I have long needed a simple and organized (therefore stress free) way to plan what I do each week with the kids. So below is my own way of organizing all of the information that I have gathered over the past twelve years in a way that works for me within the constraints of a week that contains only 4 1/2 hours of instructional time.
In no way is this suggested weekly schedule an attempt to standardize the method, although the point should be made that the TPRS /CI method has been exploding at a rate that defies description and, quite frankly, is fast morphing into thousands of new and different methods, which, together, create a very high level of confusion for the teacher but also confuse observors of the method in a negative way.
So below is the week that I have designed that allows me to keep my life simple and to insure that I stay true to the method as it was taught to me by Susan Gross. It is similar to last year’s weekly schedule (2011) but is an upgrade.
Note that a key detail of this schedule, the addition of SSR to every single class all week, and some other details about what the daily schedule might look like, can be referenced here:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/03/12/new-suggested-daily-classroom-routine-2012/
Here is the updated new weekly schedule for 2012 that I am using:
Introduction
An entire week of comprehensible input can grow organically from just three words. When the week is organized in this way, if the “plant” that is the week’s instruction starts with and is limited to just those three structures on Monday, then the students are able to experience a more streamlined and focused period of instruction over the remaining four days of the instructional week – the instruction has a more simple quality. This assures their success. What does this organic instruction look like on Monday?
Monday – We start with 10 min. of SSR – Silent Sustained Reading of whatever novel the class is doing. Kids who read fast finish the book and are given another book, but are responsible for the overall discussion of what the class as a whole did. That discussion happens on Friday (see below).
Then we PQA the three structures for the week for the rest of the class period. This is the planting of the seed of the plant that will emerge during the week of instruction. When PQA of three structures is teh primary focus of the class on Monday, the root of the plant becomes strong and grows deeply into the ground.
By working with only on the three structures on Monday, the instructor is able to personalize and get lots of repetitions on them. When this kind of focused PQA is done, the seed sprouts and the root goes narrow and deep. The growth of the plant through the week is assured. It is the delivery of knowledge and content and the checking of its comprehension in the form of discussion that characterizes Monday in this suggested schedule for teachers who use comprehensible input.
Tuesday – 10 minutes of SSR of the novel – we do this every day of the week and it carries over into a big SSR fest on Friday.
Then, we start the story, which is so much easier for the kids to understand because of all the PQA done the day before. If Monday provides the seed and root of the plant, then Tuesday, the story, is the growth of the shoot into a plant. On Tuesday we apply the knowledge and comprehension of simple information – the three structures – into the construction/illustration of same in the form of a story. Since the story script is written with no new words or structures in it, then the student is relaxed and in command of all classwork connected to the story. On Tuesday, then, we apply the knowledge/content learned on Monday to movement up the taxonomy.
Wednesday/Thursday – 10 minutes of SSR of the novel.
Then on Wednesday and Thursday after the SSR we do the reading class. This growing of the root and stem into a plant goes beyond mere application of the knowledge and content gained on Monday and Tuesday to the analysis of the story in the form of reading, discussion of grammar and accent, writing, etc.
There are three options to these reading classes, one focusing more on the reading of a prepared text (Option A), the second focusing more on the writing of a text (Option B), and the third is when you haven’t had time to prepare any kind of reading class from the story.
Reading Option A for the W/Th classes:
1. Write on the board, in L2: the title of the story, and the words who, where, what happens, what is the problem? Then tells the students very quickly, those things, in L2.
*2. Instructor reads aloud in L2 – this allows the student to make the necessary connection between the sound of the story with, now for the first time, what those sounds look like on paper.
3a. If the text is projected on a screen through the LCD or a document camera, then the kids do silent reading, decoding the story.
*3b. This step is an option – in green below – to the silent reading described in Step 3a above. It was invented by Susan VanBronkhorst. In this step, the story must be given as a paper copy to the kids – it won’t work unless it is on paper. It has a huge advantage over Step 3a in that it brings the kids into a lot closer touch with the text, in the following way, as Susan describes it:
Kids underline or highlight these words in their text. In this quiet time I also encourage kids to read the story and try to understand it. (The good part about this is that it helps kids pay attention; it gives me something to grade; and they can go back to their stories, which we keep in their folders, and reread them.)
I can see this option really working more at the elementary and middle school levels (Susan teaches grades 3 through 8), since being able to highlight words in class is next to heaven for some kids, but I would still use this important addition to Reading Option A at the high school level because it gets kids active.
4. Pair work to translate. (I only do this if being observed, to get the box checked.)
[note: some classes can’t handle steps 3 and 4 above and should not be allowed those options]
*5. Choral translation using laser pointer.
*6. Discussion of text in L2.
*7. Discussion of grammar in L1 (3 and 4 may interweave)
8. Jump into the Space! – a technique for encouraging speech output in upper level students. See https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/02/26/jump-into-the-space/ for details.
9. French choral and individual work on accent – this can be a very special time as we finally are able to hear, after a year and a half of constant input and relatively little verbal output, how our students’ brains have organized the language in the now emergent output. We notice how well they pronounce the language IF the output wasn’t too early.
10. 5 minute write of the story, in which the students answer the questions: who, where, what happens, what is the problem. 5 minute write of the story, and he urges them to use the questions: who, where, what happens, what is the problem.
*11. Sacred reading of the text – after 4 class periods of either listening or reading input, the students know the material. So, to conclude, read it to them with meaning, dramatic tone, artistry, in a quiet, sacred kind of setting. One teacher read it with such drama that the kids told her she should have been an actress. I generally do this step without the text in front of the students. They are really pleased when they can understand it.
*12. Translation quiz – pick any paragraph from the reading and have the students translate it into English for a quick and easy grade.
*these are the steps I do – they form the backbone of this reading approach and they work wonders. I think that the steps with the asterisks next to them, when done as the reading Step 3 of classic TPRS after Monday’s Step 1 PQA and Tuesday’s Step 2 Story, provide the highest quality instruction possible in comprehension based methods. The power rating in the asterisked steps above is off the chart.
- [credit – step 1 and step 10 above: Bob Patrick]
- [credit – step 2 above: Diana Noonan]
Put in simpler terms, with less steps, the above can essentially be described in this way:
1. get something to read up on the screen.
2. translate it with the class chorally after they spend five minutes or so trying to read it themselves (or in pairs if your kids have enough discipline to work effectively together for five minutes (this is rare).
3. ask questions in L2 about the text, pointing out grammar.
4. Take a deep breath and say to yourself, “This CI stuff is easy if I work from a reading first. I can learn about stories and personalization on a deeper level next summer, or never.”
Reading Option B for the W/Th class:
I do this when I haven’t had time to write up a story for the reading class or if I am in a lazy mood. I just ask the class to help me remember the story from their class and I do a retell with them refreshing my memory. While I am doing the retell (this is at the start of class), a superstar is writing the story out quickly in English. Once I get the gist of the story into English in this way, I proceed directly into the dictation format for the first 15 minutes. Then, I write the correct text out and the kids make their corrections as per the dictation format described on the resource page of benslavic.com. Once the dictées have been corrected and handed in, we read the text (still on the board from the dictation) in English, discussing grammar, and then we work on accent as per Option A above. Thus, the format for a W/Th using Option B is:
1. Dictée and correction of same (35 min.)
2. Reading of text and discussion of grammar (25 min.)
3. Accent work (30 min.)
4. Translation quiz – pick any paragraph from the reading and have the students translate it into English for a quick and easy grade.
The time needed for both Option A and Option B is about 90 minutes, whether it is divided up into the regular class periods or is in block form. Things flow more smoothly, obviously, when a block is available for this mid-week instruction.
There is a third reading option which fills about 45 minutes:
Reading Option C for the W/Th class:
This is when you didn’t get a story written. It’s easy. You just put a blank paper under the document camera, pull up a stool, and ask the kids to tell you the story. It’s done in a mix of mainly the TL but with English allowed for clarification. Once the story is finished, use any of the other options mentioned above in the other two reading options to complete the class.
Friday – Because of the need to read as much as possible (at least 50% of the week should be reading), I do an entire SSR class, a kind of stretching out of the 10 min. of SSR reading time spent throughout the week, and that goes the entire period. But I only do that for first and second year classes. They need this reading. They don’t need songs and poetry that they can’t understand. Honestly, I am so convinced that comprehensible input in the form of reading is the way to go that I don’t use the time on Friday to teach culture. They can learn the culture once they learn the language, in upper level culture classes which can then be taught in the TL. Occasionally, when the kids are tired, these culture classes can be given over to the Word Chunk Team competition game, which the kids love.
So that is Friday for level 1 and 2 classes – just more SSR. What about upper level classes on Friday?
The plant grows even further as we synthesize and evaluate what we have learned by looking at music or paintings relevant to the ideas that grew via the creation of the story and the reading earlier in the week. One example is – if one of the structures from the original story was “wants to get married”, then we listen to “L’Amoureuse” by Carla Bruni. Another example – if one of the structures is “one must”, then we read “Enivrez-vous” by Charles Baudelaire. Like that. It is always nice to look forward to a little painting, music or poetry to end the week for kids who have earned the privilege!
Another thing that can be done on Friday is to work with pictures from the internet, ideally connecting them to the three structures that started out this contiguous week of CI. With all the bizarre photo sites on the internet, this suddenly becomes a viable and creative, not to mention very potent, way to end the week at very high ends of the taxonomy of language!
Further note on why I don’t do music and poetry and pictures on Friday with lower level kids:
Many teachers who teach lower level 1 and 2 classes often encounter an ugly phenomenen of ungratefulness in their lower level kids, especially in schools where learning is not valued but seen as a chore (this, I believe, is seen in all schools). Accordingly, I suggest not giving away our gold, our music, our poetry and our visual art to lower level classes unless they can appreciate it.
Now, I don’t want to be misread on this – Friday is a perfect day for music and poetry and art, if it is properly appreciated by the students. But, too often, the kids don’t respect what they are being given in the music and poetry and picture discussions (they don’t have the vocabularies anyway) at those levels.
Bless their hearts, they just don’t. Watch them when they are listening to a song. There we are, putting gold on their desk after planning out the class at our own time expense, and they don’t appreciate it. I didn’t spend my life studying geat French poetry to throw it up on the wall and hope some of it sticks – I save it for real students at the upper levels who have earned the right to read it.
Of course, at all levels Friday is a good time for freewrites, which we try to throw in as a ten minute activity once a week, and this is really the only time it fits if the above intensely packed weekly schedule is used.
Assessment
The purpose of the suggested weekly schedule presented over the past week was to simplify the process of implementing CI in my classroom. I personally have tried so many schedules over the years that I often got confused.
This confusion greatly increased my stress levels. There is so much to do in a CI based classroom that I was always changing my planning on a whim at the last minute, which is never a good idea. Not only is the instructional confusion there, the grading gets crazy. And the kids need a routine around instruction and around grading. I have found that I do too.
There was a time years ago when Blaine asked me to experiment with M/T stories and W/Th reading classes vs. M/W stories and T/Th reading classes. He wanted to know which worked better. Neither worked for me – both were too busy – there was simply too much going on.
Now, if the purpose of the entire schedule just presented here is to ease stress, then shouldn’t the grading process connected to it do the same? Here is how I assess in terms of the schedule I now use:
1. Monday – at then end of Monday’s big PQA session, there is no quiz. The students haven’t had time to hear the target expressions enough and there is a lack of cohesive content for a quiz anyway.
2. Tuesday – Quiz #1. The last five minutes of class on Tuesday consists of a simple yes/no scantron quiz written by a superstar during the asking of the story in that class period.
3. Wednesday – no quiz. This is the first half of the two days of reading.
4a. Thursday – Quiz #2. Since W/Th are reading days as described above, the second quiz grade happens at the end of class on Thursday (or at the end of the block class on either day if it is a block schedule). Quiz #2 is a simple yes/no quiz testing the easiest vocabulary from the reading, written, again, by the Quiz Writer, as on Tuesday.
Example:
Question #1. “…class, yes or no, mouton means cow….” (the students fill in the no/false as yes/no answers on the scantron).
Note: the scantron format for Quick Quizzes saves vast amounts of time. When a teacher has 175 students, this greatly helps (but does not guarantee) the teacher’s sanity.