I am exhausted but I am happy. I love TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) and see huge benefits from it but it does take its toll when you make the (probably incorrect) decision to do a whole week of it in every one of your 6 classes which are almost all at different levels! It was likely even more taxing this time too as I actively tried to put all the wonderful strategies and tips I received from Grant Boulanger at his 2 day workshop in Leysin American School last week.

Grant was fantastic and I learned a great deal from him in just two days. Here are some of his strategies that I implemented and will definitely keep as they worked so well:

• Student Jobs: I have my ‘ambassador’ who helps me get class set up and ensures I have 4 different coloured markers at the board, my ‘luces-puerta-ventana’ person who turns on and off the lights and closes or opens the door and windows and my ‘pizarra-papel’ person who distributes mini whiteboards and paper.
• Story Booklet: Grant has a student write the story in full in a notebook as it is unfolding in either English or Spanish depending on the level. Genius! It meant I had an immediate record of exactly what happened with each class.

• Take the answer with the most energy: I’ve often made the mistake of taking the response that ‘suited my vocabulary goal’ or my story but since the workshop I always go with whichever one gets the most energy from the class. This really helps them remember and it validates that students intervention.
• Homework reading to parents: I love this idea of having the student read and translate a story to their parents. So much learning going on and the parents get to see their child’s quick progress too.
• Gestures: I never used to work the structures in gesture format before the story began but I think this helped a lot of learners visualize what the structure meant. It’s staying!
• TPRS works for all levels: I spent a week in TPRS mode with my very advanced IB Diploma students circling difficult and complex grammatical structures and not only did they love it but the timed writing they did at the end of the week was some of the best stuff they have ever written.

There were many others too and lots of this comes down to your own personal style as a teacher. I also grabbed the ‘toro’ by the horns and threw all my desks out… just chairs with mini whiteboards to lean on - ‘a la Grant’ style. I am not 100% convinced on this yet, the students did seem to be more focused and concentrated but as the week went on and this became the norm and was no longer a novelty they managed to find things to distract their attention from the story. The jury is still out on this one.
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One thing I wholeheartedly and 100% concur with Grant on is… TPRS is really REALLY fun for both the students and the teacher! You have the most amazing hysterical moments and personal connections with your students that quite simply make teaching a pure joy. Kids are great. They make us laugh all the time and when you give them creative license to invent parts of stories they will make your sides split. On numerous occasions this week I had tears rolling down my face from laughter and they were all in hysterics at me not being to speak because I was laughing so hard… tell me that is not a class you would want to come back to! 

Mini whiteboards doing their magic again! This time we are using them to re-tell our latest TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) story and again they provide a great conversation scaffold for students whilst also ensuring they are active, speaking the target language with various classmates and hopefully engaged in the task!

Here is how it works:
Having already spent a few classes developing our latest story together this task is used as a way to review the key structures from the story.

1. I start by telling the students that because I am really REALLY old I have a terrible memory and they have to help me remember our story. I then proceed to consistenyl tell the story with incorrect details. For example "Brad Pitt estaba en Elefante-land?" to which all the students almost always respond enthusiastically with big smiles saying "No!!!! Es ridiculo! Brad Pitt estaba en Canguro-land" or whatever it may be.

2. Once we have revised the whole story this way as a class I ask each student to divide their mini whiteboard into four quadrants and to draw any four scenes from the story. Only one word is allowed on the entire whiteboard if they choose to use a sign or something in their drawing. I give them 2 minutes to do this, otherwise some people get carried away a turn into mini 'Picassos'!

3. Next we all get up out of our seats (this is key... it keeps them awake!) and go into pairs. If it is an odd number I too will have a whiteboard and have done my world famous matchstick men works of art on it!

4. In their pairs each person has to explain what is happening in their scenes. After about 60 seconds the listener is encouraged to ask questions for clarification or to make incorrect statements that the teller must correct. They then switch over and go through the process again.

5. Here is the key part - once both students have explained their scenes they exchange whiteboards, put the new whiteboard high in the air and have to go and find a new partner. Now they have a new whiteboard to work with. Some students (the first time you do this) might query the strange drawings they have been handed but this is why the listening part of the exercise is so key. In fact, bad drawings are almost better as the lack of detail or clarity forces the new whiteboard proprietor to recall even more details from the story.

6. The whole process now repeats itself with whiteboards swapping various hands throughout the activity.

​Students really like this one! They get to move around and talk to different people and are constantly receiving more repetitions of the key structures. At the end you may want to choose one student to explain the scenes on the board they were left with at the end of the task. I have also sometimes taken a whiteboard myself at the end (usually one with particularly good artwork to highlight the creative skills of that student) and again I will explain all scenes with incorrect details to force the students to use those structures again to correct me.

If you have done anything similar or work with TPRS do let me know! I am always keen to hear your feedback.

So teachers, students (and parents!) are all currently back at school and getting used to early starts, homework and school uniforms again. For me this is a big year as I have started work in the International School of Lausanne now, about 1 hour from my previous school, Leysin American School, in Switzerland. Already it feels very different as I have left the hectic schedule of a boarding school for the equally hectic, albeit different, environment of a day school.

Luckily for me, like so many other teachers, I love my job. I know to some people the words 'love' and 'job' should never go together but its true... sorry! The dreaded 'going back to work' is really not that much of an issue for me when the end of August rolls around (in fact I actually look forward to it) but getting used to the pace and energy required does take a few weeks. Now, to be clear, that is not to say that I don't like my summer holidays... that would be 'completamente ridículo' as we might say in class! I knew this year in particular would be tough at the start as I would have to become familiar in the new school's systems and get to know my new students but so far it has been fantastic. My colleagues have been so helpful and nice, the leadership team is genuinely inspirational and the students are nothing short of amazing. 

Leaving the wonderful setting of Leysin and all the amazing friendships I made there was always going to be difficult. Especially having to leave behind some of my students and the great basketball team I was coaching but this is part of the nature of teaching and moving jobs. No matter when or where, you will always be letting some people down when it comes time to move. It was made easier though by the stream of emails and messages I received from both ex and current students wishing me well and talking about things they remembered in class. I've shared just two of them here below (with their permission) which might show you why so many of us love being teachers. Thank you to all my wonderful students for taking the time to write to say thank you. It means so much. If you are reading this and haven't told someone (anyone, not necessarily your teacher) how grateful you are for whatever it might be they did for you, stop what you are doing and write to them now. It will make their day, their year even.

Yes, as teachers, we will never be millionaires. But we will be profoundly rich in so many other ways.

Doing a book or novel in class is something my classes seem to enjoy a lot but it can be a challenge keeping it interesting and figuring out ways to evaluate their learning. I came across Carrie Toth's excellent website somewheretoshare.com last month and she has some wonderful ideas to do with novels.

I decided to use a version of her "Yellow Brick Road" one to recap and revise over the key points in the book once we had finished. The idea is you have 1-2 key 'triggers' of chunks of words from each chapter and these are used to jog the students memory to aid their discussion. The only difference I had was that I actually got the students to make the yellow 'bricks' and they chose the statements themselves.

I gave each pair of students a chapter (or some important chapters had 3 people working on it) and they had to find a key phrase that would jog our memories as to what happened at that point in the book. The only rule was it could be no more than 5 words. This part seemed to work really well, each student could be seen actively re-reading the chapter to try and pick the most appropriate word chunk for their poster.

Once everyone was finished a few students laid out all the yellow 'bricks' for our road out in the corridor. They did this in order as I felt like otherwise the chunks of words may not make sense to them. Students spoke in groups at each step using the prompt on the floor to help them. After about 60-90 seconds I would stop the music and they'd move on to the next card. To change things up sometimes I'd ask them to move 2 or 3 steps forward. I also mixed up the groups and pairs after about 4 steps so they weren't always talking to the same person.

I think the students really liked it and it worked really well as a student centred review activity. They were receiving lots of comprehensible input from their classmates and it certainly helped them to review and revise for the end of book evaluation. High five and thumbs up to the yellow brink road... I'll be using it again!

I'd love to know your comments and how you evaluate and review books/novels you have done in class! Leave me your comments below or follow me @liamprinter on twitter!

Students sit all day and sitting for hours on end is exhausting. We as teachers are up and walking around continuously so we (at least most of the time) manage to stay awake while we teach. Yet we wonder why our students lose interest, stop concentrating, glaze over and zone out when we are half way through a riveting explanation of demonstrative pronouns. It's because they are sedentary, passive agents in the learning process when we keep them in their seats in a warm room listening to us ramble on. 

After studying the benefits of 'Active and Cooperative Learning' while completing my Teaching Qualifications, I've always tried to have an active classroom. To me at least, the benefits are clear - engagement is improved, students receive context with new language structures, they aren't falling asleep or glazing over with the "I hear your words but am not listening in the slightest" look and above all, in most cases, the students are smiling, laughing and having fun. In my view, if students are laughing and having fun then at least they will find it really challenging to hate your subject and your class. Even if they have zero interest in quadratic equations or ox-bow lakes, if they know they'll be moving around, laughing and having fun in your class then at least they will not resent the fact that they have to be there. Once this has been achieved you may even get them to like the subject a little and who knows they might even learn something once you've got that far!

My views on 'student movement is the key' were copper-fastened when I read Grant Wiggin's excellent blog post here. The veteran teacher shadowed students all week and his number 1 key takeaway was that "sitting is exhausting" and students need to get up and move in every class. Furthermore, last week we were lucky enough to have the wonderful Lisa Lee visit our school and give us her TEDx Talk on "Getting at the heart of teaching" where she also waxed lyrical about the vital importance of student movement in the classroom.

The next time you see that I'm glazing over look start to appear on your students faces just think of any way you can get them to 'GUAM' (Get Up And Move). It might be the simplest thing like "Ok guys stand up and go and sit with someone new. Now compare your work with what they have". A simple 5 second instruction that will take about 30 seconds of your class teaching time but could save you hours of repeating yourself later and wondering why they didn't get it when you explained it 'so perfectly' the first time!

Let me know your thoughts on Twitter @liamprinter

TPRS stands for 'Teaching Proficiency Through Storytelling' and basically it uses stories with lots of repetitions of key structures to teach fluency rather than detailed vocabulary lists. It is based on the theory of 'comprehensible input' which fundamentally outlines that to learn a language you need 'input' (words written and spoken) on repeated occasion in an understandable format. I was first introduced to it last year in our language department here at Leysin American School. I'm not going to lie, when I first watched the 'over the top' teaching of TPRS Godfather Blaine Ray, I was a bit skeptical but the other teachers in my department loved it so I gave it a shot.

At first it was nothing short of a disaster. I felt exhausted and flustered throughout the lesson and I think my students simply thought I'd taken the wrong pills that morning. But I persisted with the help of other teachers in the department and we then received two separate training sessions on the approach, one from Blaine Ray himself and another from Beth Skelton. I was hooked. After just 35 minutes of mandarin I was able to read and understand a full page of text and say various key sentences like "I need", "Have you got", "Where is" etc and I could understand more than 95% of someone speaking only in mandarin. After just 35 minutes! It really blew me away. 

If this is the first time you've heard of it you should take a look at Blaine's videos, follow Beth Skelton on twitter and check out Martina Bex's site too. I've never used any other method that worked so well at embedding difficult grammar. I've just spent the last two weeks doing a story with my Spanish 1 class about a guy who was lazy, and used to only sunbathe and watch TV, but then he went to the house of the Aunt of Jennifer Lopez and suddenly became a fitness freak. He went to the Olympics in Puerto Rico and won every gold medal before wanting to participate in a Taco eating contest with... well with Jennifer Lopez's auntie... of course! This was all done in the past tense using a mix of 'preterito indefinido' and 'imperfecto' and the students can all tell me that story now using those structures and speaking about their own life with the same structures.

Here is a picture of a previous story we did 3 weeks ago written as homework by a student. No google translator, no outside help. Simply a method that repeats the key structures with memorable silly details. Trust me, it works. 

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