This is from Leah. It’s her turn. It goes in the “Observations by Idiots” category on the right side of this page:
Ben,
I’m looking for advice and also for my fellow CI teachers to lift my spirits. Here’s my situation:
I have a new supervising principal this year who will evaluate me (he is not new to the school). He has no training in language acquisition, to my knowledge. His background is math. He recently observed me for the last 20 minutes of a level 1 class, and the first 8 minutes of the next level 1 class. Our “post-observation” meeting did not go well.
My first mistake is not filling in my lesson plans for Fridays, because Fridays are “memrise.com” days in my room. I realize my mistake, but I have never been a person to just do something because I am required to. If filling in boxes on a lesson plan is not helping my students, why waste my time? Okay, because I should probably keep my job, I guess… But, again I’ve always felt a rebel at heart. I genuinely enjoy my days teaching, thanks to finding this website and CI / TPRS, but I don’t enjoy feeling criticized and not appreciated for all the hard work that I do, by the person who should be there to support me!
During the portion of the lesson he saw, we did Textivate, a dictation, and a planned math bail out (currency, not arithmetic). He has never seen any other lesson in my classroom, minus me making a couple announcements at the beginning of a class, ever.
For Textivate (fill in the blank), I had a student working my computer projected for the class, and all students wrote the words on their paper for each blank. Students took turns answering, and I made sure everyone answered several times (no one person dominating).
This principal said this activity was not rigorous! Mind you, this is a full German story script, and I translated nothing for them. I disagreed. I stated that the work “should feel easy to them. One of my first goals is to build confidence in them, that they can acquire the language.” He said they could have worked in pairs on chunks of the text, and shared out the answers after, that that would be more rigorous. Would that really have helped? He stated that they should be challenged more. He has no idea what rigor looks like. I was thinking of giving him Robert Harrell’s explanation printed out, but should I bother? Will it do more harm than go
He also wanted to see more differentiation. Never mind that I have a list of 50 student jobs posted on my cabinet, which he never noticed, never asked about, and that I differentiate throughout the year more than any other class. I had a student working the laptop (job) that period, but this admin said I should be at the computer, in order to take myself out of the equation, and that that student could be doing what I was doing (sitting on a desk, prompting them to answer each blank). Is this suggestion bizarre to anyone else? He asked what someone could have done if they finished early (no one did!) and I answered, write the quiz, of course, to which he did not respond.
I did a dictation for a warm-up (because it calms my loud class) and he said it lasted too long. Well, when I do short warm-ups, and they miss them because they come in 5 minutes late, they have no idea that they missed anything. I want them to know that we are doing something “important”, and when the students see paper, they equate that with “more points” (even though we CI teachers know this is false).
I feel like I am banging my head against the wall. This person knows nothing about CI, which I can’t fault them for. However, I feel like they are picking at things to tell me to change, with no reason as to why to change it. I told this person, in response to these silly suggestions, “If something is not broke, why fix it?” He responded that I was disagreeing with him on all of his suggestions. Yes, I am, because he has no experience, no evidence, and what I am doing is working!
I could have sat there and nodded okay to it all. Should I? With our head principal (my previous supervisor for 3 years) I had no issue, ever. He observed me, said fine, and that was it.
I received no praise and only critique from this principal. Yet, I’m more happy with how I am teaching now than I ever was.
I was going to give this person the newer, shorter, Administrators Checklist. However, some days (like with Textivate or memrise/duolingo.com on laptops, it doesn’t apply. I didn’t want to shoot myself in the foot. Thoughts?
Should I try to educate this person on CI? Or, should I just nod and smile?
Grateful for your support,
An otherwise happy CI teacher,
Leah Turner