To the degree that I may be responsible for bending Blaine’s original vision of TPRS, I apologize. My intent was honorable – to help other teachers like me who were blown away by the magnitude of the change and wanted some stepping stones to help them along. But it’s getting out of hand. TPRS is […]
A February 2016 repost, just when I was beginning to deeply explore the no-planning, non targeting approach that is now what I consider a better way to do CI: This burnout test requests that the reader do something a bit odd as they read further into this post. There is a short paragraph below. Don’t read
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, for which I am partially to blame and I apologize, is to return to Passive Mini Stories, or the infamous PMS term. Perhaps it
Something very coincidental happened today. Admin called a meeting to suggest an idea for scheduling Spanish classes for ’17/’18 academic year. We are being encouraged to let it sink in and to expect further meetings to discuss and share our “expert” opinions. Up until now, my school had only offered Honors level courses at Span
A colleague wrote to me and said this: …I am no longer so intimidated at the thought of sending in videos. I am starting to see them as virtual observations, like if we all taught in some big happy school in the sky where we could just pop into each others’ rooms…. This is powerful.
Worksheets are not only useless in WL education, they also waste a lot of paper. Guess what? This year I have used virtually no paper in teaching my kids French. They have their composition books for dictees and free writes, and we only use paper for quick quizzes. I don’t even do quick quizzes much
If you want to teach a demo lesson on parents night, we do have lots of ideas and articles that we have collected here over the years, but I would like to add one more. Yesterday I saw Linda Li teach a parent night group wants and doesn’t want in 14 minutes. I kept waiting
Those planning on coming to one of my regional trainings (so far Portland is confirmed for mid-August) are reminded that they get all my ebooks at no charge plus free lifetime membership to this blog if you attend one of the (three day) workshops. Tina is organizing them on the West Coast. Plus you can
We can’t talk about SLOW enough. A few teachers here have actually mentioned in various threads something to the effect that SLOW is relative. What does that mean? I believe that we are becoming so successful with our CI instruction in level 1 that we are starting to see a whole new definition of SLOW
In a comment here today Tina said: …I had a girl almost cry today because the Profe 2 said her cat is a boy. I think that the person who created the creature needs to be in charge of the details, not the Profe 2…. I think we need to think about this. To me
Kathryn Kuypers is one of our young rock star DPS teachers (of Spanish) whose scores in only her first few years of teaching using TPRS (under the guidance of Diana Noonan) were off the chart. So Kathryn last summer decided to take a sabbatical and tour through South Asia for a year. She has been on
Robert continues: The period after the eighth graders left, two teachers came and observed my class. One is a BTSA teacher (i.e. new to the teaching profession and the district, so in training), and the other was his “BTSA friend” who uses TPRS/TCI but has gotten stuck in a bit of a rut because of
