This article from Michele has been waiting in the queue since the end of July, so sorry about that. I consider it important:
Dear Ben,
I presented for a Russian Startalk program at the University of Iowa yesterday. It was a yank back into old-school thinking.
Last semester, the program leader asked me to film fifteen minutes of class to demonstrate how I use technology. That was because two years ago, the PowerPoints I created for an earlier Startalk workshop on distance education Russian were her favorites. Ironically, my district decided not to have me do distance ed (thank goodness, because it wasn’t going to be too much fun), so the projects were useless for me.
I had a hard time getting video of classes using technology. Finally I had my kids turn their phone cameras on me, and they filmed and edited down a class when I ended up using MovieTalk, Wordle, Kahoot, and and a Powerpoint with an Embedded Reading. It was May. The kids were dead and it was boring to watch. I was embarrassed knowing I’d have to show it.
I had a whole Powerpoint prepared to walk the teachers through the technology and the benefits of Storytelling, but they wanted me to just show the videos, answer questions. Then they discussed how my videos measured up against a set of criteria.
The questions were amazing. They wanted to know how long the kids had practiced with that story to be able to answer the questions (first-year kids). Never…we were asking a story. They thought a highly-challenged non-verbal SpEd kid was speaking beautifully. She said two words (the target words) several times and did a lot of gesturing as my actor. They asked how my kids got such good accents. Beats me…I have a reasonably strong accent myself. They were impressed that the kids could answer grammar pop-up questions without lectures.
When we discussed the lesson, they commented on some five criteria that no one had sent me. First was classroom engagement. “It was relaxed! The students were laughing.” (Actually, the teachers were roaring with laughter; my kids were zombie-like at the end of the year and shy about the filming. How did they not notice? What’s it like in their classes if they thought the kids were engaged??) “The grammar was done in context.” (There were two grammar pop-ups.” “There was formative assessment happening.” (In fifteen minutes of film, I counted only three comprehension checks. I’d like one about every couple minutes at least.) And finally, “She was in Russian 90% or more of the time.”
That was where it got rowdy and I had to ask them to talk one at a time. One teacher said that he also teaches high school, and he couldn’t believe that my kids were responding in Russian. He said, “I was taking notes on all the short phrases you used: what’s this, are you ready, where is she going, who is playing, either/or. I never thought about using those phrases in class.”
I didn’t know what to say. What in the world is he doing in his class? I can’t imagine even an old-school traditional teacher not using those phrases.
We had to go back and re-watch the film so they could write down all the phrases I used, a terrible use of workshop time. Instead, I should have been demo-ing how to do a story. One guy said that he thinks he’s doing well when he speaks Russian 10% of the time. “The students revolt if I speak more than that.” Several people chimed in that now they were afraid to show their videos (I guess that was a requirement of the program). How do I speak so much Russian? What do I do when kids don’t understand? How do I teach all the verbs of motion I used (since usually students don’t get to that until fourth year)? How did I know what questions to ask about the film I showed? How did the kids learn all the tenses of the verbs?
OMG. I just had to vent. You’ve seen my less-than-good videos. This was one of them. I feel terrible about the state of Russian teaching. We do keep saying “A bad day with CI is better than a good day in traditional teaching.” Maybe it’s more true than I can even imagine.
I have been stressing about this presentation ever since I got back from NTPRS because I was presenting in Russian to seventeen native Russian speakers. My preparation included cajoling a Russian colleague into sitting through the whole thing so that I could get buzzwords like “scaffolding” and “backward planning” and “differentiation” correct in Russian.
In the end, that didn’t matter. I should have skipped all the prep work and just let the film roll.
We have to keep up this battle for our learners, if that is what it is. There are new teachers coming out every day who don’t know TPRS exists. I’m counting my blessings that I ran into you seven years ago. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Michele