A question from Memphis, TN:
Good morning Mr. Slavic,
My name is Caitlin Zon and I’m a teacher at a charter school in TN. I’m in my second year of teaching and I teach 6th grade Spanish and support literacy instruction.
I actually had the pleasure of attending one of your workshops this summer in Colorado and I’m seeking your input on an issue I’ve been having with my administration. My department chair, Danielle Crihfield, recommended I email you to see if you had any resources or suggestions. She said that you had had some similar experiences with administration and could provide more candid feedback and potential resources.
I’ve recently received scores on my instruction from my administration and had been ranked fairly low as not meeting expectations in content knowledge and teacher knowledge of students. Even though I had provided evidence of my differentiation through several PQA strategies and a variety of instructional techniques (TPRS/cloze activities/TPR, movietalk), my administrator did not feel that I was thinking about student’s potential difficulties with the language and didn’t understand my goals for my students. I had expressed to her my goals for the students are constant comprehensible input and the goal for them is not to be able to produce the language at this stage since they are in their first year of Spanish instruction. I want them to be able to effectively read one of Karen Rowan’s chapter books by the end of the year and become culturally sensitive citizens. I only see my students twice a week for 55 minute time blocks. The charter that I work for is very structured and focused on constant assessment, which in my opinion, doesn’t fit well into my perception of foreign language instruction. I’m also not sure how helpful it is for me to be critiqued on my ability to teach content when the person critiquing me will not look at my standards, I haven’t received much support with curriculum and they aren’t familiar with the Spanish language or the teaching of foreign language. I’ve previously given them the Foreign Language Teacher’s quick feedback form (I believe this is from Bryce Hedstrom) but they didn’t see it as fitting their method of providing feedback. I was hoping you might provide some feedback as to how I can effectively and respectfully discuss the method of TPRS, explain my standards and comprehensible input and dialogue regarding how they can give me more timely feedback that is solutions based and not just negative. Any suggestions, experiences or resources you can share would be immensely appreciated!
Thank you,
Caitlin Zon