Today I got these thoughts from a teacher in our group who wishes to remain anonymous: …my department head for the last two and half years has been talking a good game when it comes to CI and I was hopeful about the future at my school. About five weeks ago she said some things […]
A summer idea from Tina for the group: Summer conferences often have group discounts and people are often looking for roommates. If you are going to a summer conference and you want to connect with other members of the PLC, please post a reply here and we can get together! As far as I now,
Keri has a question: Hi Ben, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the content of what I teach and I have a few questions. I apologize if this is a little all over the place…we now have six levels of Spanish at our high school because incoming freshman are starting with Spanish 3 (with
This is the biggest and most powerful change in TPRS history, to my knowledge. Its’ ridiculous. It sure beats circling! Why? Because this method is less about skill and more about inclusion/ownership and interest. I am in between classes right now and that is a good thing because then I would go on a rant
Robert wrote an important article a few years ago and it’s up in the Primers. I republish it here because of its importance: Scope and Sequence Harrell
This is a repost from a month ago. I have tested it thoroughly and it works. It takes a bit of time to prepare, but the time put in is worth it esp. if you are dealing with a class that needs to be hammered with discipline. This does it – literally forcing their attention
So this new class sequencing (a combined version of the very best ideas from the past two years of discussion here and which now includes the Invisibles) looks like this (in my own TPRS world): Read and Share (10 min.) Story (writing it out at the same time) (30 min. – note that I find
If a heritage student can write reasonably well, they can help process the story by writing it out in real time. My experiment of writing it out myself in real time failed. I couldn’t do two things at the same time. But I had great success with a girl from Congo today who (an advanced class) writes reasonably
We’ve been snookered. In the goal to get more reps and to go narrow and deep, we’ve very often accepted a false truth, a received idea in TPRS, that it doesn’t matter if we finish the story. Well, I haven’t finished a story in about ten years. I just wanted more reps and more reps and
I find this statement (by Diane made in a comment field here today) about Bill VanPatten’s work to be important: …If you read BVP’s stuff on teaching — I mean specific ideas for conducting class interaction, not general ideas — boy is it obvious it’s universities that he’s talking about…. Linda Li and Diana Noonan
This statement by Claire to the group a few days ago goes a long way in explaining, to me at least, why the ELL crowd is not on board with the TPRS crowd. It’s something I had not thought of: I am still new to foreign language. I [do] think that we can all be
I can’t make writing the story and asking it at the same time work. The best I can do is try to write it out (at the end of the story or maybe at the end of each paragraph) after the (story or paragraph) has been created in the normal way. I sure wish that
