Our blog colleague Irene has some important questions about starting the year. The basic thing she wants to know is about the rate of transition/how to transition through the first weeks/months of the year from TPR to PQA via Circling with Balls to Extended PQA where scenes develop from the PQA into, eventually, stories. For those new to these terms, they are discussed at:
– benslavic.com on the resources/workshop handouts link
– PQA in a Wink! (talks a lot about expanding PQA into scenes and stories)
Here are Irene’s questions in italics with my (own opinion) responses in regular print after them:
Irene: I read your blog every day and am getting ready for the school year. I have several questions I would like feedback on… I’m going to start the first day seating the kids with levantate, sientate (rapido, despacio), introduce some questions words…
My response: My own version of this is to have 150 common words up above the whiteboard and TPR or just establish meaning and gesture five of them each day. Only the ones that lend themselves to TPR are gestured, but I give teh meaning for all the words. Some kids write them down and some don’t. They all end up learning them because they are in constant use all year. They stay up there all year as we work. The kids are so visual from middle school that they really like and use that big wall of words all year and it takes all year to acquire them! It is just cool to have all those words up there – ready to rain down onto the proceedings in the form of cute answers from the kids who pull their ideas from that wall. Also, starting class translating and signing and gesturing those five words, as part of our daily routine, brings a lot of order to the first part of class . My list (French) is somewhere on this site. There may be a Spanish list here as well. There should be. It’s not a part of the Three Steps of TPRS but it adds a lot to my program.
Irene again: I get the whole Circling with Balls thing, which I am planning on using the first six weeks…
Me again: Six weeks of Circling with Balls is probably a good amount of time, but don’t be too rigid about it. I have gone longer, once into November, but that was a lively class that just kept throwing all this funny made up stuff at me all class period long so we just played with the language with all sorts of little scenes coming out of the kid’s cards. But normally, with a regular type of class, many of whom are wrestling with deciding to let go of their tight ass middle school personalities or keep them, six weeks or less will be the limit on the Balls. The thing is, we must avoid all concretization of our schedule in the beginning months of the year. The talking to the kids is what counts, and what works well for one class may be boring to another. My district trainers from 35 years ago will be happy to know that I have finally learned to Monitor and Adjust.
Irene: …my question is, what comes after that (Circling with Balls)? I know I can do simple stories with the info the kids provide, but I would feel better also having something … would Anne Matava’s story scripts be a good place to start? Or, what would you recommend?
Me: you will know when the extensions of PQA into little scenes are strong enough to let the kids loose with a story. I always use Anne Vol. 1 stories – they are the most effective. Jim Tripp’s “Tripp’s Scripts” is new and definitely full of good stuff as well. I personally avoid the “Complete TPRS Curriculum” type of products out there because I believe that there is a fundamental disconnect between free flying, in your face, fun TPRS and that word curriculum. I like the freedom but if I were just beginning this journey I would say do one of those curricula until you feel like flying on your own, because with those Matava and Tripp story scripts you can fly pretty high.
Irene: I’m teaching three levels of Spanish, but the kids have already told me their previous teacher was a grammarian that went by the book and used a lot of worksheets. Basically, they know a few phrases and have memorized vocab words.
Me: This is a serious problem, more than one may think. The kids are naturally going to resist what you are doing, especially those who made it their business last year of owning the teacher by being good little soldiers. Please stay in contact with us as things develop on this point. ANYONE who is inheriting a grammar class needs to be aware of the dangers waiting in the wings on this deal, as we discussed here about two weeks ago.*
Irene: Also, should I start out the first day with a quick quiz at all levels?
Me: I say no on that. I wait about four or five days until I know who my quiz writer is going to be. I will, however, give a few real softball practice quizzes on the PQA so that they can gain confidence. It blows some of their minds, especially the kids who are used to failing, that they can succeed on these quizzes just by coming to class and listening and staying involved.
*here is the text I am referring to (from a comment thread to https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/07/28/four-ways-to-deliver-comprehensible-input/:
Two years ago I arrived at East High School in Denver to teach four level 1 classes and I inherited a level 4 class as well. The level 4 kids had had maybe 1% of the CI that a TPRS group would have had in their first three years.
Characteristically all full of hope and confidence about how TPRS would get them up to speed and get their CI engines running, I went through the first few months of the year trying to speak French to them. That was a dumb idea. Out of the 22 kids in the class, 4 went with me, but their auditory legs were broken. The others resisted with the strength of mules.
I stayed awake at night all fall trying to figure it all out. Finally, I gave up and started giving them the grammar they wanted in January. But even their grammar was fracked, so I didn’t even know how to teach them grammar despite 24 years of experience in South Carolina doing exactly that. I couldn’t take the stress of it. What an experience in futility!
…as our department transitions into TPRS we need to be more flexible with the “upper level” students….
Some direct advice would be to lower your hopes here. Just sayin’. By the end of the year, my level 1?s had far surpassed those 4s. This is going to be much more of a challenge than you think, again, if my own experience is any indicator.
…level 4 I was thinking maybe transition into output assessment in 2nd semester, but only as they are ready….
Speaking candidly, in my opinion they won’t ever be ready. My kids were damaged beyond repair. It’s not how many years they have had, but how much language they have heard, how much reading they have done. Mine were like beginning students but with a nasty muley edge to them because they knew the deal – they didn’t know anything. It was pathetic how they tried to hide it from me by avoiding eye contact, etc. which only made the affective filter go further up.
It soon became clear to me that these kids had a single item on their agenda – they were fighting for class rank, as they came from the best Denver families and had been taught that the grade was what counted. They played me for A’s to get into Ivy League schools, Stanford, and schools like that. That is what brought their “good will” into class each day.
Can you imagine? Here I am wanting to share this great culture with them and they only wanted the A, except for those four who were my only friends in there. The demographics, by the way, were three Latino boys, one refugee from the African wars, one white boy, and 17 white girls. The kid from Africa (Congo) was fluent in French, but after those three years of grammar based instruction, couldn’t write a correct sentence in French in spite of his fluency and his three years of grammar instruction.
I am sure that I am not the only one in this group who wants to hear how this deal plays out in your classroom this year, Jen. And I really want to stress that this is only my opinion and experience. I am sure others with more tact than my Taurean self might find a way into such kids’ hearts and have some success. I could possibly have found a way but didn’t. My mistake, looking back, was being much too cavalier that TPRS could win the hearts of kids whose hearts had been buried under a sea of object pronouns and other worksheet driven travail.
If there are any answers, they lie in SLOW and in giving the kids permission to maybe accept in some way what has happened and to open their hearts consciously to a new start. But that gets real political and blame goes out. So this is really tough. I know I blew it with SLOW. I didn’t really GET the full magnitude of the importance of SLOW with them, even though I thought I knew it (do we ever fully grasp SLOW?).
Laurie’s recent comment in a recent comment to another post rings true here – if there is an answer it lies in SLOW – when she said:
…I know that I am a broken record on this….but it is about creating a clear clear clear picture in the individual minds of the student AND in the collective mind of the class. When we go slowly we can keep those pictures clear….