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Compact R & D – cRD
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23 thoughts on “Compact R & D – cRD”
Wow dude. That was intense. There is a ton in there. I’ll need to read that again and again to digest, but I love the flavor. The concept narrow and deep is where we need to be. You got it right. Until I read it again…
Jeff
This came at a perfect time, and it is exactly what I was looking for. I am reading a novel (El Nuevo Houdini) for the first time with one of my classes after a year of doing stories. I am frustrated with the fact that although I am delivering plenty of CI, novels do not provide that same meaningful repetition as do stories (i.e. target structure in EVERY sentences). This makes so much sense though. It is almost as if this paragraph (for which we will go narrow and deep) IS the story, while the parts in between are connectors that provide less-targeted CI.
One thing I would love to see, though, is a clip of this narrow and deep work with a short text. Since I started with TPRS, I feel I have improved considerably in this area, but it still amazes me that many of you are able to keep it going (and keep it interesting) for an extended period of time on just a few sentences. I’d love to see this in action. Great post.
…it is almost as if this paragraph (for which we will go narrow and deep) IS the story, while the parts in between are connectors that provide less-targeted CI….
That’s a deep insight.
My record for this kind of reading – the biggest taffy pull of all if you will – happened on March 21, 2012, with basic R & D on a chapter of Houdini with parallel information being created by me and my kids lasting 27 classes in a row.
Just kidding. But yeah, let’s talk about working on this in those afternoon sessions in San Diego. I hope I don’t forget because we only have about 12 hours over four days on all the other start-the-year stuff and the focus is on coaching teachers in those things. I will try to film those sessions and post that video here after the conference. I just have to remember to work on doing this and getting it on film. cRD really is fun to do because you get to use Annoying Orange so much, which drives the kids nuts.
I’m glad you said that Jeff. Thank you. I agree. Narrow and deep is the future of this work. We have to start thinking in terms of thousands of reps and not hundreds. Or tens of thousands. It’s how we are really wired! The brain was not wired for 53 minute classes.
We really need to make a list of the big ideas from this year, because they are transformative in nature. What can we add to what I have written below as Blue Chip ideas from this year?
jGR
Two Weeks Weekly Schedule 2013
jGA
cRD
Awesome. I love the focus on a few structures for real acquisition and the opportunities for the future tense.
Two questions:
1) By “snowplowing through the boring parts” do you mean “translate the text into English out loud while reading the French/Spanish/German/whatever text in the book”? Like all the students follow along while the teacher or a volunteer translates? Should there be a choral translation with the text projected on the board? I think this part needs more explanation. Does the text just get translated as quickly as possible so that you can get the good bit for the day?
2) Do you think there need to be two versions of R&D, one for stories (from the third step of TPRS) and another for novels (by Blaine, Carol, et al.)? I think this has come up before, but we never really got to an answer. Or are the stories short enough that one should do cRD for everything in them?
Your first question is exactly what I’m wondering. I’d also like to know how this fits into the new weekly schedule as of 2013. Ben is saying this can last a whole 50-some minute period…..
The only thing is to make reading a novel a separate thing we do for a week or a month. Using this idea, we would do the two week schedule and then do cRD as a kind of snowplow thing whenever we want to read a novel (that’s what susie teaches – snowplow means snowplow; you literally plow through the book), but now with Compact R & D we would have those pauses for the one paragraph impact days and it would slow the reading of the novel down but there is nothing that can be done about that. I guess that is my answer on how it (doesn’t) fit into the 2013 schedule.
If you are new here and don’t know what the 2013 schedule is, go read that category – Weekly Schedule 2013. It’s a nice thing to use. It’s boss. It’s fab. It’s rave. I think. It’s a big fat schedule that you can plug into that will take you through a nicely contiguous kickass week of CI with honestly very little effort. OK, I’ll say it even though I made it up – it’s B.A.
I’m just thinking out loud here . . .
If the stories are based on something the class creates, haven’t you already done essentially all of the discussion before the story is created? Then the story is the comprehension check with further transparent input. Students have an inherent interest in the story because it is their story, and it is transparent in meaning because it uses the language they have been acquiring through PQA, PSA, Storyasking, Acting, etc. I’m not saying that Reading and Discussing is not possible at this point, just that the story seems to me to be sort of an end product.
With a graded reader, the story is new because it is not one that students have created. I understand Ben to be saying that, rather than being totally a culminating event toward which you have been teaching, the reader becomes another avenue for acquisition. There is vocabulary that is new, so it is not transparent. Thus, you have two ways in which you can deal with that new vocabulary. The high-frequency, interesting words in interesting settings can become the structures for compact read and discuss; the rest of it becomes “snowplow material” – just get through it and don’t worry about acquisition of lower-frequency words as long as students understand the gist of the story so that they are ready for the next time you do compact read and discuss. You might not even read all of the parts of the book but just summarize them for the class (in the target language).*
*This fits very well with advice from Jason Fritze (just summarize the end of the book if you don’t have time to read it; don’t try to “cover the material” and push people) and with the “Rights of the Reader” from Daniel Pennac. Some of these rights are:
#2. The right to skip
#3. The right not to finish a book
#4. The right to read it again
#8. The right to dip in [i.e. just read a paragraph or page because it’s what interests you]
#9. The right to read out loud
#10. The right to be quiet
http://www.walker.co.uk/UserFiles/file/Rights%20of%20the%20reader/NYOR_ROTR.pdf
Yes Robert this is an important point to address:
…if the stories are based on something the class creates, , haven’t you already done essentially all of the discussion before the story is created?…
New people here in our group, especially, should take careful note that the presumed way it worked for the past twenty years, and we would all be told to do this at conferences, was that the very reason for the stories was to get enough reps on all the words in the book and, once those stories had led to acquisition of the words in the book, the kids would pick up the book and read it effortlessly.
But there are two issues with that:
1. It would take 50 stories to set up one book and there would be some much cross checking of structures, writing stories and then making sure this and that structure was in a story before it got read in a novel (gag me) and as time went on it just got nuts. There were too many words in the novel! And yet this is still done, except for me, who worships at the alter of Matava and doesn’t line up structures to set up the reading of novels for diddly because I am totally into the Natural Order hypothesis.
2. If Sabrina is right, that they need 2000 reps and not 200, that shoots that whole 20 year old plan in the foot anyway.
So, what to do? Well, do ER like Michele said here in this thread, and/or do what you said here:
…rather than being totally a culminating event toward which you have been teaching, the reader becomes another avenue for acquisition….
Question 1:
Susie thinks it is fine if the book is in their hands for the snowplow translation. It works fine. Sometimes the control freak that I am wants to see their eyes up where I can see them and grade them with jGR (an ongoing formative assessment process), which connects to your question, James, about the text being projected on the board via a camera. But, really they both work. Depends on the teacher.
Question 2:
I don’t use R & D for reading stories created by the class (Step 3). I created a different process – Reading Option A – for that about four years ago when I was at East High School. Reading Option A just seems to lend itself to more to readings of stories and R & D is better for novels. At least that is my opinion and is based on my own experience.
Ha! I’ve been doing that instinctively with our first novel in year one. Realizing that only snowplowing wouldn’t work well and only going slow would bore them and not get us anywhere, I’ve created these islands of slow in the process.
I can attest that it works well.
In the poor Ana story, for example, you can stop in the beginning, circly hair color, etc. briefly, snowplow until the “her mom yells at her” and do some reenactments with yelling with the students.
Good one, Charlotte, I am reading PA now and jumped out of the book to do a story using three structures that were getting a weak response in the choral translation. I need to slow down the snowplow a tad. Thanks!
The snowplow should indeed by a slowplow. But steady.
Yes, the snowplow is a snowplow, but every once in a while you put it in park, jump off and go play in the snow. Two completely different activities.
I would love to see some more on the PSA. Also – do you still suggest personalizing the same way as you do in PQA in a Wink?
I am hoping to personalize my class to levels never seen before in south Fulton next year. I want to make it ALL about the students and hopefully get some more to buy in.
Then just do PQA all year. Skip can attest to the results when all you do is PQA. Entire worlds can be built.
There is a new edition of PQA in a Wink! being written with additions but they are not major deals. I’m going to try to have that out by 2078.
Personalization is largely a state of mind. If you really care about your students, personalization and fun occur naturally. Personalization is an affair of the heart. The kids get it when you care enough about them to make up funny stuff with them and gloat on that funny stuff and exaggerate and imagine and compare with famous people and create more funny stuff on top of that as the weeks go by.
Krashen’s word compelling is completely dependent on how much the room has been personalized.
Another way to do this kind of repetition (for those of us who have only two novels written at the level we need in our language, and those are really at the year 2-4 level) is to use Embedded Reading (ER).
Russian 1 has an ER that has gone from two inspired first sentences to two single-spaced pages . . . in its twelfth version! I challenged my students to take their HF semester vocabulary list and develop a story. It started: “Clint Eastwood wants a tall girlfriend. He drives to the beach.” After we circled and PQA’d that for a while, everyone looked at the HF list and helped add some details. In the end, CE turns out to have stolen the car, so the smart, pretty girl in our class whom he tries to pick up gets mad at him, and the police come to take him away. He escapes by buying police uniform at the gift shop in the police station.
The final version is two pages of tightly-written (if silly) prose. We’ve added to it over an entire week, following Laurie’s mandate of doing “something different” with each version. We are simultaneously doing MovieTalk and giving the lone senior in Russian 1 her final…it’s that time of the year… but they have drawn story boards, acted, done reader’s theater, made add-on murals, done running dictation, done Betsy’s back-to-the-screen re-tell, translated, and read in funny voices.
What I wanted to say is that it was cool to see how the kids worked to get the piece embedded, not really realizing that they were absolutely nailing down the structures that were being repeated in the progressive versions of the ER.
Some of the biggest knuckleheads (and I say that word with absolute love in my heart) have been able to respond and re-tell this story in an amazing way, using a variety of verbs and verbs of motion unusual for first-year kids. I chalk it up to finally having had enough repetition with the same basic pieces. Usually I cave after three versions of ER, thinking that three is plenty and that the kids are going to get bored. They like it though. They like their increasing facility with the language. When the senior was doing her fast-into-English translation of the last piece (because I didn’t want to create a separate final just for her), she faltered on a couple words, and literally the whole class jumped in to help her so that the reading continued smoothly.
I think you’re right. I love this new idea for reading a novel. A tight, hugely repetitive focus on just a little bit of information gets amazing results. I only wish I had more novels to do it with, but in the meantime, we’re going to create our own.
Hi Michele,
Your class sounds wonderful! I would like to know about these things you mentioned (I don’t remember them, and I would like to find more ways to process readings): add-on murals, running dictation, and Betsy’s back-to-the-screen re-tell.
Thanks for links and/or information you add here!
Laurie’s murals: as you tell or read a story, you draw a picture, but not necessarily in order. You make sure that you have everything in the writing presented visually. Then the kids can do a retell the next day, or the teacher can save the best drawings for unit or final exam re-tell options.
Jason’s running dictation: you prepare a four-to-six-sentence dictation that is out in the hall or behind a screen. Kids work in pairs. One writes what the other reads on the dictation poster and runs back to the writer to dictate. (I like to do this on white boards so that they hold them up for being correct.) When they get one right, they switch roles and do the next sentence.
Betsy’s back-to-the-screen re-tell: When there’s a story that the kids know well, put it up on the projector. Kids sit in pairs. One looks at the screen and gestures to the other, who speaks the words. The one looking corrects as necessary. The kids think that the person benefitting is the one speaking. Instead, it’s the one who is reading and processing. When the first one gets it perfectly, the pair switches.
Just FYI y’all I just now added or heavily edited the part in orange since publishing this earlier today.
Ben, I would love to sit down with you in Dallas and talk about the Australian system of “Scaffolding Literacy,” because I think the SL idea of honing in on a small piece of the writing is going to resonate with you, now that you’ve written this post. It’s more work for the teacher up front, but it gives meaning in context at a whole bunch of different levels for kids, and with the personalizing that you would bring to it, you would have a powerful punch.
Michele I deeply admire what you and Laurie are doing with all of the reading ideas but I don’t yet fully understand them and I find it hard to implement them into my teaching.
I think that this is largely because:
a) I lack whatever insight is necessary to wrap my mind fully around them.
b) I am lazy.
c) We are over the top in ideas here in this PLC.
I wish I could read and study and implement your work, and read more at other sites/blogs for new ideas, because so many fantastic ideas are out there, but it would cost me my sanity. I can’t even keep up here. And I won’t be in Dallas. Oh well.
Maybe this work is starting to splinter out into different directions, in the way one beam of light becomes many when directed through a prism.
It had to happen. Blaine couldn’t control this forever. Maybe it really is prism time, where the original Krashen pure ideas, which are universal, start getting refracted in different forms depending on the personality of the teacher reflecting (on) them. I must say that Blaine’s original TPRS model is an excellent reflection, hasn’t it been?
(Well I should say that I don’t think Krashen’s ideas are original . If you read a post I wrote about five years ago called “1963” you will see why. Find it here: https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/05/13/1963-a-blow-to-his-confidence-30/).
Maybe some day I will understand embedded reading and SL, but my new two week schedule is just so packed now there is no room in it anyway. There is no room at the inn!