08.1 MY RESOURCE BOOK THE TEACHERS' KALEIDOSCOPE

08.2 My request for financial support to make a website for teachers

A proposal for funding the creation of a website for teachers in Alto Adige or for Brescia area of Italy. This would be in the nature of a library of lesson material with explanations for use. This is the logical follow up of last year's 10 immersion course of 50 hours by Anthony and Valentine Bamber

1. What do teachers REALLY want/need?

• i. Teaching material.

• ii. A few sensible principles whereby to organise their work practice.

• iii. They want coherence between one top down scheme and another. They would prefer to suggest to authorities what they need rather than as often being given something not too practical.

• iv. During my and Valentina's visits to schhols, we shared material, we demonstrated it, we taught the children to prove it worked. We had beautiful comments from the children.

What are teachers tired of?

• i. Sacrificing precious time to "training" and finding very little gain from it.

• ii. Schemes that are abstract and bureaucratic.

• iii. Schemes that make them seem ignorant.

• iv. Schemes that require sycophancy

What will my website be like?

•  My web site will be simple. It will not need 90 euro online courses with Garimond! (Portfolio!)

•  Teachers / schools outside of Bolzano can pay a small contribution for accessing the site. A scheme that plans to MAKE MONEY!

•  No element will be bigger than 2 A4 pages

•  Each page or 1/2 page will be independent and stand on its own.

•  There is no abstract theory to swallow.

•  My website needs no bureaucracy of experts or trainers.

•  It will be useful to all teachers. It will have elementary, media and superiore sections

•  It will not require them to waste precious time.

•  My web site is not a vague promise. The teachers already know me and know that I do practical things to help

•  The anonymous comments of the children at the Bolzano schools where we have taught prove that we know what we are doing.

•  The scheme is democratic and cooperative. Teachers can decide THEMSELVES if they want to meet me to add things to the site.

•  As the web scheme is also a cooperative, each teacher must produce "variants" and instructions for use on my material.

•  If teachers want I can do some workshops with the web material but I want them to film their best use of material and these films would be available for home viewing.

•  Such a web "library" of material would be the heart of all future "training". Too often aggiornamenti schemes don't fit together. Each year another Red Indian chief arrives with a new idea. Bricolage is the key concept...Pluralistic methods that just add on (in the real architectural sense of something of varied function variously combinable)

My guiding beliefs .

•  It is high time that experts thought again about their "acquisire una lingua". It is so obviously impossible in a 2 hour classroom. The wishfulness has done huge damage to teaching of languages.

•  Grammar is still the best organsing principle:in my view, and not the strangely contorted "descriptors" of Portfolio.

•  The great defect in the schools I have visited (not the fault of the teachers but of the experts' conventional wisdom), is that there has been no grounding practice with the simple structures. Many superiore pupils can't use the 2 present tenses properly, and certainly can't use them in autonomous speech. PORTFOLIO will NOT resolve this.

The site.

•  It will be organised by Grammar categories: "islands" of grammar as I call them.

•  This grammar is above all an organising heart of the lesson material. BUT it will not be old grammar (useless abstract rules). Often the material is simply focused on one aspect of grammar but it is treated lightly. The learning occurs around the support activities.

•  The structure will be like Russian dolls. The outer one is the grammar island which is shown in a page or ½ page of my "Express Grammar" which I would otherwise publish.

•  The inside dolls will be heterogeneous material. Either it will be speaking games/ activities, or varied material (my grammar plays or rewritten material taken from newspapers which is also rewritten to include the grammar of the outer doll).

•  It will include a vocabulary section with games.

•  Teachers that use this open "system", can put their pupils in an exterior exam in competition with non participants. It's time that the so called "proofs" of "success" were put to public test. It's too easy to talk about success if there is no alternative being tried!

•  The material is heavily biased towards teaching autonomous and fluent speaking.

•  Anyone who wants, can look at my DVD of lessons in the 10 Bolzano schools. Those and the comments of the pupils PROVE that I am saying something important and UNCONVENTIONAL.

08.1 MY RESOURCE BOOK THE TEACHERS' KALEIDOSCOPE

08.2 My request for financial support to make a website for teachers

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