Giving up control, staying in flow, and, most importantly, allowing the kids to feel in control as well, all while delivering massive amounts of CI every day, is what I have been wrestling with lately. It started with Michele’s comment here a few days ago:
“…they like doing illustrations for their own stories. They like coming up with their own needs of what to say. They like choosing the songs that they will sing and talking about the artists and the people in the songs. They like, in essense, running the class…”
This has to do with a fundamental shift in how I conceive of my TPRS classroom. It’s like a train I can hear but not see yet. The kids’ role in what we do must change. They must be given more freedom. But we all know what happens when kids are put in groups. What to do? I feel like I just got to the bottom of the stairs in the dark and I’m not sure which step is the bottom one.
My current French 1 kids are bringing this change. They are unlike any kids I have ever taught. I go in, and they start yelling out stuff they want to know before I can even start the lesson I had planned. After a great few months of Circling with Balls/Cards and fantastic One Word Images (the last one was “Pumpkin”), they just start in in French.
The student who wrote and recited the text from “A Wonderful Surprise” from a few days ago here, in another class started a discussion about her boyfriend in French that lasted the whole class period. (The artist went crazy with that one.) Another kid brought in a story about a French gymnast who won the world championship on vault last week, and we talked about that the entire period.
So this is kids driving content. But it can’t just be free form. It needs some structure. Plus, I certainly don’t want to stray too far from Blaine’s Three Steps, which, as far as I’m concerned, are the absolute guarantee of success in any TPRS classroom. How to blend what we know is working for us now with what we know is coming in terms of more kid ownership of the class?
I think what I am going to do as an initial experiment is start setting up a prezi.com page, which treats content spatially and not linearly and thus would allow me to go in any direction that “feels right” (vs. the dead concept of linear lesson plans).
Maybe the idea of having a bunch of links to all the potential cool things that I can do in my TPRS classroom in one place, on a prezi.com page, will give me some answers to how to give kids the feeling that they are more in charge of things. I really don’t know, but I love the idea of a place where I can present TPRS in spatial fashion.
I’ll mess with that site for awhile. If anyone else does, let me know how it goes. I really want to figure out a way to make the kids feel that they are in control, but not stray from the CI plan that we know works so well right now.
I will make new categories for
prezi.com
student centered TPRS instruction