I’m behind on Teacher of the Month but I’ll get caught up. This one is for March and is a no-brainer:
Throughout the month of March and throughout the year, we have benefitted from the intellectual prowess and expertise – it’s the right word – of Eric Herman. He has sent us videos, shared all sorts of research (he is all about the research and no doubt on that point) and, the main thing, he has given us large quantities of things to think about as we continue together to learn more about comprehension based teaching.
For every rock we turn over on the CI beach, looking for good things, Eric turns over a hundred. In that sense, to mix metaphors going from the beach to the countryside, he is like the engineer in the front of the train waving his hand and yelling for all the sacred cows to get off the track because the CI train is coming through. Here is a sample of that from a comment he made earlier this month:
…I think that as the FL pedagogy shifts further from grammar and more to communicative competence, the next battle, after grammarians go extinct, will be against output and the myth that “output practice makes perfect” in a FL….
Here is another example, a very insightful reaction written by Greg Stout to one of Eric’s ideas:
….I like Eric’s description of targets- “as just ways to stay comprehensible and ways for me to speak more naturally.” Like our targets aren’t special in and of themselves, but special because they keep us in bounds, like bumpers in bumper bowling. And the pins falling over at the end of the lane stand for the end-of-class bell after a continuous and comprehensible flow of language from a slow rolling trip down the lane between the bumpers….
Clearly, Eric gets us thinking. What I most enjoy reading in Eric’s observations, however, are the countless strategies he is always testing. His level of excitement to see if some new idea about CI can be successfully implemented in his classroom is reminiscent of how great inventors work – they just keep trying out new things.
We are lucky that Eric does that and shares all the things he tests in his classroom. We are extremely lucky to have him in this group. When he’s not up there in the engine of the train waving cows off, he’s holding a big arrow in his other hand pointing it down the track and around the mountain for all of us.