We could say a lot about the move to ACTFL’s Three Modes of Communication by the College Board AP Exams. Indeed, we have already done so, in a discussion that has lasted since May, 2011 when Robert first brought it up. The intensity of the discussion over the ensuing months revealed that many of us who were thinking, had been thinking, along the same lines. To read some of those discussions, click on the “assessment” categories to the right of this page, especially “assessment/Robert Harrell”.
Then, I’m not sure how, this month, we ended up with an actual assessment tool that allows us to tie our objectives and assessments to our students’ habits of learning. The words in italics there was an actual sentence written up by Annemarie when she came from Maine for the Odyssey/TPRS training when Jason was here. It came from a comment she posted on this site.
The actual assessment document does not include a rubric, since all of us are tied to different grading systems, but the document provides the wind power to make our own indivdual rubrics fly. The document revealed, finally, the importance of the metacognition piece that has been sadly missing from our students’ daily palate of things to do in our classrooms for decades if not centuries.
We don’t even have a name for this instrument, but, for now, I am calling it the Metacog Railway that goes up Taxonomy Mountain at the end of each class and that will definitely be in the form of a big poster to invite introspection by the kids about how they are learning and what behaviors they are manifesting in our classes, which alone brings about the self reflection necessary to make comprehensible input work in our classes.
Now, there is going to be a lot of hot air about this AP change to the three modes and the metacognitive piece among our colleagues who still teach the old way. Michele’s comment about her furious Russian colleage is just the beginning. It will be a strong defensive reaction born of a deep realization that everything those teachers have ever done in their classrooms is fundamentally wrong.
It will finally reveal the truth that grammar/trasnslation book/computer based methods have unnecessarily shamed hundreds of thousands of students who, had they been given the right environment, could have easily learned a language in spite of the protestations and cutting remarks of their teachers.
We must note that such teachers never seemed to be able to create a defined articulation path from 7th to 12th grade. this always seemed to be an accident involving the personal teaching preferences of individual teachers, but in reality there was no defined articulation path because there was no truth of pedagogy there. Now a truthful path as been found, one that is based on the way people actually learn languages.
The truth wil finally come out that the only reason that those teachers were able to get away with what they were doing, which most of them labeled as an “eclectic” approach, was that the smart kids in the room made them look like they were doing good teaching, which they were not.
Take away those smart kids, that 4% of their student populations, and suddenly no students in their schools pass the AP Exam – it all becomes a joke – and immediately they are emporors and emporesses sans clothes. Many jobs will be lost.
We must stay conscious of what is really happening here. It is the end of one way of doing things on the AP and the beginning of a new way. A deep and dramatic paradigm shift that has been decades in coming, since 1963 (see the category by that name for more information), has finally reached its tipping point.
So I want to say here again that the eclectic approach to the teaching of foreign languages is officially dead. But the problem is that, for some years into the future, this fact will be distorted and strong reactive attempts to justify all sorts of pointless activities that mix English with the TL will be made as frantic traditional teachers stubbornly cling to the only way they know how to teach, which largely shames most kids into thinking that they are stupid when it comes to learning a language.
Therefore, we need to be aware and ready to always return the discussion about the change in the AP exams to the facts: foreign language students need to hear the language and read it first for a few years before outputting it in the form of writing and speaking. (Krashen said to our group in my classroom a few weeks ago that he thinks that the ENTIRE FIRST YEAR should be nothing but listening).
We need to absolutely remember what is going on here.