Here is a repost from 2012. It applies again to how we can begin the 2014-2015 school year as well:
It is the main purpose of this site to help teachers find ways to make comprehensible input work for us in our classrooms. Of course, what works for one doesn’t always work for another, and there is no set formula for success in this work.
Our work with comprehensible input must mesh with our personality. This, of course, is a rejection of all standardization, and the work thus can become a thrilling internal journey of discovery for each of us each day.
The ideas presented in these web pages are merely guidelines, the banks of the river, as it were, for the rivers of our own careers to flow within, each one different.
PQA is one such set of river banks. Stories provide another. Reading gives us a third set of guidelines for us to flow within as we bobble along down the river in this work with our students bobbling along next to us.
Comprehensible input is the powerful current that drives the river forward, and Blaine Ray is to be acknowledged for his singular contribution to the creation of the Three Steps. It is he who unlocked the process – specifically how to take a few target structures in PQA and turn them into stories – that makes this all work.
But to try to do CI in the way that Blaine does it is inconsistent with the truth that this powerful river is really designed for each of us to experience as an extension of our own personalities and interests. There is nothing that can prevent us from gaining mastery over this work more than the fixed idea that there is only one way to do it.
So, we must let go of the banks of the river – PQA and stories and reading as the Three Steps of TPRS – and learn to float along the more rapidly moving waters at the center of the river. There will be rocks, rapids, big turns in the river, debris (naysayers) and they will all teach us things that are personal, as each day of teaching reveals things about ourselves that are unique to our own experience as teachers, in this hard internal work that not everyone can embrace.
There are many articles on this site that have to do with water. Water is a good image to describe the flow of what we do, and the reader is encouraged to search the word FLOW on this site to get a feel for the real release point of this work, that concept that challenges us to let go of the banks of the river and all formulae and develop our own unique version of CI for ourselves, to keep it unique to us and therefore profoundly more interesting to our students with each passing year.
Each of us can make comprehensible input into a reflection of our own personalities this year. We can hug the banks of the river as long as we want before doing that, of course – there is no one way to do it and no formulated time for us to begin swimming in the deeper currents of the method – but at some point we have to let go. It is all an individual process.
Some may cling to TPRS materials, formulaic products, that tell them what to do for years, but eventually they will let go and swim on their own. Only then will they realize what they’ve been missing.