Yea, Elizabeth! – I would first like to say thank you to everyone here for creating such a wonderful, open, honest community. The ideas, thoughts and support I find here are truly invaluable. Onto the bio! I teach German 1 and 2 at a high school near Philadelphia. This coming year will be my 4th […]
I like that Angie just started with this just this month in her classroom and is willing to report in, like May Lee did today, with some pretty high level questions that, since we are a group, we must respond to with good comments. I certainly don’t have all the answers. We’re all a work
Ben, After reading David Maust’s post I was inspired to give my own report from the field. I am teaching two sections of Spanish B (2nd year of middle school) one section of Latin A and one of Latin B. The circling with balls has been great for simplifying my life these past two weeks
Pouncing on things we learn while asking slow circled questions about the cat describes a process that is ever-expanding, because we in our class are looking for something as a group together, which guarantees success in any kind of conversation. To extend the PQA, to create the story, we have to listen to each other.
In a recent comment here David reminded himself to just stop those little explanations of discrete information in English that come from our egos and that are designed to make us look intelligent. He reminds us that they only hurt our instruction: …the kids in my first level classes are doing a great job at respecting the no
Since Bob and David led the way with this new idea of y’all sending in “Reports from the Field”, I have received a few more. Here is one from Bernard, the French guy of Face 1 and Face 2 fame from Las Vegas. Thank you for sending it, Bernard, and others please feel free to
I’m just putting this here for my own reference, to make it easy to find if I need it. I’ll categorize it under Classroom Discipline and even make another category for it by name. I know I have too many categories here and I will go through and clean them up sometime. The following things
Again, When the students are sitting there listening to PQA, it is like they are watching a still picture that we are adding details to. In PQA there is not a lot of cohesive action, where actual scenes unravel in our students’ minds. Everything is kind of static in PQA – the experience is like taking our students
Now, as soon as you have asked where and brought in another character, this image of the cat is real enough to invite a student to play the role of the cat, and you have a story. Remember that stories begin when an actor stands up and/or there is a problem. If it doesn’t naturally evolve into a story
Just for clarity for those interested, here is my updated version on jen’s original document, posted yet again. I do so because I used it to great success last week in my first week with students. Man, I have to say that it is so clear and simple, and the kids really get that it
When we create the image of a cat, just that and nothing more, with no plan, trusting in the moment (see “Skill #22 in TPRS in a Year!) the right brained kids in the class lean forward. The left brainers get a little nervous as they are brought out of their comfort zone in a
By requiring students to behave according to jGR, we reparent them, if that is needed, and with most kids it is. This is beneficial to a society in which bullying others and an inability to even look another person in the eyes and have a meaningful conversation with them has become the norm. We in America cannot
