Catherina said that she got confused with the voiceover and I agree that it is too much to absorb. It’s very similar to asking our students to understand when we go too fast and provide too much information and the class is not comprehensible. So we need to address that.
One thing that we can do is to go through our footage and pull shorter clips and focus on just one thing, and then either:
1. write out our comments in the email you send me with the link to your clip so everybody can see what your intent is or address any questions you raise about it.
2. voiceover to explain same.
I think that Skip and others were thinking in the above direction when they suggested a set of criteria to frame out our work in looking at the videos. This ties in, as well, with what Brian said when he suggested that we to try to make connections between our video clips and the skills mentioned in TPRS in a Year!
The shorter clips with less commentary may be the way to go. We have to make it so that we can learn from each other. As we iron out the details of how we are going to use video here, we must keep fully in mind that we all suck to some degree, and that we can, and must if our program is going to work, embrace that.
We absolutely must get rid of the very concept of comparing our work to others and then feeling like we come up short. We live in a culture that shames. Schools work basically on shaming people, on shaming msny kids at the expense of a few.
But we can change that. We can get into a win-win with our kids. We can get into a win-win with ourselves regarding posting these video clips. Drew and Angela started it off and we can get it rolling and showed a lot of courage in doing that. They took a big risk and I am taking a big risk too.
It is virtually impossible to put our best work up here, or anywhere near it. I have had to work through this. The video I have is not representative in any way of my best work, and I am having a hard time with that. But we have to accept the limitations of the medium of video and put the shit that we do get up her by clicking the mouse and letting it go. We can’t wait for that “magical class”.
All we have to do is accept ourselves where we are in this process. Can we do that? Can we love ourselves even though we aren’t perfect teachers? We have to, unless you want to be like me and take eleven years to get to the point I am at with all this, which is nowhere near where I feel like I can be in my teaching some day, a point I will never get to without your input.
So, let’s see if shorter clips with minimal (targeted to one skill) comments that we either describe by write out or voice over our thoguhts in the links that you all send to me. By posting only shorter segments of our classes, and by trying to isolate a featured skill and say, “O.K. now I can see that I am going too fast here, or here is an example of parking, here I am confronting a kid in a loving way, or here I am bringing some out of bounds words inbounds”, etc. we can grow.
Below are two short clips. One is from Monday’s three hour workshop I did with the DPS teachers. It will take weeks if not months to share al of that workshop here. In this clip, I am trying to model Circling with Balls:
The other video is from a reading class that I did yesterday with the class that created the Pan story. It is not a good example of a reading class, but, in the spirit of what is written above, it gives the general feel of what a reading classs is.
I want to make three points about reading classes:
1. They are best when there is a lot of pure translation work being done by the students. That is modeled in the clip below. This is what Krashen says is best. You can read his book The Power of Reading on this, or, if you haven’t read it, you can just take my word for it. If you want your students to learn the language you are teaching them, then do this kind of translation/reading work at least a full 50% of your instructional time.
2. The second thing to do in a reading class, which I don’t do enough of in this clip, is to spin out and ask simple yes/no questions to the kids about the text. Don’t do too much spinning, but do some. Why not too much spinning? Because reading is a more powerful form of comprehensible input than speaking to our kids in the target language. The catch-22 is that our kids can’t read without the auditory input first.
3, The third thing is teach grammar. In these moments you can become the grammar teacher that lurks inside of you. Go for it! This is the time to do it! But don’t go crazy and above all don’t use any grammar terms. Just point stuff out to your students in kid friendly terms. Most of the kids don’t care about those terms, only 4% of your students do. Just say things like “this means this” or “look how the word ‘it’ comes in front of that other word that describes an action in French – we don’t do that in English, do we?” – and stuff like that.
Below the link provided here to the reading class I have copied the process of how I do a reading classe. I copied and pasted it from the workshop handouts I did on Monday. As always, I must say that this in only how I do it, and I offer it here in that spirit. Here is the link:
Part C – The Reading Class is done according to the following sequence of activities:
a. Silent reading of the first page of the prepared text (usually a generic version of five classes’ stories).
b. Pair work. Students work in pairs to try to read the text.
c. Choral translation and discussion of text in L2. This includes discussion in L2 on spinouts from the text, but this is also when we teach grammar. I prefer going paragraph by paragraph through the sequence.
d. French choral and individual work on accent – this can be a very special time as we finally are able to hear, after constant input and relatively little verbal output, how our students’ brains have organized the language in this newly emergent output. We notice how well they pronounce the language (as long as there wasn’t any forced output too early.)
e. Sacred reading of the text – this is a particularly fine thing. Toward the end of the reading class, I take the opportunity to read the text to the kids without their being able to see it. But I don’t read it like a teacher. I read it like it is a secret that I want to share with them. I read it to them in a dramatic tone. I try to lend a kind of sacred feel to the words. They are as people attending a play, the dramatic moment of a play. One DPS teacher told me that she recently did this sacred reading and that the kids were blown away that the understood it. That’s the point. The kids told her that she should have been an actress.
f. Translation quiz (optional) – pick any paragraph from the reading and have the students translate it into English for a quick and easy grade.
Note: we use the Embedded Reading technique when creating reading texts based on stories. I embed readings based on stories with about 30% new vocabulary and grammar added in to the reading to build students’ vocabulary, teach more grammar, and create more unpredictable and personalized stories to heighten interest. So in the link above about 30% of the text that I wrote up of the Pan story is new vocabulary.