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Andrew’s Question
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17 thoughts on “Andrew’s Question”
I have 0 experience as this is my first time with TPRS and will not be commenting on the big picture, but this summer before I knew the administration would be so welcoming to TPRS, I watched Scott Benedict’s webinar “Textbook to TPRS”. It was a very practical webinar about what steps to take to pull the most important structures out of the required textbook. I realize this does not solve the over-arching issue, but if Andrew decides to go for it, I would recommend the webinar for sure (teachforjune.com). Very practical.
Adrianne your other comment didn’t get through. I just found it awaiting moderation. So if you (or anyone) comments but it doesn’t show up right away, please let me know so that I can go in and remove it from moderation.
Ben
2 years ago I decided to put the textbooks in the closet and I started to use Look I Can Talk. Even thought I know know more about PQA and CI the responses I got from students where outstanding. They were describing stories by looking at illustrations, they were answering my questions and reading page long stories and all with a semester of Spanish in 6th grade!
As it pertains to grammar I used the phrase me gusta, te gusta,le gusta, me gustan,… ( i like it, you like it, he/she likes it, I like them,…) with no grammar explanaition. Students were able to use the phrases and recognize them with ease. These phrases where difficult for students to learn and understand when I was working with the textbook Realidades. ( I believe all the gustas where worked on for about 2 chapters in the textbook- it was awful) One of my favorite complaints from the 7 th grade teaches was that as they went page by page of the textbook and introduced what they thought would be new concepts they got tired of hearing their students say ” We already learned this in Mrs. Downey’s class.”
I will have my first End of the Year test this year. It is solely based on the vocab from the En Español textbook. I am not going to even think about it till the 4 th quarter, maybe.
What might have seemed like a “hard road” was well worth it when seeying the leaps and bounds students made with out having to battle with grammar, nightly homework ( that was rarely completed and I somehow needed to lower my expectations). Students were able to use phrases and combinations of words that if I had used a textbook they would have not seen till 8th grade. They were also unaware of that fact which made every teacher that came in to observe my class (and yes they are all textbook fiends) left in awe.
To think that by personalizing my class and working with what I learned in TPRS in a year could make my class more relevant ( less about animals) and make the students more successfull is so exciting to me. I am nervous because of my other 8th grade teacher and her textbook teaching but I am so confidant in this method that all my nerves should dissapear once I get back infront of those kids.
To me the real crusher here is not the book so much as the required shared assessments. The book issue depends on the book. If the book contains lots of good stories, then you can teach with CI and simply use the stories from the book, embed them, etc. If it’s not a book with good stories, then the book is fairly useless.
All language textbooks that I know of are sheltering grammar and not vocabulary, and in CI we flip that. You can even overcome that problem, again, if the book has good stories.
I guess the final possibility would be that if your book does not have good stories but you used it’s vocab and did not try to shelter the grammar the way the book does, you would move more slowly than your colleagues, telling and asking your own stories using vocab in common with them, but your kids would be acquiring grammar way beyond your colleagues’ kids, in some respects. So, here’s what I think I’ve just said:
1. Book has good stoires: teach CI and draw on the good stories (which you also embed) from your book
2. Book has no stories or no good stories: teach CI, create your own stories, don’t try to shelter grammar. Use the text vocab which will slow you down in comparison to your colleagues but your kids come out ahead in the end.. Always keep an eye to what will be on the shared assessments and make sure that those things are.
I think it’s key that your colleagues know that you are venturing this way and try to gain some support from them for you to do this, even if they have no interest. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s what’s going on in my school. The two of us who do Latin are on board with CI (sort of doing item 1 above because we have great stories to work with in our books). There are 7 Spanish teachers, and 1 of them does TPRS. They are fine for her to do that, and quite honestly I don’t think she does it very consistently, but her kids do quite well and are more advanced than some of the others. She has influenced another to do some TPRS like things, which is a little movement in that direction.
As I said before, I think the real nasty here are the required shared assessments. Designed by and for a computer, not real people working with real people, who change, hour to hour.
Dear Andrew,
I can really appreciate your dilemna as it it the same one I experienced my first year of teaching in 2006. I was recommended by my methods teacher ( a CI guru) to the department chair of the first High School I taught at ( Naperville Central H.S) , which is the high school by the way where Barbara Watson now teaches (she published an article comparing TPRS and Traditional Foreign Language Instruction at the High School Level) . The department chair ( Ignacio Gamboa) who was so excited I was a new teacher doing CI that after a 15 minutes conversation over the phone he handed me the job. I jumped right in and started doing TPRS the first semester until the veteran French teacher found out and did everything in her power to stop me. And she did. She forced me to give weekly quizzes, chapter tests, and final exam. I lost my kids, my sanity and cried every tear out of my body, I even lost 10 pounds. Ignacio, my department chair was powerless and torn but there was nothing he could do, since the whole department of about 16 teachers were all grammar-based except for three of us. At the end of the year I quit teaching. Well, the following year, I was asked to teach at the University level as an adjunct and I did and it was fun. Then I heard about Ben and started reading his book and my passion got reignited.
Any way to make a long story short, I decided that my next job I would be interviewing the district that hired me as much as they were interviewing me. I did some research before applying.
I am now working in a district where I have some autonomy and I hope it will always be the case.
There is a book we have to give the kids (“bien dit”) since they pay for it so I gave it to the kids last year, and once in a while I asked them to read some culture stuff in it and do some bogus activity of sorts as to justify the expense and to cover myself with parents and administration. This year I am not going to bother, the book will stay in the closet and I’ll deal with it the best I can.
Concretely, do you have to give quizzes and chapter tests or is it just the final exam. If it is the final exam, how much is it worth ( mine was 10%).
I remember reading somewhere ( may be Blaine or Susie or even Ben?) that you can do CI all year/semester long and then dedicate the last 7 weeks or so just to do the book stuff. Ignacio had tried to help me overcome my dilemna with creative ideas such as :
1) open book quiz/test
2) take home quiz test
For me I had to decide whether I would compromise my ideal and be a miserable slave and lose my kids, or if I would fight the system, one teacher/administator at a time.
I chose the latter.
BTW I saw Barbara Watson at NTPRS and she tells me the divide still exists in the department and Ignacio is still powerless. She just closes her door and does her stories with her kids and feels isolated but she doesn’t care, she knows what’s best for her kids. I am not sure how she handles the common assessment dilemna, but all the power to her.
I m sorry Andrew that I couldn’t give you more practical advise but I wanted to share my story to tell you you are not alone on this journey and at the end of the day, YOU have to decide what’s best for you. Nothing good comes out without a fight . It is always about making tough decisions.
Good luck Andrew. I’ve been there and it is hard!
Andrew, Sabrina’s experiences are not isolated. I will tell you that from my experience trying to blend methods or half-step on CI are a recipe for disaster. Been there done that. If you look at the frequently used list of structures, I would be that they show up somewhere in a textbook:). It may not be in the linear fashion of lesson quiz, lesson quiz, lesson quiz, chapter test, but they are in the textbook somewhere. This morning on the moretprs list, Terry Waltz answers your exact question, it’s in digest number 8156. How to pick structures when you are sending your kids off to a non CI teacher. It might give you some direction. Remember, you are on a journey and there will be growing pains. I applaud your openness to change. Your kids will be lucky to have you. Remember always, it’s a process and we are all on the path together.
Bob I agree with everything you have said above. I overlooked the shared assessments because I am also expected to do these this year but I have no real intention of doing any of these except the End of the Year Test. If parents start to worry I will load some vocab lists, quizlet flashcards and quia games to the class blog. Using the vocab from the textbook should be easily entered in readings and the 3 page extended readings.
I tend to have a more defensive approach when it comes to my peers. I have been burned too many times in the last few years. I let those noisy parents and my students work speak for me. I tend to not ask for permission and just do what I think is best for my students. This may not be the most mature approach but again I don’t feel like a part of my department I feel like it is them vs. me. I recomend trying to get to get your department on board and if their is resistance then take the road less travelled and see how your kids benefit and love it, you won’t regret that decision.
Sarah, I agree with you about not asking for permission, and you are right that letting colleagues in can be trick if not dangerous. I do think, though, that one has to navigate how one will get through the hoops that one intends not to jump through. Your example of posting the vocab quizzlets, etc, is a good one.
The road less travelled has long been my friend.
Ben, I’ve been watching the Archie videos and I would like to know more about the part where you focus on Archie and say that even if it takes days of class time, that you’d stay with him and bring him into the group. I was wondering what is happening with the rest of the class during that time. During my student teaching and long-term sub positions, I had experiences where I felt like I was the TV at the bar…it’s playing, but nobody’s looking at it and they are all busy talking with each other. I know that I have a lot to learn about discipline. I also looked up the Denver Public Schools curriculum and saw how it is all based on TPRS, which was a thrill. Is there any evidence from your school system that the change has been effective….like studies or whatever that I could show an administrator to bolster my argument for teaching in this way? I also wonder what is the method for teaching culture, where it says that you choose one or two countries to study in depth…is there anything in this blog about that part of the curriculum? I have spent hours on the internet searching for materials to help high school kids learn about stuff like the origins of salsa music, for example, and it’s a jungle of cheesy, advertisement-laden pseudo-information in there. And finally (for now), I want to thank you for your responses to my previous questions, especially that you took the time to respond and that you didn’t consider them to be ridiculous. I’m struggling with writing lesson plans for my methodology class right now, because I have to squeeze out these miserable lessons filled with activities that fulfill these guidelines written for…who?…no human being that I ever met. Surveys, Matching, grids and charts, creating context where none exists….and it all has to be student-centered which seems to mean that I create elaborate worksheets to replace myself so that the students can teach each other? Is this frustration related to what you rant about sometimes? I feel like I have to put my heart off to the side if I’m going to pass this course… Plus, the professor said in class that if we don’t learn to write proper learning objectives, it is likely that we will all be fired! Shit, I haven’t even started teaching yet and I’m already fired! What is that about?
Angie your questions above weigh so heavily on my heart that I don’t think I can answer them at least right now – the best I can do here is just briefly comment on them. Look at them:
1. …what is happening with the rest of the class during that time (with Archie)….
OK this one is definitely too big to fully address here. The short answer is that the other kids are squaring up with me and paying attention and I am doing lots of comparing Archie to Sarah or Josh across the room, or to some celebrity. The classroom discipline piece is big and it would require much more than this, but it’s a small start. That classroom discipline is an issue with CI teachers weighs on my heart bc in fact it should not. CI brings involvement and this should not be a problem and with a little training you would see that. It is SO MUCH EASIER to keep kids involved with CI than the book. The difference is absurd.
2. Yes we have studies. We don’t have them in one place. Five of my middle school kids scored the five highest scores in CO over the best and brightest traditional high school students to be found. The kid who got 70/70 on that test scored a four on the AP exam in level 2 with no prior background. There are many such stories. DPS teachers who use comprehensible input make the traditional teachers’ summative scores look like a total joke. But, in other districts where CI is still just a thought, nobody seems to be able to think past 1950. They try to ask if there was prior background when they hear test scores like the ones above and when they get their answers they just walk away in doubt and in refusal to actually compute the results. Easier to just say they don’t exist or that there is a lie somewhere than change. Test scores are not our way out of this. People don’t hear them. The data people only like the data that they create and collect. It’s a club. We can’t get it.
3. It is my strong opinion that kids need the language as a key to the door of culture. That ends that discussion before it starts. I love what you said about …cheesy, advertisement-laden pseudo-information” being given to help teach culture. So true. So sad. Such a mess. Culture. An excuse to not teach the language, an excuse to use English, to assign useless projects that could be done in a social studies class.
4. Surveys, Matching, grids and charts, creating context where none exists. So true. It is all madness now. What they are making you do is madness. It breaks my heart.
Ben, This is all I need. Broken hearts make change, because they are open. Your generosity is so beautiful and inspiring. You have given me what I need to go back to class tomorrow. Thank you.
Surveys, charts, matching, grids…you can have it all with CI!
A great example of a survey is Ben’s questionnaire. Just re-type it with “Survey” at the top.
Charts: how many kids in the US like Justin Bieber? How many kids in class do? Find out and create the chart with them. Then ask them questions based on the chart, or add some information from other countries about who favorite musicians are for particular ages.
Matching: use the information you gained from the questionnaire and have the kids match facts about one another.
Grids: do a Carol Gaab. Make a grid with preferred flavors of ice cream and amounts, and have kids put their names on post-its and attach their names where the amount they’d like crosses with the flavor. It’s a great way to be able to talk about them comprehensibly. (Carol does this to limit the “ask me too” factor in elementary school, but I have found it to work well with high schoolers.)
You can add the same sort of activity that is real when reading the novels. Poor Anna, first chapter: mini-survey: where were students born, where do they live (street names, if not cities), what school did they attend before this one, how do their siblings bother them. Chart: Fill in the information for Anna; they walk around and fill it in for three others in the room (could even be a brain break for three minutes in English to help bond the class), and then you can use it in PQA. And so on.
Using these for the real purpose – to get to know your students better – will make you slow down and get more reps out of the same information. You can do a different activity for each chapter in a novel, on top of everything else we do. (Poor Anna again: “What would you do if you needed help at an airport?”) Don’t create them in a bogus way. It will only irritate you. Create them in a way that you can imagine using them with kids. Make them activities that you do together, rather than worksheets that you hand out. (Of course, for the methods class, you’re going to have to create samples of what you’d do in class.)
Hope this makes sense. It still isn’t right, but you can find ways to turn it to good.
Oh…and go to iJFLT.com for studies in back issues. They are there. There’s also Krashen’s 81 Generalizations about FVR http://successfulenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/81-Generalizations-about-FVR-2009.pdf
which should have some resources for you.
Good luck!!
I tried last year to adapt my textbook to TPRS, with a group of teachers from the yahoo TPRS group for that textbook. We divided up the work and assigned people a couple chapters and then we took each reading from the textbook, chose 6 structures from it, wrote 2 stories with 3 structures each to be the class structures for PQA and stories to ask and act out, so for us, each chapter had 5 readings, then it was 30 structures per chapter of the textbook.
As you can probably guess, my kids hated it, so I quit doing that after 2 chapters and boy did I work hard writing all those stories. But, if you had to absolutely use the text book, that would be one way to adapt it, is just treat it like a reading, choose the structures and then follow the steps of TPRS with those structures and then in the end follow the reading process and read and discuss the reading from the textbook. It is not ideal, but not impossible.
(My situation was different, it was a mixed upper level class and they didn’t want to do stories at all anymore, so it may not have been the textbook or the stories and I didn’t have to have common assessments with anyone.)
The other thing is, in my other district, next year, happily my only district, we do have common assessments and some teachers use TPRS and some do not, so we tried to compromise by making our common assessments open ended and communicative, not based on a specific set of vocabulary or grammar items.
Wait until you get tenured to shake things up too badly. I was a rebel from the first day only because I graduated from the high school where I currently teach and I pretty much knew everyone.
It’s a culture of change. It will take a few years for people to catch word of the cool stuff that Mr. Andrew does in his classes. Invite people in. They won’t come but set up a community of sharing. At our department meetings we share best practices. I did a demo lesson of circling using German. Everyone understood the lesson and one person actually took me up on observing.
Fast forward 3 years and the majority of the department rejects the text book and sees the Bennefits of a program that focuses on stories and authentic texts (in level 3 and AP).
Be bones with your department. Say this year I’m going to try an experiment. The results I’m looking for at the end of the year is a 100-word composition that is mostly understandable. Does anyone want to try this with me? Otherwise I’ll be totally transparent and let you know how the experiment goes.
Good luck. By the way, great name.
Drew, I like the “this year I’m going to try an experiment” idea. I’ve formed the idea along the ideas of Daniel in the first few chapters of that book in the Bible where he says something like “just give us vegetables while everyone else eats the royal food and at the end of 10 days, see who is healthier looking.” I’ve not had enough guts to actually state that, but we have a new principal this year, so I might.
Andrew, I, too use the “Expresate” book for Spanish II–well, I don’t use it, but it is there in the classroom for reference and pretty pictures. What I ordered for the students this year was the “cuentos y cultura” workbook, thinking that at least there would be some stories and culture in it. The problem is that the vocab and grammar in the stories is way over their heads. And the I like the authentic literature part of it, but I’d have to really simplify the vocab.
lori–look up what Michele W. and Laurie C. are doing with embedded reading. I think you can get to what you want using their method of breaking down the vocab. and building them up to the reading. They have a new website for Embedded Reading and I think it may be your ticket. I have no readings really in Mvskoke for the kids that are at emergent or level 2 reading skills. Embedded reading is my only hope.