This report from the field by Cherie Thomas brings some pretty cool news. You can find the conversation that Cherie refers to below at 33:50. Even though Jay Thomas only mentions TPRS once, it is a significant public endorsement and should give any traditional teachers in Virginia a jolt:
Salut Ben!
I have been out of touch for awhile, but still reading your posts and getting inspiration from the posts and responses daily. I’ve had some great things happening this year that I want to share with you, but first I want to share something that might make our PLC members smile. My husband, Jay, is a principal at a high school here in Albemarle County and has been getting national attention for some changes he has been making at his school to better serve the students. He is also a huge proponent of TPRS. He was a guest on a podcast show last night speaking on the subject of “reimagined schools”. At about 20 minutes into the show, he shares that it was his German teacher who uses TPRS (which he called TPRStorytelling, but I’ll give him a pass) and the level of engagement of her students that inspired him to start thinking of new ways to engage kids, change spaces, and realize that we need to change the status quo if we want to reach our students and keep them interested and learning. He talks more about TPRS and how great it is for students at approximately 30 minutes into the show as well. Here is the link to the YouTube video of it in case you want to check it out. The show itself was really interesting and inspiring. It was great to here a discussion about education that was focused on the kids in such a positive and innovative way. Jay is hoping to attend iFLT with me this summer (he brought Carol Gaab to his school in the fall and loved her), but so far he hasn’t been able to find teachers in his department that are able to attend that week. He sent 5 teachers to NTPRS last year, and I think they want to attend that again.