I take seriously what Chris Stoltz and Eric Herman have taught me in recent month about how Step 1 of TPRS never was part of Blaine’s original design/process and happened more as a result of Susie Gross’ groundbreaking work in clarifying the method, when Step 1 kind of “happened”. So now TPRS consists of two steps […]
Here are some exerts from a recent comment here by Paul Kirschling of Denver Public Schools, for your edification and enjoyment: …this job is too difficult to do and still wind up feeling like a fake…. …one might as well get into sales and actually make some money…. …I will not judge but do wonder
I got this in an email from a group member today: …love the kids but harder to steer the CI ship with older kids traditionally trained under a different teacher each year of Spanish…. I think that this statement is very true. We talk about this from time to time here in our discussions, but over
Eric Herman has said: …it’s better to decide on your [CI] approach and then choose your own “way” – your own method – of making it happen in your classroom…. If we can’t get people to understand this, then this approach to teaching language is doomed. It will turn it into a method. It’s already
PLEASE understand that in my recent post I wasn’t calling for the abolishment of establishing meaning, gestures or PQA. Indeed, I wrote two books about those things. I was calling for getting rid of those things as they exist in the form of Step 1 of TPRS. (Eric Herman explains it below.) Of course, we
I’m breaking my contract here in New Delhi to return to the U.S. next year. It’s a long story (I don’t generally break contracts) that has to do with the pollution here and being a dad, which outweigh the great benefits of being in one of the elite schools in the world with an elite teacher in
If we compare storytelling and the way we acquire languages to a blade of grass, we can say that the root system is the input and the blade of grass itself is the output. The input must precede the output and act as the foundation and base for any output that follows. The blade (speech
Joe asked a question in 2013 that fits in with our current discussion on Scope and Sequence. It started a discussion that may still concern some of us so I repost it here. Hopefully we address it in more detail than we have in the past (we have been too general on this topic): This year
Language is processed unconsciously. As we hear words thousands of times their meanings move richly and deeply into the deeper mind and a wonderful dance of language creation occurs. The creation of a new language system can only occur in the unconscious mind. Children learn a language because they wants to know what it means – it
You read that title right. Why do I say that? Well, for one thing, it would get Paul Kirschling to write a comment here, and a good one. There is Tina’s great model for a CI kind of Scope and Sequence, but those are hard to create. It makes us work too hard and would
Don’t Change Traditional/Grammar Based Scope and Sequence Models Read More »
I suggest that we never do grammar pop ups during stories. The unconscious focus on the language gets interrupted when we do that. We don’t need hand comprehension checks either. Search that term for an article on that. We do need “What did I just say” comprehension checks. Doing pop up grammar interrupts the unconscious process
Mark just now asked us to discuss with our partner our work in terms of this question: “How do I make content accessible by fostering thinking?” In introducing this activity (all of it grouped under the general heading of Teaching for Understanding*),he used two terms that I couldn’t grasp: dichotomous and leveraging. What? I can’t grasp
