Anne Matava and Laura Avila teach together in Maine and are veteran TCI teachers:
Hi all,
Here in Maine they have made standards-based education law. The school I teach in has held out as long as possible, but there is no avoiding it, so now we are having to scramble to be ready for next year. We have to work with the 5 C’s model, and we have had to pick 5 of the 11 individual standards to “require for graduation” for now. (I put that last part in parentheses because we have no FL requirement for graduation. We have been told that we must have students meeting these in year #1 of all of our languages.)
Laura is the only Spanish teacher and I the only French teacher, so fortunately we do not have to try to coordinate our efforts with people teaching modern languages from textbooks. We do, however, have to work together with a Latin teacher, who has a solid and wildly popular traditional program. It’s great for us; if CI is too silly or not academic enough for someone, we send him/her to Latin. It becomes challenging when we have to choose 5 standards that we will all require.
We’ve chosen our 5. Laura and I are scratching our heads trying to figure out how to work in the non-communication standards. We are inclined to assign culture projects to be worked on outside of class and presented in English (this is level1!) But we are having a hard time conceptualizing a single project that will meet multiple standards. In addition to that, there must be evidence of a student having met each standard multiple times.
The state’s foreign language coordinator has held workshops to help people with this, and I’ve been to one. I was the only CI teacher there and it was pretty grim. Everyone acted like it’s possible to do all of this output, combining culture with language, in the early years. You know: research the climate of some country and prepare a weather forecast in the language. That sort of thing. Between the lines I hear: let the kids get into groups and speak English all they want.
Laura and I are twin souls on the CI thing–PQA, stories, novels. Rinse and repeat. A lot of laughing, almost no English. We are stymied by this standards thing. No matter which way I think about it, I can’t picture anything less than a complete overhaul of what we do, and not for the better. We are reaching out to you, our community, for help. We would appreciate it if someone could share a way to conceptualize this whole thing, that makes sense, as well as specific assignments or projects that you have come up with.
We are looking at the following standards: 1.2, possibly 1.1, 2.1 or 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, and 5.2.
Thank you in advance to all.
Anne