In my opinion Tina is on target in these points about targets. She shares:
Problems I have seen/experienced with targets are:
- Teachers find it difficult/draining to provide repetitions on targets. They have classroom management issues and give up on CI.
- Teachers are inclined to think, “I said it 75 times and I have the baseball pitch counter to prove it so I will test the kids on recognition/production of the targets.” It is just our teacher nature. We want to make CI look like school. This, too, discourages teachers. They will say, “Well, I must not be doing it right because only 70% of them got that right on the quiz.” Targets just reinforce the notion that we are teaching language parts and therefore should hold kids accountable for them. It is a subtle influence on the way we think about our instruction/assessment.
- Targets can both stifle and encourage teacher creativity but I am not sure it is the kind of creativity we really seek. They can stifle creativity because they put our focus on getting reps and also we tell the same skeleton story in class after class. They also encourage creativity of this type, the type that all teachers use: How can I make these targets engaging? So teachers devote precious time and energy to dreaming up stories and activities and ways to engage kids. It wears them out.
- Teaching with targets is stressful. Why am I so interested in non-targeted work? Because I think it takes stress off of teachers. It has taken considerable stress off of me. Using TPRS to get students to buy into a story based on targets requires a level of emotional trust that is not always easy to build even for a “natural” with the method. I find, and we have heard from not just a few teachers, that non-targeted work lightens the load emotionally in class. I continue to investigate it in the hopes of helping other teachers find more comfort in providing CI.
- Many teachers, including me up until last year, do backwards planning from novels. I have now given up on targeting items needed to one day tackle a passage in a novel in favor of focusing on the items needed to understand that story, that day. These words and phrases emerge in the moment of the story and are not sitting on the board at the beginning of class. Thus they are not pre-planned and selected from a list that came from a district document, high-frequency wordlist, or backwards planed from a novel. I am finding much greater creativity and freedom and engagement from the students with this approach. I have taught in different settings since 2003 and this is the happiest I have ever been in my entire career.