To view this content, you must be a member of Ben's Patreon at $10 or more
Already a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Subscribe to be a patron and get additional posts by Ben, along with live-streams, and monthly patron meetings!
Also each month, you will get a special coupon code to save 20% on any product once a month.
13 thoughts on “Robert's Full Scope and Sequence Article in One Place”
Dear Robert,
Thank you for your scope and sequence musings which in a clear and intelligent way explain what fuels us practitioners of TCI/CI/TPRS. In one place, I now have a clearly articulated vision of CI that will help inform my discussions with administrators, department chairs, and colleagues who just don’t get it! Excellent. Safe travels.
Best,
Carol
Thank you, Robert. This is such a cogent, useful document.
Dear Robert,
This is incredible. Thank you for the time, insight and commitment you show. Enjoy your travels!!!
with love,
Laurie
Yes, thanks so much, Robert. Invaluable document.
Thank you so much for sharing this, Robert. What a great tool to have and whip out as necessary.
I just read it again. It’s a tour de force.
Thank you, Robert. As always, everything you write is clear, detailed and immediately useful in the discussions we are having in our department PLC’s.
Enjoy the rest of your travels.
Clarice
Robert,
This is excellent. This is truly the information that needs to spread throughout school PLCs and Curriculum Committees/Subject Area Committees, until it reaches the Tipping Point.
During the summer of 2012, our WL Dept. completed Curriculum Writing for Levels I and II Spanish. The Scope-and-Sequence that you laid out in this document is eerily similar to what we created.
The scope and sequence was presented to the larger Subject Area Committee and approved. It has since been retracted, and new curriculum writing is currently being completed this week. I am hopeful that ours is a case of two steps back and then one forward.
Thank you for taking the time to not only gether the thoughts, but so consisely assemble them into one document that you shared here. It’s as if this group is writing it’s own ‘textbook.’
I loved reading this piece in its entirety. It is extensive in explanation, understandable with examples, and concise with fact all while being presented as a conversation.
I have already presented ideas I have learned from it to justify, explain, and defend teaching with CI.
A huge thanks for sharing this!
I have no idea where to put this, so I’m posting here.
On my Facebook feed I got the following two messages this evening from former students:
Shoutout to Herr Harrell for drilling enough German into my head over four years for me to pass German with flying colors two years later. 🙂 (N.B.: This student was not a particularly strong student but stuck through four years.)
Shoutout for Herr Harrell for the 4 years that waived me out of German. (N.B.: This student was a fast processor, and German was his third language after Vietnamese and English.)
And now for a completely different anecdote. One of the things that helped convince me that TPRS/TCI was effective was what happened with a student assistant I had. This guy had flunked out of Spanish and wasn’t terribly interested in learning a language, he just needed a place in the middle of the school day to stay busy. I took him on and had him doing things like making photocopies, cutting paper, even coloring a German children’s coloring book for kindergarten day. One day he was working away in the room while I taught. At the end of the period I gave a quiz and, just for fun, asked him to take it. 100%. He was so proud of that that he asked me if I would put it up on the wall behind where he usually sat. I did so and figured that if a kid who was concentrating on something else could understand what was going on in German, then the method had to be pretty good.
On TPRS being the best method for everyone . . .
I gave equivalent forms of writing, reading, and listening tests in October and then in January and I can say that most kids (7th & 8th graders) showed improvement in all areas. But here’s some general observations:
– there is quite the range of abilities
– some kids could write, some could not (and this year I have done NO writing)
– a few kids did not improve in 1 or more areas
– listening was by far everyone’s strength (only 1 kid wrote an inaccurate summary)
I considered what I could do to reach all the kids and get them all to improve. I decided more homework and more tests wouldn’t do it. My solution is to have kids self-evaluate on the communication rubric daily and each student has the form stapled into their notebooks where they’ll report every day. And I’m going to be doing some cold-calling on those students who scored in the lower range – interrupting the flow more often to ask in L1 and L2 “What did I just say?” I’m going back to more Blaine-like “mastery” with more targeted lessons and parallel characters. Also I think FVR is only going to further the gaps between CAN Reads and CANNOT Reads, so for the lower students I think I will need them reading with me. At the same time, I realize that the kids not doing well in a TPRS class wouldn’t be doing any better in a more traditional or output-based class.
I have presently settled on only doing FVR with levels 3 & 4. It works nicely for them since I have a variety of very beginning level books now, and they can choose from supposedly level 1-only readers. (Ha, level one readers, my foot. I’m using one of them with level 2 and it’s plenty of new stuff and plenty of challenge. In fact, it’s a book that after 2 or 3 chapters, got too complex for the 3’s and most 4’s to read on their own… all but one student selected easier books since I gave that option. That one student is now starting a level 2 book on his own and doing well.)
I completely stopped after attempting with middle school kids. It never worked for me, even as a 5-minute event once every 6 class days.
I have a real mix of kids who can and cannot read independently. Also appealing about FVR is the down time it affords me.