This is a plug for iFLT next month. You go around and watch teachers teach in the mornings. You are shuffled around to each one of them. You sit in the room as they teach kids, and they don’t talk to you at all – they just teach for 2 1/2 hours. It’s a good training plan. And there are lots of afternoon sessions.
Each year 75% of attendees at national conferences are new. That means that a lot of the attendees at national conferences don’t return for training the next year. The obvious conclusion is that people drop out of this kind of teaching at an alarming rate.
They try it, they spring for the large amount of money and time away from family and loved ones to take a crap shoot on some training, and they come home disappointed and more confused than ever. We can’t have that.
Susan Gross has shared with me privately that she feels that out of every 100 people who attend her trainings, one may attempt the method and, of those who attempt it, out of every 100, only one successfully implements it in her classroom. Why is this?
In a few months millions of kids are going to walk into foreign language classrooms with all the enthusiasm of youth. They honestly will expect to learn a language. Most of them will be bitterly disappointed by October when they realize the game is skewed in favor of memorizers and verb conjugators. How can we let this happen?
We must find a better way to train each other. No more kids feeling stupid. We can’t allow it. It’s almost criminal, really, and it has been going on for a long time. We need to change and we will change.
We will change how we train teachers and we will train how we communicate with each other so that we are not a big cackling mess of egos but rather are working together to actually and effectively bring real change, not by listening to experts (there are none) but by teachers working together side by side.
That’s what I get from people like Bob Patrick and Laurie Clarcq and James Hosler and many others in our own PLC here – we share a desire to get to the core of the method and extract it for teachers’ use and we don’t care much about the politics and all that other stuff, although they necessarily enter into our daily conversations here. We want to learn the method.
Money is tight, but do try to get whatever training you can this summer. Blaine has a bunch of regional trainings in various U.S. cities, which I recommend. NTPRS is in Dallas this year. Susie won’t be there, but a lot of talented trainers will be. I recommend iFLT for the Learning Lab/Real Classroom approach it offers. Plus you get to hang out with Stephen Krashen.
Here’s the website:
https://tprstorytelling.com/conference/