NTPRS 2026 in Port Orange Florida

Wow, another NTPRS has come and gone! 

I was trying to think about how many I’ve been to. I think it’s 9 or so. (Reno, San Antonio, Boston, Chicago, Chicago, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Huntsville, Port Orange) Crazy how time has flown by!

I was actually excited to be able to go this year because I used TPRS 2.0 in my classes all last year and was quite impressed with the quality of output in level 1 students (compared to when I had previously only used TPRS, or what we refer to as TPRS 1.0 now). 

Here’s the main difference from what I can tell:

TPRS 1.0	TPRS 2.0
Tell an entire story each 1-2 days Read on a separate day. Use Circling to get students to talk about the story Focus on comprehension to determine class pacing	Tell a chunk of information almost every day Embed reading each day Use Circling, Triangling, and DTS to build comprehension and speaking confidence Focus on speaking from day 1 to determine class pacing

Latin Demos

Something that I have always loved about TPRS Workshops and the NTPRS conference is the focus on learning a language during the week and the power of how that feels. I remember when I first learned French in 2010 and it felt so easy. I wanted to speak. Later at my first NTPRS, I learned Russian. It was so neat to be able to learn languages and get a glimpse into how my own students might feel in my Spanish classes. And it also helped prove the effectiveness of the method to build the language in the head. 

Magister John Ricard was our Latin teacher for the week and while people might not have been convinced after the first lesson, he stayed the course and each class masterfully blended a mixture of asking the class questions (circling), asking individuals questions as the character (triangling ) and asking us to retell the story to ourselves, a partner or for the class. A takeaway from me was how much I was hoping he would call on me so I could try out some of the language and take some risks to figure out if I could say something unscripted. However, there were plenty of people to call on (and later he told me he wasn’t sure if I wanted to be called on). Which is a fun point. But in TPRS 2.0, the best part I learned this past year is that it was ok for me to call on any student and help them if they weren’t sure how to answer with confidence. In a few cases, a student might pass, and I let them know I would come back to them, and when I did, they had more confidence after listening to their peers.

By the final day of Latin, the class laughed together, celebrated each other, and the students wrote in Latin! They did a 5 minute timed write and some students rewrote the story in over 100 words in Latin! And these weren’t people that knew latin 3 days prior. Pretty awesome! Which echos what I saw in my classes last year.

Beginner and Experienced tracks

During the first three days, there were two tracks: Beginner and Experienced. Beginners was for those who didn’t feel confident using TPRS 2.0 in their classroom yet. Experienced were those that were using it and felt like they could do it, but needed more ideas for variety and to sustain it. For the Beginner Track, there seemed to be some that weren’t convinced the first day, but as the week went on, a paradigm shift occurred for many of them here they really could feel their own learning in the Latin class all week and then when other teachers would demo TPRS and try it out in languages like Greek, Russian, and Upic. I was able to be there for a few moments for the Upic demonstration. It was phenomenal. The teacher was patient and encouraging. She had a calming presence and I could see how impressed she was when people woudl respond in full sentences in the Upic language as the character! 

The experienced track also went well. Whenever I would walk over there to take pictures or talk to attendees about what they had learned, they would have some great takeaways thanks to Profe Craig Sheehy. 

The Final Day

And the final day there were some breakout sessions. I presented on How to Teach with Novels in the classroom (see a similar presentation I gave here) and also one on How to Write a Novel. Since I think I have around 13 or so novels now for TPRS Books. Crazy! I never would have thought I would even write one years ago. 

In the closing, Blaine Ray shared some reflections about his time in the classroom as well to inspire us. 

By the end of the week, the group seemed to be closer then when we all started as strangers and it was a special week that I hope inspired people and encouraged them to try out this seemingly different method that actually gets students speaking in their classes! 

I'm excited to get back to my students in a few weeks and keep working on my TPRS 2.0 skills to push them to higher levels of speaking fluency!