Today I was being interviewed by the Colorado Dep’t. of Education. I mentioned about the Latin New Life Commandos out there kicking up dust and getting it in people’s faces. The interviewer, who proudly told me about her own Latin background, could not keep her eyebrows from moving up and down over her glasses. I also noticed that her socks were rolling up and down. The idea of a teacher speaking Latin just messed up her day. I just wish she could have read this nice little rant from our own Dr. Bob Patrick who recently “cleared off a place and threw a little fit” on the Latin-Best Practices list. Bob reports:
That’s how we say it in the South: …cleared off a place and threw a little fit….
So, I just posted the following to Latin-Best Practices list. We’ve had really wonderful activity there over the last couple of weeks as well as a couple of difficult folks who want to opine about all the rigourous work that they are doing on themselves and that they insist others do before they ever try to speak Latin with their students. Rubbish head-wacking. So this morning, Pat Barrett gave me the perfect opening to say a few things. He was responding to a thread that I had going with a teacher who wanted some ways to review the relative pronoun with her students. I offered her some concrete steps for engaging kids with a story and lots of circling. She wanted them to memorize long paradigms of forms.
I wrote:
There really is no authority out there for us to appeal to, Pat. Ben Slavic talks about this. Krashen demonstrates this. He says that all the research, even his own, has been done with university students in university conditions, so already its a select group of certain kinds of learners. Krashen says that there is no research out there, anywhere, done by any particular method, that speaks to what we do in primary and secondary ed classes, so he constantly defers to us and to what we know about how our students are learning.
We are the authority about what we are doing, and that is the high and keen interest of this list of “Latin best practices”. People seem to misunderstand “best practices” as everyone doing what they like and that since “practices” is plural, it means that all practices are equal and welcome.
That’s not how the term is used professionally, and that’s not how we mean it on this list. There is a well written, simple read on Wikipedia about Best Practices. I quote just two lines from it for our purposes here, but you may wish to go and read the whole thing. It is aimed for BP in corporations, but the basic principle work here as well:
“A best practice is a method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark. In addition, a “best” practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered.”
A few comments.
1. …consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means…. What are we aiming for in our Latin classroom? Those aims may include many things, but as I’ve said in this thread and in many other over the years, I want my students to have a language experience with Latin. That is, I want them to know what it feels like to work within a language without having to rely on translation to know what is going on. Language students, even Latin language students, deserve that from their education. The fact that most of us who are teaching it were not given that experience simply means that we have work to do so that we can changes this sad state of affairs for our own students and for future students. That work means that we must try things, very different things in our classrooms, be willing to experiment, fail, learn, and try again. We must be willing to share what we are doing and learning as well. That’s the very purpose of this list. [ed. note: the Latin-Best Practices list] We do not need Latin-Best Practices to rehash how to teach kids to conjugate verbs. When we try Comprehensible Input practices, and TPRS, we begin to have different, better experiences, than when we teach kids to conjugate verbs. These become best practices. They show superior results. My Latin 1 students right now, after reading a story, can write about that story for 5 minutes, in Latin, and understand what they ahve read and what they are writing. While their writing is not flawless, it is comprehensible. I could never have done that even after my first two years of Latin study. The students who used to take two years with me and quite while I was teaching grammar couldn’t have done it either.
2. …this practice becomes a benchmark for repeated use…. Based on the above, I am convinced that I am on to a “best practice”. I can repeat it. I can show others how I’ve done it. I can create templates for it.
3. …a best practice can evolve and become better…. As other teachers try similar things and report what worked and what didn’t, ideas for improving the practice emerge, and so the practice evolves as well.
That’s what this list is for. There is simply no place for anyone to stand back and criticize a practice that they have not tried. They may say–“wow, that’s so different from what I do. I am a little anxious just thinking about trying that.” In other words, on this list of best practices, it’s welcome to hear honest concerns as we struggle over how to give our students a more authentic language experience, to help them acquire Latin as a language, but it’s not okay to criticize a practice that one has not tried. That’s a head trip, and there are plenty of other lists for Latin and language teachers who want to engage in head trips. This is one of the few lists where teachers have been invited from the very first to talk about what they are trying, what they are dreaming of, what they are experimenting with, what has worked,, what has not and how they are thinking to improve what they are doing.
That is still the invitation of this list. I am thrilled at the number of Latin teachers who seem to be deciding to try CI and TPRS and similar approaches. I get as many if not more private emails from those teachers as appear here on the list. Of course, I urge them to join this list and take advantage of other resources as well. Most of them do end up here.
This list exists to encourage those kinds of teachers who are taking on that kind of work–the work of developing and evolving and using best practices in the Latin classroom.
Best practice is not about how long you have been speaking Latin, what workshops you have gone to, who you have studied with. It is about what you are doing in your classroom this week, with certain students, and how that is working better than what you have done before. If it is the same way that you were taught Latin, then it’s not a best practice (unless you had some extraordinary teacher who was light years ahead of the pack–in which case, tell us about it).
Pat, back to your third year student who quit because it “wasn’t you.” I want to hear about what you were doing with her in the previous years that was different and which she KNOWS was better than the grammar instruction she was enduring in third year. Tell us about one or two things you did that you know were better. Share the practice with us.
To everyone else: what are you doing, trying, dreaming of doing? What is working? What’s not working? How are you improving on something this year based on what you learned last year? What kind of feedback do you get from your students and how do you gather it? I have some ideas if you are at a loss for that. Share your Latin best practices here, and join the movement.