We revisit articles, so why not revisit videos? Here is some work Drew Hiben did three years ago. In it we see modeled much of what we would like to integrate into our own instruction, especially a true command of SLOW. I added it to the Videos hard link on this page this evening at Angie’s request. Any video you want to add up to that hard link, just le me know. I’ll also add to that link the speaking samples Eric shared with us today.
Back in 2011 Drew wrote:
Ben,
I took my first video of my accelerated Spanish 2 class doing a story. The quality isn’t great. It’s unedited. I watched myself teach for the first time in 6 years. Is this something the group might be interested in seeing?
I wrote back:
Defintely yes send the link. It’s one of the reasons the group is small now and private. This is what we want. We can’t stay in our heads forever. This is the kind of fearlessness I want more than anything on this blog.
And then Drew wrote back:
It’s a 40-minute class after a 10-minute comprehension quiz. Here are the links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJzSnf_cD3E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbDbGAfAMbM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQWxB-sJk1o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR2uuAyvmZQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XciHyVkRC4A
I’m nervous to put myself out there like this and hopefully can receive some good coaching and feedback. I did this on a whim and wish I had a better video camera. I used my MacBookPro in class and flipped it around pointed at me. Next time I’m going to hand a video camera to a kid and see what happens. No more apologies or excuses. Here it is.
Here is a comment I wrote back to Drew before I got to actually see the clips he sent:
By this effort on your part, you display the true spirit of what I want this site to become. A picture really is worth a thousand words and we can learn so much from each other just by watching each other teach. We can never capture our best work, and we cannot really edit the footage we get because of time. Your doing this is a sign that we are starting to trust each other more on this site, enough already to know that putting ourselves “out there” on video is going to work. It’s going to get better and better in spite of our fears because we will learn to trust each other. Trust is what is lacking in our training now, or maybe it’s just absent in the world, or on a break! All we have to do is put aside the need to be perfect, or to think that the footage should not be shared because it is “not good enough”, because we are not good enough, or whatever other excuses our egos would put up in self defense. We just put ourselves out there. We give constructive feedback and we learn from each other. It really helps now that the group is small and we can be free of the fear of someone on the wide open internet seeing it. Yea, Drew!
And here is a comment I wrote back to Drew after I got to see these clips he sent. There is a lot to view here, a lot to see, so let’s share our ideas liberally on this excellent footage that we are so fortunate to have from Drew. If you want to learn TPRS, study this footage. Here are my initial thoughts and I will study and make comments, hoping we all do, over the next days and weeks. Drew wanted feedback so let’s honor that.
Drew, this is good. I mean really good stuff. You have the “je ne sais quoi” quality in the bag. Whatever it is, that hard to grasp and bottle quality that makes a good class of comprehensible input, you have it. I am struck first by the pacing. Magnificent. Great, genuine pauses. I wish I could do that and if I watch these clips enough I will be able to. I rush through those pauses. You make the understanding supremely easy for your students. Very relaxing teaching presence. No threatening energy, very soft, and all just inviting whatever students into the dialogue who may want to come along, which, listening to class response, is just about all of them. Almost a Linda Li slowness. But what really strikes me is the way that you are genuinely involved in an actual conversation with your students. You are not just circling the required questions from the circling chart, but rather, you kind of meditate and appear in the most natural way to actually wonder (maybe you are wondering), about where this discussion could be going. O.K. so where did you learn to do comprehensible input like this? If you did this on your own it is really very remarkable. I am certain that these clips are going to make a real difference in our group members’ teaching. It’s all there, and, let’s not forget, it seems to reveal, to reflect, your own style of teaching even if you weren’t a TPRS guy. In this way this footage provides us with an important example of how TPRS does not restrict the personality of the teacher. I see Blaine here, definitely, but I also see mostly Drew! A genuine and heart felt wow is all I can say. When I get the time to see all five clips, I’ll try to be add more comments. Wow again. Oh what the hey – wow three times! This rocks!
[Ed. note: I suggest that we limit our viewing and comments to one of these clips every two days. In that way, the comment thread – I sure hope there is one created from this post – will be clear and we can be focused on the same clip at the same time. Just observe, take a few notes and throw them up in the form of a comment. What do you see? How can we help Drew with anything? How are we benefitting from what we see him do?]