Tamula has an opportunity:
Something kind of incredible is happening in my department. There are 5 of us. Me teaching Chinese using CI for the first time, our Russian teacher who is in her 4th year of teaching with CI, 2 Spanish teachers including the chair, and one French/Spanish very grammar based about to retire teacher.
Last week, my Chair was asking me about my teaching methods and nearly blew a gasket when I told her I only teach about 4 structures a week. Fortunately, she is pretty open minded and asked if she could come and observe my classes. Then yesterday, I was having lunch with the other Spanish teacher who is my good friend. She told me that the Chair told her about the 4 structures. I was steeling myself for criticism when she said that they just completed a listening assessment on their Honors 3 & 4 kids and they bombed it. Vocab they had taught in class couldn’t be recognized by the students on a recording of native speakers. I told her I had the same experience and that is one of the reasons I changed to CI. She said that they would like to know more about CI and maybe we could present at the monthly dept meeting.
I was so excited that I powwowed with our Russian teacher right away. We will probably get at most 40 minutes to promote CI to these teachers who are very heavily reliant on their textbook and all the worksheets, videos, and games provided by the publisher. So how best can we present to them in a convincing manner in that brief space of time? Our Russian teacher is going to contact Terri Weichert to ask about any upcoming nearby workshops as well. Please suggest what you would present if given this great opportunity. We’re not worried about criticism because we all get along pretty well and benefit from the fact that Russian and Chinese are less commonly taught languages considered difficult so no one is going to criticize how we teach them (except maybe the French teacher).