I have recently posted many classroom observations by a variety of teachers on this blog. Here is an previous observation from 2012, when a teacher relatively new to TPRS observed me teaching an intensive language lab course to a diverse group of high school age learners at the 2012 [...]
Here is a question from Karen Olson about personal interviews. She is well on her way to combining the components of TCI, but is worried that the process is taking too long: “I feel good about having established my class expectations/procedures/participation grading, Free Voluntary Reading, Kindergarten day, music listening/cloze [...]
The gains from personal interviews continue to amaze me. In the last six days we have been doing only two activities: establishing procedures and conducting personal interviews. Drilling procedures is crucial for classroom management and the time invested now pays off hugely in the weeks ahead, but the gains [...]
As we interview our way around each class, we stop periodically to quiz students on what they know about one another. I give quizzes about students in class and their task is to write real information about classmates in Spanish. Students have to attend and they have to listen to learn [...]
We are continuing to interview our way around each Spanish I classroom and the fun is accelerating. Students are becoming more and more comfortable with the process and with the language associated with it. The are acquiring enough to be comfortable. Today a girl was nearly at the level of telling [...]
I have been give n a wonderful gift this year in two of my Spanish I classes. There are two Chinese exchange students. Both are bright and charming young ladies. And both know absolutely no Spanish. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Oh, sorry! I can't use that term because they don't [...]