Many group members who have been reading here for the past seven years would agree that the basics have been hammered out. The hammering is done, in my opinion, and the time for decorating – putting frills on strategies that we knew worked – arrived a year or two ago.
Not all will agree with that and will say just the opposite, that this method is ever-evolving and new things are always happening, but I don’t agree. I think anything new at this point would really be something old (vibrantly old, it will never lose its power) packaged in a new way. That is why I frequently say here that what we do is:
1a. establish meaning (of anything as long as it is simple and short, like a word or a few words together – what we call a structure).
1b. practice those words or structures in a friendly and personalized period of time that is fun and that could last five minutes or several days.
2. expand, if we want, that friendly discussion into something bigger that might take various forms like a story or a Movie Talk or a discussion of a picture or anything really, for fun.
3. read what we talked about and created together.
So I am just saying to new people that if you don’t see a lot of new training articles being published here, don’t be too concerned. The discussion we have here kind of follows the slope of the mountain as water does when it goes down a mountain, with the discussions being like corks on the water, bobbing up and down, disappearing out of view, etc.
But don’t let those discussions make you think that there isn’t any good basic training stuff here for new people to read. It’s just that it’s already been written. You have to find it. All you have to do is go down the list of categories, find something that resonates with where you are in your teaching right now, something you want to work on like PQA or Classroom Management, and go read those articles.
Anything we produce that would be new right now would be some variation on some of those articles. So if you are new and want training to improve what you are doing in your classroom in a real and concrete way, examine those categories or go into the archives from the years 2008 to 2011. Of course the Forum is always there as well for questions, or just email me and I will bring it up in an article with the group. But those were years 2009 to 2011 in the archives were the most fertile ones in terms of classroom teaching ideas that really bring the good stuff into our classrooms, in my opinion. Those were some amazing years.