I just cut and pasted a comment from the thread on the DPS study:
When I shut down this blog a year ago, which lasted until May, it was to take some time to think about how I couldn’t speak honestly on the internet, which eventually led to this blog becoming a PLC for members only. See this post:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/03/02/why-i-shut-the-blog-down-1/
I had been severely attacked by an IB principal who was defending his traditional teachers like a dog in an alley. Now, I see (in our inability in DPS to find teachers willing to do the study) a rare chance to challenge that very school, Lakewood High School in Jefferson County. Maybe they can put their money where their mouth is, as the saying goes.
One teacher asked me amidst that conflagration to admit that her traditional approach was just as good as TPRS. I didn’t answer well or strongly in that moment like Diana certainly would have, and I still feel weak and shitty about that. Now is my chance to answer her question better, with a real study directly guided by one of the most published and credible researchers in the world and indirectly guided by Dr. Krashen.
I will talk about this to Diana today. I love that you have a few teachers who might be able to participate, Michele. We just can’t lose this opportunity because we can’t find teachers. If we can’t find them in DPS, maybe we can find them elsewhere.
What is ironic is that this morning just before I read what you and Jody wrote as comments, I spent an hour writing an open letter blog post requesting help from you all. If I finish it I will post it here. This morning I feel that the study is kind of crumbling as it is just getting started for various reasons.
My big fear is that traditional teachers will game the test. That is what they do. I did it when I was a traditional teacher. I could game the national French exam like a pro, producing the best scores in SC year after year at all levels for over twenty years with really smart kids even though if I did a study like this one those same kids would be outed as little robot trained gamers. I had kids passing the AP exams with very limited skills. You all know what I mean, especially in the light of what we know now about CI.
Another problem is that I feel that we need more time for the study, like five months at least, with a larger number of teachers involved, with controls and classroom observations and interviews by Beniko going on all the time and controls over the gaming factor that Michele alluded to above. So I will get with Beniko and Diana asap. Paul Kirschling agrees with me.
I like the idea that maybe we in this PLC could work with Diana and Beniko to make this thing happen – just thinking out loud here. What I do NOT want to do is be part of a flawed study because of the critical issues you two bring up in your comments above, included among them these:
– how many times did you read it to the kids before they did the comprehension piece?
– what about the writing piece?
– did you read it at a normal TPRS (slow) pace, or faster?
Those are from Michele and they don’t have good answers in the sense that nothing was done to control how those things would be done for uniformity in all participating teachers’ classrooms. Jody says it all right here:
– how is the “non-CI” side of the study being run – or did I miss that?
So, there are flaws in the study connected to the traditional side. If they game it, we have flawed results. Can you imagine? We get gamed by talented traditional teachers and that doesn’t show up in the conclusions of the study and there are no demonstrable differences between the two approaches. That makes my socks roll up and down just thinking about it.
Thank you guys for your input here. Maybe I can talk Diana and Beniko into using the wealth of talent in this group, our group, to push this project forward to a more credible level and avoid any gaming bullshit and make the study much larger in the process.
I can’t believe Krashen is ready to sign off on what Beniko does on this without getting more involved. He must know that this is our big chanceto get the first credible field study of his ideas out there. He needs to support us big time on this thing instead of sitting around LA sipping on vente lattés thinking about the research side so much. He needs to put on his boots and walk around with us in the trenches for awhile, rallying the troops in this daily warfare we experience.
We’ll see what happens. I’m thinking that we should put it off until the fall, so we can set it up better. I’m not going to stress myself by putting a lot of energy teaching and testing those (untested) scripts from Anne (except script #1 was a major homeroom in all my classes) unless we build some better controls into the study.