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Denver War Room Final List/ Wait List
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22 thoughts on “Denver War Room Final List/ Wait List”
I’d like to reserve a spot for 2015. Will you do this again then, Ben, please?
Well with you in Denver next year we may be able to do some intensive War Room coaching in the district for those who want. Diana can arrange it and y’all Valor Christian folks are certainly welcome downtown anytime. Once Sean and the rest of the Chicago CI teachers get through moving out here to join Sabrina and you we can get to some serious work.
Yay! This cracks me up, though. Really though, after the winter we had, no shock that Chicago people are willing to leave!
Thank you for the invitation – I will look forward to the opportunity to work with such an incredible group of teachers. A little intimidating too. Out here in Chicagoland, it feels like just a few of us and we’re mostly in our first 3 years of CI teaching.
I want to add a critical point to my asking Sabrina to do the a.m. teaching at iFLT. She is so kind. She models kindness. It is nothing she has to work for, to think about, she just teaches with kindness. Why is this a critical point? Because kids perceive teachers with neutral emotions as mean in schools.
Have you ever heard that said about a teacher/colleague/yourself? They say, “Mrs. So and So is mean!” It usually is done by kids who have failed to do some assignment as they somehow magically transfer their failure to the teacher’s nature. So classroom neutrality is interpreted as meanness by kids. No blame. That’s what they do at that age.
How to combat that? How to really and authentically reach kids with comprehensible input? We have to go out of our way to avoid being neutral, even if we have things that are wrecking our hearts at home. There is no other way. We all know this, I am preaching to the choir, of course. Any teacher who has been in the profession more than a few years knows this.
But I wish I had known the supreme importance (far greater than mere personalization) of going out of my way just to be kind, reaching into my heart on those days when I just couldn’t do it, and then doing it anyway. Is teaching therefore the hardest profession, at least emotionally? I say yes.
We must give all the little smiles and looks of approval – they must be from the heart or the kids will know – to my kids as I possibly could for five fifty minute periods in a row and in the hallway. Cheerfulness, kindness is the bedrock of this method. Bernard also has this. Maybe it’s a French thing.
So true, and as always, beautifully said.
How about the way we phrase things? A single word can change everything.
“You act like a clown!” has a different effect than saying “You are a clown!”
My colleague suggested I read a book by Peter Johnston “Open minds, using language to change minds.”
“Introducing a spelling test to a student by saying, ‘Let’s see how many words you know,’ is different from saying, ‘Let’s see how many words you know already.’ It is only one word, but the already suggests that any words the child knows are ahead of expectation and, most important, that there is nothing permanent about what is known and not known.”
— Peter Johnston
“Open Minds” is a great book. I was at a school in Evanston, IL., where “Open Minds” was a book we read as an entire staff. During PD sessions we discussed the book: a much better use of time than most other PD data analysis type of activities.
It is amazing how the words we use when talking to young people make a difference.
I have been thinking about this point a lot lately. I think it is a secret to teaching, maybe THE secret. You see, the method is overrated. It is great, of course, light years ahead of anything that came before it, but if we continue to send the same kind of messages about kids having to jump high to succeed and please us or we will slam them with jGR (many have given up jumping by high school), then the kids will not be motivated.
Only kindness and love can motivate in the real way, as Catharina suggested in her comment above. Let’s not blow it by focusing only on learning more about the method this summer. Let’s also reflect on how we approach our students each day. It’s not just a good thing, it may be everything to our success. Just being kind and not judging.
CI/TPRS lends itself to kindness more than traditional ways of teaching. I am a much kinder teacher now. For real.
“Only kindness and love can motivate in the real way.”
“It’s not just a good thing, it may be everything to our success. Just being kind and not judging.”
One person showing kindness and support can change lives. Imagine the change that happens inside as trust is created and grows. Building self worth where none may have existed. Replacing motivation from without to a self motivated state. Beautiful!
We’ve heard before that “discipline precedes instruction” (often attributed to Susan Gross, but certainly said by many educators of different academic disciplines), and we here are saying “kindness precedes discipline.”
A good, positive relationship with the students is the glue that keeps it together. I always say that building self-esteem is my #1 goal before any other learning goal.
TCI/TPRS has a live PULSE, while traditional methods are flatlined and I think it’s one of the defining factors in determining which teachers gravitate to TCI/TPRS. Those of us looking for a way to connect to our kids, really relate to them and teach them ALL, immediately see the value of TPRS, while those teachers who take themselves too seriously, who prefer to think of FL as an “academic” requiring hard work, those teachers with little creativity, and those thinking “rigor” means that few students should succeed, cannot see the beauty that is TCI/TPRS.
My firm belief that anyone (who wants to) is able to acquire Chinese language ability was what got me looking into TPRS in the first place, several years ago.
I worked for a Chinese dude while in Uni. Two evenings and one slow Sunday per week I was there in the camera store with him and I said “yo teach me some Mandarin” and he said “hai.”
Over 6 months I acquired maybe 100 words. I couldn’t speak it well– I once apparently called his brother “an electric idiot”– but it was easy to understand. All I really did was listen, at first for one word at a time, then to 2-3 word sentences. At start it was “camera” and “door” then near end it was “back bring camera” (ie get the camera from the back– Chinese seems to have really weird word order rules) and “help the two customers.”
WHat worked for me: limited vocab, a lot of repetition, and the guy was cool with repeating if I did not understand. Too abd I have now forgotten every word. Chinese does nto seem that hard.
Kindness precedes discipline…I love that. Thanks, Eric.
And Melissa I don’t want to take the inventory of some of those teachers but I do believe that one reason they reject comprehensible input is that it requires kindness to work. They are using the old model of it’s all about the teacher and the teacher giving commands (homework, busywork, memorize, tell the teacher how cool she is) and the teacher being the star of the show and all that – the way classrooms used to operate, with enough English in there to strangle a cat. But in this new model it’s about the group generating conversation as art, which requires respect, where what all the interlocuters think and say counts, and the group dynamic, not the dynamic of one person and a few students, rules, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/lart-de-la-conversation-and-tprs/
I have in the past connected this art of respectful conversation to knowing how to float down the Lazy River in our classes:
…we must stop trying to teach content and see what content happens. Dance in CI with the kids. Grab a target structure and saunter on down to the river, the Lazy River, and just float down where the water goes naturally and quit trying to push the water upriver in the direction you want. Follow the flow of the conversation. Let the CI flow…. see where it goes….
Soren Kierkegaard put it this way:
“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the
sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.”
That is not what I see a lot of teachers doing, as they continue to think it’s all about them.
I love the image of the Lazy River. One can’t do this unless they have built community in their class. It has to be a safe place for this kind of conversation to take place.
I think one of the things that is so moving for me is to see such genuine concern for others from the students. Students showing kindness and supporting each other and making a difference in each others lives. Each class is a type of family that has love for each other.
“*this is a floating spot that doesn’t really exist. It is reserved for Regional Commanders whose last name starts with a C.”
Haha Ben, I love this!
Writing assessment with Diana and the DPS group and really missing your presence here.
I hope you are savoring your first days of retirement. Can’t wait for the War Room!
I don’t miss spending my summers working for that slave driver Diana. But somebody’s got to do it, and you and Paul and Joseph and the team are so shackled! I do miss all the talk about CI in those sessions, it’s where I learned a ton of stuff. And somebody really has to do it, in fact, don’t they? Think of the non-CI aligned assessments of the past, those common assessments based on chapters out of a book. Pure garbage. So write away, DPS writing team! Help kids and help us align with real stuff after a century of insane assessment based on memorization and not on actual gains in the language!
Having access to all that you produce in Denver would be such an asset to all of us lone wolves out here. I would gladly pay but, alas, I realize that all this is probably district property and not (ever?) available for outsiders. just daydreaming here…..
I have been tempted to steal those materials. Especially since I was retiring. What could they do to me? But I think that the process we are in has to proceed at its own pace. We want so much to be able to share what we know with others, but there are few Diana Noonans (only one) in positions of power. In most districts, it’s business as usual in the 1950’s, only with computer programs. The kids still do class in their conscious minds. The four percenters are still fully in charge. I will publish an article later today or tomorrow that will blow your mind about what some districts are up to. So what I am trying to say Brigitte is that DPS under Diana’s leadership serves as a model, but that the actual materials we have generated wouldn’t be embraced and used even if other districts had them. Maybe each district has to go through its own process. You have to be the lone wolf and that is not easy, as many in this PLC are also alone. That is why we need more regional activity like how Skip and Alice Yates started all that stuff in Maine that is just crushing it right now. By the way, Diana is the keynote speaker at NTPRS in Chicago. I would love to hear her address. She asked me what she should say and I told her to tell the Denver story. It is a great story and I have been privileged to have been part of it. Really, it’s Diana. You need a Diana in your district. She is the definition of fearlessness, and I have seen her remain professional and courteous in situations but if you listened carefully she was really dismantling the person. There aren’t too many people out there like that, in fact there aren’t any.
Now I can see that all my plans to get to NTPRS are going to be worth it! I’ll try to film her address if you won’t be there Ben, and send it to you! (Wait, you’re not going to be there?? What?)
Hey Michele, if we get a War Room going at NTPRS in Chicago it would be great if you could join!
🙂