Our newest member Mindee could use some feedback: Hi – I am an Elementary FLES (Spanish) teacher and am a recent convert to TPRS. Totally sold, through and through. Love this blog. I have to do a Smart Goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound) as required by the State of Va. and every year […]
Tina just sent me a link to a series of videos she took this week in her Spanish One class. For those of us working with One Word Images, this series of videos shows a sequence of instruction that leads the class from the image-creation process through the next day’s review of the artists’ work,
I had written here and on FB a few months ago against making the kids read those awful novels in level 1. My post wasn’t well received. Lots of people thought my position to be preposterous, and they made their positions quite clear. Some CI teachers even proudly like to say how many novels their
Teach the Novels in Level 1? Not in my CI Classroom. Read More »
Does anyone who was at the Lake Elsinore workshop last month remember which teacher mentioned Earl Stevick in relationship to the point about images (and thus the Invisibles) being more effective than mere words? She shared a line Stevick had said, all the way back in the sixties, that “imagination supports memory, and memory supports learning [what
We want good group dynamics in our stories, but wanting is not enough, and a sense of neediness on the teacher’s part actually makes the group dynamics shakier. Good group dynamics happen when the teacher allows the students to just be who they are in the classroom. Then the teacher will see something. Creating an
No comprehensible input class – especially one organized around unscripted, authentic communication – can succeed unless the students and the teacher are trained from the beginning of the year in the art of negotiating meaning. In the same way that we don’t allow students to pick the character, if we are using the Invisibles/emergent targets
Jeff Easthon totally gets it and, like so many others right about now, is therefore experiencing pressure from within his building. When you get it and start implementing it in your classroom you become a target. He’s not alone. I think it’s the time of year when traditional teachers see our CI kids having fun
A cool pic from the hotel in Agen last summer. Tina and I got a few hours in the mornings at breakfast with Stephen Krashen and Beniko Mason. What we learned from them in those discussions only furthered our belief that non-targeted comprehensible input is a fine way to teach a language, and that we
Colleagues who are full of pride about their ability to teach in a way that we know is outdated, from another time, which favors the few, can be dangerous to us. They can even threaten us. Of course, such posturing and judging is always done out of sheer ignorance. If these relics from the past really put
A way to train teachers that I have found very successful is to just return to something Blaine was doing before all the fracturing of TPRS over the past twenty years, Passive Mini Stories, or the infamous PMS term. Perhaps it was the acronym that threw people off the scent of true TPRS, because they
Cherie’s situation and a recent email communication with Reuben Rojas in L.A. prompted this post. I will certainly get some heat on this from the TPRS purists who say that it is CI or the highway, but it’s just an idea. This could impact teachers doing CI in those in departments that haven’t yet shifted their
This is from Cherie Thomas in Albermarle, Virginia: Hi Ben, I have a situation that I need some help with. Our school is using our PD day next Monday to work with the HS we feed into. All departments have to meet at the HS to discuss “common student experiences”. We are supposed to come
