Toyota?”
Another example is “les yeux” in French. The kids associate that sound with laser eye surgery or lazy eye. Sound associations are the most powerful. I once asked a student who score a perfect score on the National French Exam one year what part of the instruction he felt most contributed to his score, and he immediately replied, “…those word activities we did at the beginning of the year….” Anyone who has done this kind of gesturing and association, knows how strangely powerful it is as a teaching tool, especially as set up work toward building successful stories later.
A few details: (1) if no one can come up with an association, we just go on to the next word; (2) we never do more than five words in one class period, and we are fairly quick about it. (3) use all the English you like in this activity. (4) a key point is to be specific in the sequencing of questions during this short word association activity. First I tell them what the word means, and then I ask them how they can remember what it means. Doing this creates a pleasant sharing of ideas. Using L1 in this way at the beginning of class allows us to connect in a social way first, before getting into the harder challenges of connecting in L2. It is a nice way to settle into class, highly recommended because it creates the proper mood right away and leads to a more personalized classroom. How?
Each time that we introduce a new word in the word association activity, we ask the class how WE can remember what the word means, as in:
- Students, the first of our five words from this big list for today is les yeux. Les yeux means eyes. How can we remember what les yeux means?
When the class as a group chooses to remember that les yeux means eyes by making associations in their own minds and by expressing those associations out loud in the group in their own voices, they create a community. When the instructor says
- Oh, class, Bryan said that we can remember that les yeux means eyes because of lazy eye!
she acknowledges Bryan and his immediate contribution to the group at the beginning of the class. Michael is also acknowledged for his equally intelligent and creative suggestion (expressed in his own voice) linking of les yeux to laser eye surgery.
The teacher, like Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol, sends an
- I’m going to like this class!
message out to the kids at the beginning of every class! That is a fine way to start a class -not commonly done in schools -with plenty of personal acknowledgement of how smart that particular group is. Flattery gets us everywhere in TPRS.
The phrase “how can we remember” is of key importance when we do the word association activity. How can WE remember it? Here we are all together, about to embark, after this brief period of doing five word associations, into L2 for the rest of the class period, and the inquisitive message from the instructor is
- How can we all work together?
- What can I learn from you?
- How smart you kids are!
and the kids’ message to the class and to the instructor is,
- Look how smart we are!
There is a tonal difference here. This inclusion of the individual in the group, this attention to what their own life experience has been enough to ask them how their life experience (how can WE remember) can help the larger group, this attention to the student as a person, is significant and merits further discussion in our discussion about what personalization really is.
Q. And as far as stories, it seems from what I’ve read on the PLC that as someone with classes completely new to TPRS/CI, I should hold off on stories until a month or two. But what in the word do I do every day in class in the meantime if we’re not doing stories yet? Should I just do things like Word Images and PQA for the whole entire class time?
A. Yes, just read the link I just mentioned above and do Word Associations, Circling with Balls, One Word Images, and the Word Chunk Team activity for a few months.
Your specific question of what to do for the 90 minutes is the four things mentioned above minus the Word Chunk Team activity until you are ready to do it. You must also learn how to do bail out moves (see that category), especially dictee. Click on dictee in the categories list. It is the best bail out move of all, and you will need to bail a few times in the first weeks.
We will be here to hold your hand as you do this. You will probably be checking in with a field report every day. Good! The main thing is to relax and we will get through this together. Don’t forget to ask questions as they occur in class and send them to us between class periods.
In summary, pay particular close attention to
- Word Associations
- Circling with Balls
- One Word Images
- Word Chunk Team activity*
*put this off until you have presented to the kids at least 20 words from the Word Wall. Those words will have been taught in chunks of three or four per day and will have been taught via word associations. That’s right, you need a Word Wall. Now, this is not anything that is always done in TPRS, it’s just something I added to that bunch of stuff that I needed for myself to avoid having to jump right into stories. I really needed to get the classroom personalized and the Classroom Rules set up before I actually did stories but all that is just what I needed personally. See my posters page for Word Wall words and for Classroom Rules. You can easily make a Word Wall by adding those few new words ach day and then when you have 20 or more you can play Word Chunking. By focusing on these last four things mentioned above, you will easily navigate your first months of doing this.)