I now have a strong desire to share what I have learned about TPRS with as many people as I can back home, in earnest and with intensity (intentionally). Since I will have the time to go around and do that next year, I look forward to visiting as many schools back home as I can with my message that TPRS can and should be done without lesson plans.
This is a subtle point. Most people say, “Oh, new people need training wheels!” and they get high on that. My position is that we need to leave the training wheels much earlier and just do stories, even just the super mini stories described in my last book. Yes, we must allow that teachers in some schools have to turn in lesson plans and I respect that, but my fear is that the lesson plans will become the method, and that is the point of this post. We MUST keep TPRS/CI instruction spontaneous and free.
Currently with new people we leave leave the training wheels on far too long and then the training wheels become the method, which is happening now. Then everyone can say that they “do TPRS”, but they don’t. TPRS does not roll that way. It is a kind of teaching that simply can’t happen if the training wheels are left on. Let’s not allow TPRS to become the TPTW – Teaching Proficiency through Training Wheels – method.
So what I want to do when I return in June is train as many people as I can to do TPRS without turning it all into a bunch of lesson plans. I can do that and the videos that I will share soon here will show how. I objected to this new and alarming trend in TPRS in June of last year, before iFLT and was unduly chastised by a few experienced people in our PLC and I even found myself apologizing to a few people at iFLT. I believe that we need to keep TPRS pure. I know, not a popular position but I am not known for popular positions.
In my deepest heart I know that we can’t do TPRS with lesson plans – we must do it in a far more lofty and free way – and something tells me that lesson plans are going to become the “new TPRS”. So I have to go with what I think is true and right, and that is to work on the fundamentals, yes, and have a “plan”, yes, but not to have lesson plans*. That’s going too far.
Nice ramble, Ben!
*to be clear, my two most recent books Stepping Stones to Stories and The Big CI Book are NOT about lesson plans.