This morning Eric Spindler wrote in a comment:
…Ben, you have noted before what a complete shift of how you think about teaching this is. It is a huge shift and people won’t make a huge shift if pushed from outside, we have to make them feel a need for it, by drawing their attention to the retention issues (in privacy) and by playing on their desire to be successful with more students, especially those they usually aren’t successful with. Eventually they may have a class that rejects the traditional and forces them to reevaluate (that is what happened to me). We need to always be there with the solution and pushing for CI friendly exams when we have to all do an exam together….
I support this position. We have stated our truths recently on the ACTFL list and now we must just go forward because further truth-statement-making is going to really piss off a lot of people. We are in such a difficult position. We want to say what we think but we don’t want that to be perceived as an attack on someone, because it’s not.
The one thing I want from this group right now is that we soften up. The attack mode sword waving thing is simply not going to work and will backfire. That is the predominant position among group members here right now.
I am going to say this again – its’ time to soften our position. I cannot control what people write on the ACTFL list but I can request that our discussion here return to discussing things that will help us get better at comprehensible input.