A report from Hotlanta:
In these days when a lot of us are stressed and stressing (and I have been), I have had a couple of encouraging experiences that I want to report.
As you may recall, I have several workshops for teachers scheduled, and this past weekend, I did the first one with 30 teachers from various languages at the Foreign Language Association of GA. This was a 3 hour workshop entitled “Creating a Comprehensible Input Classroom”. As attempted with the title and workshop description, it attracted teachers who were already familiar with TPRS and most of whom were practicing it to some degree. I spent the time demonstrating (after an opening discussion of what CI is and what it is not–a welcome review they concluded) 8 of the CI processes that we can use. I have come to see, and said this often, that there are dozens of ways to deliver CI, many of which we know and share and practice and many of which have still yet to imagine. As soon as one of us imagines it and tries it and shares it, it joins the ranks of other CI processes.
FLAG does a great job of collecting random surveys of workshops and giving electronic feedback to the presenter, within an hour of the workshop’s end. I am very glad to say that the workshop got very high marks all the way around.
Of course, that all felt very good to me, but today was the icing. Three of my colleagues in my own department chose to come to this workshop. One, a Spanish teacher next door, unbeknownst to me decided (based on workshop discussion) to dive into Asking a Story with PQA yesterday with his most difficult Spanish 2 class. This class is made up of students who have all failed Spanish 2 once already.
He came to me this morning to tell me how it went and to ask for some coaching and fine tuning of how the PQA was going. I made some suggestions, including giving students pauses in the story he was going to tell today and letting them silently draw what they were hearing and labeling as they could. He came to get me after that class mid-morning all aglow about how it went. He had the drawings and was thrilled with that component of what they did. He is moving toward a timed write later this week.
He has often been very down and negative about this class. It was just so nice to see him excited about how this was working. He made his “most difficult” student the center of the story, and “even those who usually sleep through class” were engaged in the work today.
This work works if we work it. We also know that it’s exhausting, so, while we are being exhausted, it’s nice to get a reminder that it works!
The 8 hour workshop with World Language and Literacy Ed department at UGA is coming up in 3 weeks. Much excitement mounting as we approach that. More later,
Bob