Jody made a comment about four days ago that has stayed with me. I think it is one of the most important observations I’ve ever read about comprehension based instruction. To start, I had said this: …in terms of CI gains, we start slowly but soon gain great speed, like a freight train – which […]
Karen’s bio: I am new to your PLC, and so grateful for finding this wealth of information and guidance. I am a 7th and 8th grade Spanish teacher from Ithaca, NY on a full year sabbatical to explore TPRS. I am spending most of the year in the Bay Area of San Francisco, where I
The degree to which a comprehension based class succeeds or fails is often determined by the number of socially capable kids in the class. This success or failure can be a function of the social makeup of the class, which can take many forms depending on the school we teach in. In schools where many
In my opinion, there are two reasons kids don’t engage in our comprehensible input class: 1. We don’t engage them. We get going too fast, we get nervous about the method, we just haven’t got the experience we need with it yet, we don’t really understand what comprehensible input means and so we’re going about
A report from the Chevalier: Hi Ben, I will have a student teacher for the first time ever this semester, and I’m looking forward to it. She has attended several COACH workshops and seen Jason Fritze in action, has gotten and started reading not only “Fluency through TPRS” but also your “TPRS” and “PQA” books,
I am happy to report that in the past two days I have received via email five reports from the field from these people: Kath (published) chill (published) jen (published) Rita (published) Chris Vancouver (in queue) I’ve also received and published field reports recently from David Young and Bob Patrick. Many, for example the one
As we know, Leigh Anne made the switch from teaching AP Spanish to AP French and requests our help with grammar when writing readings created from story scripts: Hi, Ben, My level II, III, IV-AP combo is into the second half of Anne’s first book of stories, and I can’t do the grammar! Most stuff
A repost for those continuing this next week: Here are the verbs Paul is targeting for the next eight weeks. You can see how they are grouped together and how they would therefore lend themselves to building little scenes. So this is an option to just doing word associations: Week 1: is called, calls himself,
Hi Ben, I had a short conversation with my friend that had so much to do with the work we do as second language teachers that it blew me away: My friend recently agreed to teach me to play the piano and we were listening to a few songs in the car when out of the
Chris Stoltz (Vancouver) reports: Hey Ben – I’m sitting in the Von Ray workshop (he has his dad’s eyes) as he demos TPRS in German. Since it’s my first language I am just watching audience and note a few things: A) SLOW rules. A word a second. It feels like he’s CRAWLING and when he
TPRS/CI is starting to work it’s way into businesses: Hey Ben – I am trying to adapt what I’m learning about TPRS and PQA from your books to online teaching of adults often at and above the intermediate level. A different ball of pedagogical wax, one supposes, as these are often adults who are top
I will add this post to the Seating Charts category: Hello, Ben, I am really enjoying Stepping Stones…thanks for writing it! I am in a school that is totally Kagan-driven. In fact, one of Kagan’s national trainers teaches at my school which means that it is pushed hard and implemented in every single classroom. I
