If you read my older books from 10-15 years ago, they are filled w details about how to make TPRS work. Each year from 1997 or so to 2015, when I finally jumped the TPRS ship, the skills and strategies got more and more complex until they were a real burden.
I attribute this to a cadre of the same people who each year would organize the summer conferences and their ideas – each year the same – put a kind of stranglehold on people. The message was that you had to keep going back to the conferences if you wanted to master it. Nothing really changed in those years.
I never thought until today how those increasing complexities, esp. in the area of skills that really were flawed, caused stress for people. It was SO MUCH to implement in the fall. As a result, people just quit and went back to the book.
Circling, in particular, has claimed a lot of victims. I’m not trying to bash TPRS – they were doing the best they good, but their belief in targets was what really crushed them. Only really good teachers could pull off the targeting game, teachers who could handle high stress and “get it all done”.
The concept of mixing CI w lists and textbooks now has, in general, a stranglehold on growth in the CI movement. Until CI teachers let go of targets, nothing will change and the stress will stay high. Testing, of course, plays its ugly role as usual.
I’m going to repeat that. Until we stop mixing CI with the textbook and free our instruction to align 100% w the research, and not just 50% as now, the CI movement will continue to stall.
Doesn’t it figure that if a movement has 25 years to prove itself and can’t get more than 5% of the national WL teaching corps to stay on the wagon, isn’t something wrong?
That’s the main point of this post, but I also wanted to say here that in my opinion you won’t really be free of stress in your classroom until you do two things:
(1) stop circling and start doing WBYT, which combines about five “important skills” into one, greatly reducing the stress you used to encounter in trying to remember to do those five skills while doing stories, and
(2) stop trying to mix CI with lists (high frequency verb lists, semantic sets, lists in textbooks, thematic units, backwards planning from chapters in novels lists, etc.).