Today I got an email from Ray Bauer who is doing important work in elementary TPRS. His email reflects perfectly my thoughts of recent weeks, that kids ultimately need to feel in control of generating their own stuff for the CI class.
(I can think of only one exception to the above statement, and that is re: stories generated by Anne Matava and Jim Tripp and other master story crafters. Wonderfully crafted stories will always be as or more effective than stories generated by kids. I feel that we might be rapidly moving in the direction where both will be commonly used in TPRS classrooms.)
Anyway, here’s Ray’s email:
Hey Ben,
Today as I was in the middle of some PQA about Halloween with a sixth grade class I took a moment to reflect on how much teaching (and life in general) is better with Comprehensible Input. The retention level is amazing. I’m the only Spanish teacher in my school and I feel like I can pick up one year right where we left off the previous year with confidence that kids remember the vocabulary and structures.
My sixth graders now are on their second year of Comprehensible Input but I can only imagine the possibilities when the current first and second graders reach sixth grade. Hopefully the budget cuts don’t affect me and we can see how far this program can go.
I have recently started to give the kids student-generated texts. Volunteers write funny stories for the classes to read. I often show several classes stories that individual students write. Not only are the other kids curious to read their classmates ideas, but the authors love the attention. I’ve seen this become the sole source of getting a kid totally hooked on Spanish.
Thanks for all the support, ideas and tricks on the blog.
Ray
In particular, Ray’s sentence about student generated texts:
“…I’ve seen this become the sole source of getting a kid totally hooked on Spanish…”.
is therefore well timed for me as I move, spurred on by Duke and Michele, into less and less of a “controlled by me” CI environment in my classroom. If one thinks about it , moving in the direction of giving up control of the CI in a TPRS classroom would probably be a rather noxious thought to most main stream TPRS teachers, given what we had to do to retool from what we used to do. We think we are the CI maestros and that’s it. Well, that is what I used to think. I must give some good thought to what 35 different kids are experiencing in my classroom. Yes, we differentiate naturally, but could a closer look at this idea of giving up control in our classrooms and really exploring, developing, the concept of play lead to more gains and happier kids? That’s my question du jour these days.