Here is a nice bio from Briana Livingston in Idaho:
I have been teaching Spanish in Idaho Falls, Idaho, for thirteen years. I spent the first ten years of my career teaching Spanish 1 and Spanish exploratory classes in a junior high. As I was finishing my third year of teaching, I was depressed by the realization that students leaving my classroom could barely speak any more Spanish than when they came in. I decided that I either needed to find a new way to teach or find something more meaningful to do with my life. I started doing some research online and came across Blaine Ray’s site with information about a TPRS training in Salt Lake City… I guess the rest, as they say, is history. Although I experienced a lot of resistance and some nasty repercussions from some of my high school colleagues, I had the good fortune of being a one-person department in my school and was able to forge ahead.
This year I joined the staff of a new magnet school in our district, Compass Academy. We opened last fall with about 300 freshmen and sophomores, and over the next two years will expand to a 600 student four year high school. Once again, I am the head of the one person world language department J. Our school is part of the New Tech Network, which means that the main instructional method is project-based learning in a one-to-one environment. Although the training I received from the network did discuss comprehensible input, the model I saw was ultimately output based instruction. In spite of this and with administrator support, I have continued to use TPRS/CI.
I found and joined this blog last fall while struggling with some of the challenges I have faced this year. I have done TPRS for 10 years in isolation, but with my new position, I am desperately in need of a support group and additional training. I am mostly a “lurker,” as much an introvert on-line as face-to-face, but I have appreciated so many great ideas and encouragement from the blog since I joined. There is such a wealth of information, I just wish I had more time to spend absorbing it all.
Although it’s been a challenging year, there have been some wonderful affirmations of how powerful this method is. I have had so much positive feedback from parents, from “Thank you, thank you, thank you – she is actually speaking Spanish now” from the mother of a Spanish III student to, “He wanted to drop Spanish after last year, but he loves your class.” Last month, two representatives from New Tech visited my class, including a woman who has been a leader in world languages in the network and facilitated my training sessions. She had nothing but praise for how much Spanish the students were speaking and how engaged they were. The other representative said he wished all of the language classes he visited looked like mine. Hopefully this could be a small step in moving the entire network in the direction of real CI instruction.
Thank you!
Briana Livingston