Keri Colwell started doing comprehension based teaching last spring and has made great strides. I had asked her to report in on how things were going and the following is a compilation of the emails I have received from her so far this year.
As interesting as our discussion has been with ACTFL, and we hopefully keep that going because it is important to at least talk to those guys, but I feel that I want to steer the general discussion here back to more practical talk about the daily grind of getting CI up and running in our classrooms. So Keri’s report is right in line with that. We are always happy when teachers who have just discovered this work report on it. It is because the work is so hard, but the gains so worth it.
So here is Keri talking about various aspects of her year so far, and I am requesting that if anything she raises here speaks to anyone in the group, please write a response in a comment field. In that way we can answer her questions and keep that learning curve going for all of us.
This first report is from September:
Hi Ben,
Thank you for your response! I forgot to mention that the second time I did a TPRS story, it kind of bombed with my first class of the day. However, I know now that it was my fault because I was trying to hold on to tightly too the script. PQA is so fun, and easy, because there is no script and the kids take it to wherever they want to…and I let them. I believe that this is why it has been pretty successful. So, that story that didn’t go so well lasted about 20 minutes and then I actually just stopped it and had them draw some pics based on parts of the story we did create…it also got kind of weird because the story line was about some one getting stalked by someone else. *:-O surprise After that class, I literally felt like crawling under rock…I was so upset because I spent all summer preparing for this and, even though the other comprehensible input” classes went very well, the stories are certainly at the heart of TPRS. So, I felt very discouraged! Well, I learned quickly for the following classes that day not to worry so much what was written on paper for the story and to have the characters be animals (a bee stalking a rabbit)…it was much more entertaining and definitely not as weird as one student stalking another!! So, the following stories were successful!! I mention this because if I ever bomb another story, and it probably will happen because I am new at this, I will re read your email to be because it does give me the encouragement that I will need some days. Thank you.
Just one piece of good news…I did PQA in the class again with the boy who said it wasn’t sticking, and this time, using the structures (woke up, yelled, ran), I used your advice that I read somewhere and really tied them together to make it a little story. So, a student in class “woke up at a famous amusement park in the area with Santa Claus. The student yelled “You are crazy” and Santa Claus yelled back “Ho Ho Ho” (the kids played the roles and the class and I kept encouraging them to yell louder, not softly…hilarious), and then another student, who about five classes ago during PQA “was eating” pizza with Santa Claus, reappeared in this story and that student ran away because he was mad. I was laughing so hard that I literally had tears in my eyes…as well as the kids! Everyone was hysterical!!! So, after that PQA and before our novel reading, I just asked that boy right in front of class (maybe I shouldn’t have done it that way but it was bothering me knowing that he said right in front of class that this important method that I do was not sticking for him!)…so, I asked him, “Did it stick for you today?”, and he said “yes” with a smile. Hopefully he was truthful…but I believe so since he was hysterical himself that class.
So, anyway, I got only 39 reps of “ran”, about 55 or yelled, and “about 50 of “woke up”…so I know believe that quality of the story is more important than reps.
Thanks again for your help and I am looking forward to hearing any other thoughts that you, or others, may have.
Keri
Here is a second report from October:
Just a quick note to tell you that things have been going well. The only thing that I personally feel that I need to work on is circling a bit more when we are actually “telling a story”. I circle a lot in PQA…in fact, many times it seems like PQA is even more interesting!! Anyway, do you find yourself circling a lot in stories? I know that the structures are repeated in each scene and when we do retells, but I feel that if I am constantly repeating a structure to circle it, then it takes away from the story a bit. I can read in their faces sometimes that they just want to continue so I don’t circle too much. What do you think?
Also, today after my Spanish III class, two students came to me and said that they really feel that they have learned more in these two months than in their past two years of Spanish class (and I was the teacher of one of them for Spanish II). One of them said that the kids always ask themselves how their classes can relate to real life situations and most of the time they don’t feel as if their classes do, but she said that my class is actually “using” the language and she is enjoying it so much more this year.
So, this is all really thanks to you. Thank you for taking the time to read some of my lengthy emails and for helping me with this.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the circling.
Keri