A repost from March of 2009: Eugene and Bonnie Hamilton just spent a few days with me. Eugene is a Latin teacher and musician (French Horn) and Bonnie is a high school German teacher. We were talking between classes and Eugene said that he thought of stories as jazz, when some TPRS teachers turn them into […]
This post is from 2009. I republish it here because it is core to the kind of things I want to discuss here in this PLC. It just seems to me odd that if a good conversation is, as it says below, “divorced from any planned outcome”, then why are we so intent on targeting and analyzing and working
If you are new to all this, before you get too nervous about the changes that you wish to implement next year, I offer one important idea to hold on to – just take an image and work with it and stay with it and don’t go into any other stuff too fast. What does
There are days when we wish we could go into our classrooms and be mindless and not worry about anything at all, following a set of automatic steps that still hold our students’ attention for the entire class period. Below is a 90 minute lesson plan that does that for me. I use it
I wrote this in a comment to Bryce’s post but will add it here so I can put it in a category for search purposes: I doubt that Krashen ever said anything like, “Oh, and by the way, just throw in whatever English you need into the CI to keep things going.” Rather, those little
I wrote the following yesterday as a comment to something Mike said, but want to make it a blog here so I can reference it later to see how true it is. For yesterday’s classes, not using English at all was a great shot in the arm, and perhaps a sleeper, not just for me, but
Here is a link to an old blog from 2008 describing how spontaneity can be reached in a TPRS class if we but listen to the kids. I revisit it from time to time. It’s about being open to the moments of potential creativity during the CI. If we make our own luck then we can also make
There is a phrase in TPRS that was made famous by the master himself, Blaine. Thomas Young recently asked me and Bryce about it in an email: Hey guys, I have been thinking about the “tprs game” lately. How do you get your students to “play the game”? Any ideas are much appreciated! Thomas I
I am starting to realize that every time I want to break into English, I don’t have to. I can, but instead of doing it, say eight times a class period, I can just do it once. I can teach myself to avoid the needless English. Paul Kirschling (Thomas Jefferson High School, Denver) and I have
I was talking to Lynn in Canada and she was asking about using story scripts, how it can be easy to stay to stay too close to the story and tell it instead of asking it. She said this: …I’ve been trying to use my own scripts, but I’m telling instead of asking, and I
