A report from the Chevalier:
Hi Ben,
I will have a student teacher for the first time ever this semester, and I’m looking forward to it. She has attended several COACH workshops and seen Jason Fritze in action, has gotten and started reading not only “Fluency through TPRS” but also your “TPRS” and “PQA” books, has observed me and other CI teachers several times, and is enthusiastic about teaching German through Comprehensible Input.
Today my district held a training session for Cooperating Teachers and Teacher Candidates. They are using the new terms to reflect what they are doing as far as the training is concerned. Rather than the traditional Master/Student model, they are promoting a Co-Teach model of collaboration and cooperation. It looks to be a great experience for both Julianne and me.
What I am most excited about, though, is something potential. During the discussion of how to apply some of the Co-Teach configurations (One Teach, One Observe; Parallel Teaching; Differentiated Teaching; etc.), we were talking about how we want to engage our students in conversation. Using the Team Teaching configuration we can share the conversational load between us and bring students into the conversation more easily; after all, they will hear the structures from two people rather than one, so we can get even more repetitions more naturally. One of the presenters was circulating and overheard us talking. She asked me to share our idea with the whole group. (BTW, she mentioned that she had just been reading Krashen yesterday.) Later she mentioned that they need Co-Teaching videos from 7-12 instruction to use in their presentations and invited me to let them know when Julianne and I were ready for them to come and film us. What we do could then become an example and model for other training meetings.
This semester could be interesting.
Robert