Brian you and Brigitte both mentioned how you actually discuss how you use comprehensible input methods with others. I have done that too, a lot, and I wish I hadn’t. You can assume that nine of ten teachers with whom you speak about the exciting things you are doing in your classroom simply don’t want to hear it. Of those nine, a few of them will fight back as if threatened.
I didn’t know this earlier, and I got myself into some bad scrapes. I wouldn’t blame others in the TPRS community if they called me paranoid. But I am a talker and the only thing that is saving me now is being in a committed department where every single teacher is fully on board with teaching using comprehensible input, and where I now have full building and district support as you all know.
What makes me say these things is the image I can’t get out of my mind of Brian being set back on his heels by a dark force who asked him what he was doing in his classroom to get his students for the periodic speaking assessments expected by the district.
That image churned up feelings from my own experiences with these unique kinds of teachers who seem to lack interest in and compassion about new things in education, and whose energy is dark. I compare them to hard line ideologues in any field, those sad people who somehow get into a place of power in any walk of life and intimidate and bully others who are trying to find new ways to do things because the old ways espoused by these bullies don’t work.
Anyway, I do agree with the person Brian referred to as saying that TPRS is a bad word in certain places. It is, but only because some person went to a workshop and then very poorly implemented the method in their classroom while calling it TPRS. What is the other person to think? We can’t do that. We can’t set ourselves up for attack by calling what we do TPRS. Of course we will be met with disdain.
Rather, I recommend saying to others that we are using Krashen based methods based on the idea of comprehensible input and that we feel that doing that is best for our students. We can say that we are experimenting with ways to stay in the target language with our kids, as per current research and ACTFL. I would agree that we should never use the term TPRS with people we don’t know.
Because, in fact, we don’t do TPRS. Blaine does and it is great. But, in recent years, TPRS has morphed out of its own boundaries and now the real heading for what most people who are aligning with Krashen is CI anyway. Our groups in Denver are not TPRS groups, but TCI groups – that is the term we use since it is much more accurate: Teaching using Comprehensible Input.
I sense that Grant and Jim and Drew and others in our group do this well. They don’t use the terms TPRS. They quietly say, if asked, that they use comprehensibly input methods in their classrooms and they don’t go up to potential tar baby colleagues – it is tragic when we lose friends over ideas – and start conversations like I have done, making many enemies in the process, with people I shouldn’t have started in with, ever.
Too late for all that. Maybe I really am paranoid. I know that I don’t want to share my gold with fools, if that is a definition of paranoid. So, please accept this word of advice from an old warrior to anyone who thinks that they can discuss this stuff with most of their colleagues – don’t.