When we don’t target structures, when we have no lesson plans at all but only a pool of strategies from which to work, we win the CI game. It’s as simple as that. We have a pool from which to work but we don’t plan. We don’t even think about which strategies we want to use that day. Spontaneity raises its eyebrows in anticipation of some fun!
Usually it’s stories, that is what the kids always want, but those who have been reading these pages for many years now know what we have a lot more strategies to use and they all work, just not at the level of stories. (The main one is Reading Option A/ROA which is a kind of Step 3 on steroids.). So really all we have to do in this work is show up for class, start talking about something, then read it with the kids the next day or two, and that’s it.
I learned from my colleague Amanda Baumann here at the American Embassy School that this way of planning a class by not planning has been described in a book, in about 1970. The author is David Kohl and the book is called “The Open Classroom”. It’s worth a look. The teacher doesn’t even have the desks planned out on the first day of school – everyone does it together. The result is much like the result at the doggie park when they owner lets the pooch off the leash – the struggle and tugging evaporate and the dog is free to run and play and the dogfights disappear.
Most teachers won’t embrace this “lawless” approach to teaching using comprehensible input. It is because their idea of what a teacher is contradicts the above described mindset. But the fact is that TPRS doesn’t work with a traditional mindset. We must learn how to teach without planning, to play, to embrace the unexpected and to draw activities from the vast pool of options here without knowing what we are going to be doing on any particular day. Do we really want to spend our teaching days stifling our instruction to
“teach something?” I don’t.
Teaching using TPRS requires risk taking, requires faith that good things will happen if space is but made for them to happen, requires trust.
Look. Let’s not get into a long discussion about this. TPRS, in order to be successful, cannot be planned. Nothing of what we used to know about teaching can be applied to TPRS. We have to chuck it all. That is all there is to it. I hope I offended at least a few people with this post.