I got this from John to share with the group:
Ben,
I wanted to pass along some excerpts from a discussion taking place on my Latin-Best Practices listserv. Justin Slocum Bailey is a teacher in LA who is not only a Latin whiz, but he is rigorous in his study and application of progressive language acquisition theory. Often he is able to articulate clearly what many of us are thinking and doing, or attempting to do. Here is his response to a teacher’s concern that in a CI program the distinction between grade levels is lost, followed by my response to him. His program seems to me to be the logical conclusion of the study of Krashen’s theories, and their application in the classroom.
2) Value and meaning of distinctions between class levels:
I think I posted sometime last year about how I almost redesigned our entire Latin program so that there would be no formal sessions of Latin 1, Latin 2, etc. That is, students’ transcripts would indicate such a level, but the students would simply attend “Latin” whenever it fit their schedules, and I would end up teaching four or five sections, all of which were multi-level. I had two main motivations for this: (a) students would progress a lot by teaching and learning from each other, and (b) from about two minutes into the first day of Latin 1, there is already a wide range of fluency levels among students in the same cohort. It has always been the case in my classes that some Latin 2 students, say, are “better at Latin”—not just more apt, but actually more fluent—than some Latin 3 students. My redesign was meant to take this more seriously.
For me, ultimately, the distinctions “Latin 1, Latin 2, etc.” communicate little more than how many years a student has been taking a class called Latin, which doesn’t tell us much about what he or she can do, given the immense variability in human temperament and experience and the immense variability in students’, teachers’, and schools’ goals. I would rather use ACTFL’s proficiency levels, which are neither bound nor attained by a student’s having taken certain courses for a certain number of years, but neither the school nor the system really allows for doing away with the year-to-year progression.
Teach for June of senior year
Many of you are familiar with the movement/philosophy “Teach for June,” which claims that our goal should be figure out where we want students to be at the end of the school year, do what we can to get them there, and evaluate them according to the proficiency they demonstrate in June. Most grading systems in our schools mark students down for not demonstrating a particular skill in November or March, even if they can demonstrate proficiency in June (i.e., grades from earlier in the year still stand, even though they don’t necessarily communicate the proficiency a student has attained by the end of the year).
My philosophy is even more extreme: Teach for June of senior year. The retention rate in our Latin program is basically 100% (the only students I lose are ones who transfer from the school outright), so I’m not too worried about what a student can do after year two. The students are on a four-year journey (with me—many of them go on to study Latin elsewhere) during which time they gain as much fluency as is possible for them in that time.
Here is John’s response:
Justin,
“Teach for June of senior year”
For me this idea really supports the idea that every class is a mixed-level class. This is very powerful stuff. Powerful for us as teachers to allow students to make realistic progress without being micromanaged by a traditional pedagogy that is based on the false assumption that we can control not only what students acquire, but when and in what order they acquire it.
Secondly, so much of the difficulties of retention are based on these assumptions, which in turn undermines the health of language programs. On the one hand, students need to “advance” with their peers from one grade to the next, for social-emotional reasons. But it is difficult to justify this if they haven’t reached the goals for that particular year of study. If we use ACTFL proficiency guidelines and teach for June of senior year, this is no longer a “problem.” However, this requires that Latin teachers rethink what it means to teach a Latin 4, 5, AP, etc. curriculum.