NTPRS - Tuesday and Wednesday

It was certainly a busy few days and as I'm sitting in a really great session on Common Core and TPRS, I realized that if I don't get it down now, I don't know that I will.

Tuesday and Wednesday were similar in that, as someone on Intermediate track, I spent most of the day listening to people talk about their "style" of TPRS and the different thoughts and philosophies that they have on it.  I thought it was extremely useful because, as many people are noting, they have been watching these "masters" (such as Blaine Ray) and feel like, "That is SO not me."  I think the key to sticking with TPRS is identifying, recognizing, and trusting your professional teaching self to make decisions that you feel are best for your classroom.  Mira Canion (who is amazing and bitingly witty) had a really great demo where she noted that all we ever see at conferences is the "easy stuff."  I have seen twenty million lessons on "tiene."  So she took suggestions of things we found hard to teach, and allowed herself to get stuck in PQA, and we problem solved on how to get out of it.  It was extremely useful.

Wednesday (yesterday) and today, I have been shifting from lots of questioning and circling and basically steps 1 and 2 of TPRSing to reading.  I love the reading aspect of TPRS and I think it's really going to take off this year in my classroom of 5th graders who have had Spanish since K.

I'll report back tonight with reflections on today as well!

NTPRS 2014

Hello from Lisle, IL!  I know that there is an official blog on the NTPRS conference this year, but I have decided in part to use some of my down time in the evenings trying to synthesize just what it is that just happened.

Overall, I thought that the sessions today were good.  I spent 5 hours in an intermediate workshop.  We started by making a list of things that kill our stories.  Those things that, when they happen in our classroom, make us want to give in to the little voice in your head saying "The textbook is the way... Comprehensible input is too hard, you can't even do it right and your kids aren't learning... Go back to the textbook...''.  Now, I've never taught using a textbook (TPRS since Day 1, baby), but the voice even says that to me! I liked the list, especially since we problem-solved around some of these things. Here it is.

• Kids want to go really far out of bounds because they're having so much fun being ridiculous. (Just say no! Maybe they suggest a bunch of stuff and finally you, the teacher, says 'No! It's obvious! Inset in-bounds statement here.')
• Conversely, some classes you just can't squeeze the damn details from. (Try giving them a choice of two.  Hard to refuse when you already have two options laid out in front of you.)
• Students struggle with the purpose of the class and feel as though they aren't "learning" anything (they have already been sucked into the traditional 'school' mindset, in other words).
• As teachers: setting or believing that we can set goals and targets for a CI-based class - and what would those targets be anyway?
• The quality of our kids' acting. (Threaten to fire them, then sit 'em down, 'cause ain't nobody got time for that.)
• How to grade kids.
• Transitioning from PQA to a story. (Simple.  Just say, "Ahh! Clase, hay un problema!")
• Pulling back from the absurd (so they don't begin to expect it and become immune to it).
• Keeping PQA interesting throughout the year.
• Getting a story to end. (Story Ender Wizard/Fairy ... the teacher just tells them at the end of class so they have some closure)

The presenter was great, very engaging, and the feedback I gave at the end of the session was simply that we were practicing a lot of detail fishing, storytelling/asking, and parallel character-ing in small groups, but there was no time between people practicing to give feedback to the last person! There were some things I definitely wanted teachers to know they should keep doing, and some of them didn't have the basics of circling down but didn't even seem to know that. I think a safe space of "Keep doing..." and "Next time try..." language would really be useful to make the practice as meaningful as possible.  We worked on:

• Fishing for details
• Verifying with Actors
• Parallel Characters
• Create-an-Event

There was a keynote speaker, Diana Noonan, who spoke about building a TPRS district out of Denver Public Schools district.  It was interesting to listen to, but not super relevant to me.

Finally, I went to a session titled "Assessment and the Common Core."  I figure it would talk about effective assessment strategies (using concrete details) for the FL classroom, probably using a lot of reading strategies.  I was wrong.  The session wasn't bad! I will probably create a separate blog post for the new topic I discovered in his session called "Depth of Knowlege" (DOK) indicators.  Basically a way to consider the rigor of what we are teaching and assessing.  

At this point it's time to work on LPs for summer school in 2 short weeks, then read a bit before bed.  Tomorrow's plan includes more workshopping, a session on management, and a trip to an exhibitor's reception.

TPRS and Understading by Design

Let me think out loud a bit about Understanding by Design and how it meshes with TPRS/CI strategies.

What is Understanding by Design?

When I first started teaching, I spent 2+ years learning about and living a type of curriculum and unit organization strategy called "Understanding by Design" (Click here for a PDF overview of the topic from the creators of UbD).  Many of you have already heard of or used UbD.  Very basically, the idea of UbD is that you start to plan with what you want students to be able to accomplish at the end of the unit - begin with the end in mind, if you will.  Then, create assessments that would in the most pure form possible show to you whether students had mastered the goals that you had set for them.  Only then, when you have done those things, can you begin to plan the learning experiences that will bring them to be successful on your culminating assessment, and therefore demonstrate mastery of the goals you have initially set for your students.

When I learned about UbD, I thought it was really, really great.  I became pretty good (if I do say so myself) at using the template and strategies to plan thematic units of study for my kids.  There are lots of resources for this use, if you just Google "understanding by design foreign language."  There's even a great template out there that matches the ACTFL three-prong standards approach to help you plan a balance of learning activities in each of the modes.

What are potential issues when doing TPRS and CI as well as UbD

However, there are many things that I have heard, read, and seen in the use of TPRS that makes understanding by design a tricky thing to use.  First of all, there's a definite difference between merely "backwards planning" something and planning something using "Understanding by Design."  Backwards planning involves beginning with the end in mind, yes, but on a generally smaller scale.  For example, I have a novel that I want my kids to read.  I think it would make sense to read that novel, figure out what words they'll need to know when they read it, and then make sure that they know those words before we start to read the novel.  Many people, myself included, "backwards design" stories we tell in class to expose students to high-frequency structures or a certain pop-up grammar point we would like to make.

This is not necessarily UbD.  UbD asks, "What are the essential questions I want students to be able to answer?  What skills should they come away with?"  Many TPRS purists decide that we should just be inputting at all times.  Ben Slavic, whose website I love and have found to be immensely helpful, is among these. I am not in agreement.  As this blogger noted in her thoughts on lesson plans, even if they are not thematic, language at some point must serve a purpose -- there must be an intentionality to teaching different functions of language and since we are limited on time, we need to also be intentional with teaching words that give the most "bang for their buck."  This is part of fluency, is it not?  But, to me, it seems that only in a thematic unit can we discover the answer to an "essential question." And while I'm being honest...

I don't really buy into the whole "essential question" business.  Here is a list of World Language-specific questions generated by one of the "big names" is UbD.  They are broad, far-reaching.  I don't think that they do much other than make teachers feel great about their teaching.  The kinds of questions that they ask are usually ones that are either impossible to "teach," in my opinion, or impossible to assess.  It is extremely possible that I don't understand EQs because I'm just not that good of a teacher yet.  Maybe I fundamentally misunderstand EQs.  Other UbD unit plans I've seen from FL classrooms have grammar-based EQs: "How can the subjunctive be more important in languages beside English?" Ugh. That one was on the UbD website.  I don't feel comfortable with that being the essential thing I want a student to take away from the language acquisition experience.

My Solution

I want my kids to be able to order a sandwich, hold a conversation, and read a book in Spanish.  I want them to know a little something of the Spanish-speaking world (ideally, enough to spur them to study abroad and a enough to help them recognize that it's okay that not everyone does everything the way they do all the time).  But I don't know that assessing them on their growth as global citizens is the way I want to go.

Ultimately, I have decided to do the following:

• McTighe himself states the following is a way to kill a UbD initiative: "Standardize all UbD implementation.  Do not permit options/alternatives/different approaches to learning and using UbD.  Disregard the interests, talents, and readiness of individuals and teams." So I will FrankenPlan.
• Go with mini-units based around just 3 structures at a time and not stress about weaving them into a larger narrative.  For every three mini-units or so, I'll make sure to backwards plan a summative assessment. 
• No essential questions.  I'll plan a couple for the beginning of the year as part of my Course Goals.  That's something I can calendar in time (thanks Outlook!) to reflect on, include perhaps in the end-of-year project and survey, and reflect upon at year's end, without hurting myself and my kids trying to fit it into each mini-unit when it doesn't belong there.
• Units based around novels can, of course, be planned in the more traditional way with Essential Questions and a summative assessment at the end.

Topics to come

Just stuff I'm planning to cover on here at some point:

• TPRS/CI and Understanding by Design
• TPRS and the Common Core
• The "forced output" conversation
• The "authentic resources" conversation
• Reinventing the wheel and product legitimacy in TPRS
• TPRS/CI and homework

Just to give an idea of what's to come!

Fighting through the murk

A little bit about me and my personal reasons for starting this site.  Please bear with me as I tell you about myself -- I find that when  go to someone's internet space, the context helps me to place what I am reading into a larger narrative.  I hope this does the same for you.

I have a B.A. in Spanish and English, and I graduated in 2011 with excellent commendations but very little direction.  As many thus unfocused-but-decorated graduates have done before me, I decided to join Teach For America and I taught Spanish in an elementary school in Newark, NJ for two years.  I had hopes that I would find teaching to be something I enjoyed, something that I could be good at.

Good thing I did, too.  Because it turns out I'm not anywhere near "good" yet.  But I found something that gave my life purpose.  Teaching children, and teaching them Spanish, turned out to be the best decision I ever stumbled into.  I'd still make the argument that I was just as good (or not) as any traditionally-trained teacher with similar experience (i.e., none) in the classroom.  But I decided to stay and to figure out this Spanish education thing for myself and for my kids.

When I first started teaching in Newark, I was panicked that I had been put in charge of developing the curriculum for the kids I would be teaching.  With 1 month's notice and no experience, I did what I think all good teachers do when faced with challenge: I asked for help.  Luckily, the person from whom I asked said help knew about something called TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling).  I learned the basics of it and used it in my classroom for the next two years.

I'm now finished with my third year in the classroom and going into my fourth.  For personal reasons (turns out I don't really like 5 year olds), I moved to middle school Spanish at the end of my second year.  And now that my classroom is settling down and I have on some level found my true teaching self in there, I can focus more attention on creating the best curriculum for my kids.  The problem I have found is that TPRS, and its larger umbrella, Comprehensible Input (CI) have a lot of different hands in the pot.  It's kind of a grassroots methodology, if you will.  So sorting through the voices, the research, and my own personal beliefs about teaching has been extremely difficult.  I have read thousands of blog posts, downloaded hundreds of "curriculum samples," story samples, templates and ideas.  I've read lots of books too, from Krashen to Blaine Ray to Ben Slavic, of course all the TPRS novels, and more.  There are things about TPRS as an ONLY THIS classroom strategy that I -- and research -- simply do not agree with.  It's all very confusing.

I have created this blog for three reasons.

First, I would like to use this space as an honest place where I can sort through my ideas and what I find in the vast interwebs.  At time of writing, I am 25 years old.  That means, on some level I am more technologically competent than some of my peers in the TPRS "movement."  Not all, of course.  But looking through hundreds of websites has made me cringe at how HARD they are to navigate, and, for people who are all about going S-L-O-W to increase student comprehension, they don't do any favors to someone trying to learn off their webpages.  More than that, I want to organize the information that I am thinking through in a way that appeals to the way MY brain works.

Second, ideally, I would love feedback and constructive criticism/response to the things that I am saying.  The best information and grasp I have gotten on this journey is from reading points and counterpoints by those who really understand what's happening.  I don't yet.  But I want to.

And third, This will be a space where I blog about my experiences in the classroom and in my own professional development.  The CI/TPRS community doesn't have a lot of visible teachers like me.  I work in a charter school in a Title I/urban area.  I am former Teach For America.  I also, incidentally, do not tie teaching to my faith.  Just say the words "data driven" or "educational reform" and I have found that many TPRS advocates get disgusted and dismissive.  When they can't possibly imagine that a TFA teacher is in the room (because why would "they" want to develop professionally?  They are poverty tourists), the things that these TPRS proponents say are astoundingly hurtful.  So I think if I can show what TPRS and CI teaching looks like in the places that I am from and in the schools that I continue to proudly work, perhaps more people like me will be interested in having their voice heard in the larger community.

Onward!