One of the things that's interesting about the department in which I work is that we're not a TPRS only department, but roughly a third of our teachers have either used TPRS exclusively or use it periodically (what that means can vary) as an instructional technique.
This year, our latin teacher presented a twist on TPRS that incorporates technology: Movietalk. This page is where I'm going to document my experiments with this technique. Here's my disclaimer: I'm not an expert with TPRS or Movietalk, so this is going to be a casual journal of what I try in my classes and what I think of it afterwards. I may even post some student or collegial feedback.
My understanding of TPRS goes a little something like this:
- Present a story with all the elements that are traditional in stories: characters, setting, conflict, climax, resolution. Folks who use TPRS a lot often seem to use the conclusion as an open-ended assessment.
- Use a technique called "circling", which means asking questions of increasing complexity:
- Yes or no? - Is this a boy?
- A or B? - Is this a boy or a girl?
- Who, what, when, where? - Where is the boy?
- Why or how? - How do you know he's a boy? or Why do you think he's in a classroom?
Dragonboy
Here's my first movietalk video. I was in a process of heavily overthinking this decision when I decided this was my video. I picked it for two reasons:
- It has no dialogue.
- It fit well with my unit topic, which was interpersonal relations and conflict resolution.
It has the additional distinction of being the 38th Student Academy Award Winner-Gold Medal
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science.
So how do you do movietalk? You play the video for a few seconds until something interesting happens and then you start asking questions. REFLECTION: I would speculate that the most artful way to segue between circling questions and pressing play is probably to ask a question that the students cannot answer without seeing more of the video.
Here is my full list of questions for Dragonboy. It probably looks overly ambitious, but it seemed to work fairly well. This is for a third-year Spanish class. The general recommendation is to have a limited amount of comprehensible input. In other words, don't overwhelm your students by including too many new structures.
To get the students putting the story in their own words, it helps to have a storyboard or collection of frames that they can use to stimulate recall. Here is a Google Presentation I made of "stills" from this video, which are easily created by putting the video in full-screen mode and taking screenshots. I also used this presentation to emphasize the comprehensible input I wanted to focus students on.
What has happened since then that is mind-bendingly cool is that Google has created a new presentation mode that lets you receive (and present, if you like) audience questions. They can do this with their cellphones. Yeah. That gets me pretty excited.
Assessment
I do a performance assessment for each topical unit I present. After we finished the story, I had students pick a point of view and write a letter to one of the other characters. How an assessment plays out in my classroom is probably a different blog post, but for right now I'm going to leave this assessment here.
