Q. I first purchased Susan Gross’s DVDs and saw lots of circling and reps. When I googled for TPRS I found your website and got two of your books: Stepping Stones & TPRS in a Year. I got the idea that you too advocated this kind of circling and reps. But in the PLC I find much less emphasis on circling and a NT-approach. So I’m a little confused. Did I misapprehend these parts in you books? And is the “Invisibles” about NT?
A. Basically Susan Gross in about 1999 started a movement to make what Blaine Ray was doing, and this is all my opinion, palatable in the extreme atmosphere of schools, where real human communication, quite frankly, is rare. This required a strong focus on targeting, bc only with the targets could TPRS be made to look like a curriculum. The force of Susan’s very strong personality made me a believer and for fifteen years I wrote books about targeted instruction. I went to the conferences. I did the circling training. Anne Matava did as well, even plucking “targets” out of her naturally non-targeted scripts and putting them, on my advice, at the top of each script in order to make it look like it targeted words.
So it all became, via the targets, compatible with a school curriculum. People, Joe Dziedzic and Martina Bex and others, built and sold TPRS “curriculums” that addressed/mirrored the subject matter found in school language textbooks. Readers, first written by Blaine and then some really fine ones by Carol Gaab, became available. Denver Public Schools, under Diana Noonan’s leadership, became the first major metro district, to my knowledge, to start backwards planning from the novels to align with district thematic unit curriculum documents. It was at that point, about eight years ago, half way into my TPRS years, that I wanted out. Why?
My classes were weak. Rarely were the stories any good. I felt nervousness doing massive reps of circled targets. It wasn’t really fun. I soldiered on. Then, after I retired from Denver Public Schools in 2014, I wrote the Big CI Book, which accurately collected in one place all the strategies I had invented over the years, strategies like One Word Images and Questioning (formerly Circling) with Balls and the Word Chunk Team game. Little did I know that my view on all that would change personally for me as a teacher in the next year.
What happened was that after writing that book in 2014 I then went to teach at the American Embassy School in New Delhi for the 2015-2016 school year. I could see from my colleagues in that school, as a kind of revelation, that targeting words/structures in the way that Susan pioneered was against what I felt was best for the kids. Half way through the year I felt as if my stories sucked and so I invented the Invisibles, which (a) don’t target any words, (b) make no attempt to align with a curriculum, (c) work from images created by the kids, employ a special collection of really cool jobs as well as (d) a certain way of asking questions that doesn’t involve circling. The result was that I felt as if I had been launched into a new orbit with this work. The stories were so much better.
So then I wrote my most recent book, A Natural Approach to Stories – the Invisibles. It was started there in India a year ago and was just finished a month ago. Without Tina Hargaden helping me write it, it wouldn’t exist. Writing it was like coming out of the NT closet, one that I had been in for fifteen years. When I started naturally to share it online, people, notably Karen Rowan on the iFLT list and Dr. Terry Waltz and Lizette Liebold on the moretprs list, started saying with nails in their mouths that I was claiming that I had invented a new way to do TPRS.
So Tina and I decided to go ahead and make our own small conference this summer in Portland. I can never again attend one of those targeted/circled conferences because they haven’t changed in 20 years. Tina and I are encouraged that we have been given support by some really outstanding CI teachers, Michael Peto and Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg and others. .
Most people are quite fine with targeted instruction and they like to sing its praises. I am not trying to change them. I say live and let live. If most of the people in TPRS in schools are doing targeting, then good for them. It is possible that the 90%+ teachers using targeting and calling it TPRS (even though Blaine doesn’t target), will never even begin to think about trying to redirect their instruction in a non-targeted direction.
But, to answer your question, the discussion here on the PLC, as you have observed, is more and more about how to do non-targeted input, in particular story listening and the Invisibles. Why not do that, since targeted instruction is being discussed literally everywhere else online right now?
Thus, for fifteen years until that last year in India I lived a kind of lie. In my efforts during those fifteen years to fully master and understand TPRS as targeted instruction – T1, the coin of the realm for the past fifteen years in TPRS, I just ran out of gas on it. I wasn’t really enjoying it. I so wanted to fully grasp the core of the profession – comprehensible input – to which I had given my life to the extent that I wrote books about how to do it, the books you mention. I put so much of myself into those books. I was writing for myself, to understand. Then when I saw a better way I wrote a new book about that.
One more point: Some people are now saying that a teacher needs to be trained in the instructional skills of TPRS first in order to then be able to move to NT instruction. I say that is not true. In fact, TPRS/T1 work is much harder to learn than NT instruction. The simplicity of NT seems to be the problem for most teachers.