In this follow-up article to the important doc (previous article) by our group members Jesse and Ele, I make the case for ANYONE using the StarChart™ to use it (their document) in their communication with ANYONE who wants to know more about CI, and not get led down the garden path of the current misdirected (i.e. off the tracks) CI movement:
Any administrator who might receive the curricular doc information in Jesse and Ele’s doc from a CI teacher will receive a blockbuster document that is not boring. Why?
It’s because all day long the only thing that administrators get from language teachers are boring, cookie cutter descriptions of what to look for when visiting their classroom. This is true not only for traditional teachers, whose curricular docs are among the most boring ever written in the history of education, but for the current largely misinformed band of CI teachers out there. Why misinformed?
It’s because CI has gone with each passing year further and further down the road to sheer boredom. CI these days no longer even resembles it’s halcyon days of bright potential and sweet hope back around 2008/2009, when everything started to turn sour as CI teachers began to worship at the altar of traditional language instruction gods and the CI gods both at the same time by mixing their worship, resulting in the current disaster that is the entire current CI movement.
(There were no disastrous results when this happened to traditional teaching because it was already a disaster.)
Many if not most current language teachers who claim to do CI don’t even realize that there is a problem! This is how great ideas in education die.
In fact, I can say with certainty that CI language instruction has not completely but largely failed, whatever you call it (TPRS, TCI, CI, etc.). So where has the movement gotten to and where is it going?
THE FACT IS THAT WE WHO KNOW ABOUT AND DO CI HAVE MADE AN INCALCULABLE ERROR IN TRYING TO MIX CI AND KRASHEN’S WORK WITH THE TEXTBOOK AND SINGLE WORD LISTS. I’VE WRITTEN ABOUT THAT EXTENSIVELY, MAINLY IN BOOKS, AND SO WON’T BELABOR THE POINT HERE.
But the problem keeps growing with each passing year, and the CI movement keeps going further and further off the rails in the hands of all the CI experts out there who have dumbed CI down to reflect the textbook.
I and others are trying to redirect the train back onto the tracks of the pure research – where it always should be – but this isn’t happening. There are too many online CI “experts” telling too many people to give their admins just another boring submission of a required doc that bores everybody. The option?
Offer a jolt of real language education excitement when you hand your administrator the previously posted Jesse/Ele document and make them actually WANT to do the observation.
As I said before, I have never seen such a curricular doc carry such “pop”.
