Note: I write long posts. Social media experts say not to. But this isn’t social media. These pages represent an in-depth look at our profession on many levels. So I feel no desire to keep my posts short.
That said, here’s another long post. It covers a problem that is unique to CI teachers. What happens when you change buildings?
In my view, there are three possibilities:
(a) New CI teacher is welcomed with open arms by a department committed to the transition.
(b) New CI teacher is met with a divided department and a sticky situation.
(c) New CI teacher only pays lip service to CI and is met with hidden derision.
We’ve talked about this many times here. Just this year one of our long-time members almost took a job that would have put her into a bad situation. So what to do?
Below is an email discussion I had last week with a teacher who is new to the group and clearly a CI super talent BUT is going in the fall into situation (c) above when she perhaps thought that she was going into situation (a).
What I say in response to the points Victoria makes is just my opinion, by the way. I could be wrong. But it’s necessary stuff to think over should you ever change buildings with your CI skills as part of your application package.
Here’s the discussion:
Hello Ben,
VB: I just joined the PLC and wanted to introduce myself as well as share some questions I have after reading some of the discussions thus far.
I have been teaching Spanish for 9 years and in that time have studied SLA through graduate work as well as workshops and conferences related to CI/TPRS. I am currently working on my masters in Applied Linguistics and am excited about being able to use the knowledge I gain in the classroom, although I am always concerned with how I can work it in depending on students / administration / parents etc.
BJS: There is a category on the right side of the home page of the PLC entitled “admin/parent/teacher re-education”. There are also Primer articles on the hard link bar at the top of that page. Both can give you ammo for you grad program. One guy in Boston about ten years ago wrote an entire PhD thesis in language education based largely in the information provided in this internet space back then.
VB: I will begin the year at a new high school teaching Spanish 3 and 4. The assistant principal seems to be excited about the idea of teaching that does not entail your traditional textbook / worksheets / grammar drill and kill, however, I have not yet met the other teachers who will also be teaching those levels so I am not sure how open they will be to a more CI approach since I still was given a curriculum that is based on two textbooks.
BJS: The AP is not in charge. He just wanted you to take the job so he said that. Your new colleagues will be smiling but their hearts and minds will be steel cages of mistrust about anything you bring up having to do with CI. I have over forty years of experience w these people. It hasn’t bettered my opinion. They will hide their disdain for the research, so they look ok to you, but their interest in the research, and their knowledge of it, would shock you in that they are probably ignorant of it. For you to bring up CI would be an error. That is my opinion based on my own experience but I have seen this type of scenario before many times. You don’t want to draw their fire.
VB: My assistant principal basically said that the textbook is a guide for what to cover, but that there is some freedom to be creative.
BJS: I have also believed things AP’s have said to me upon going to a new building. But they don’t know. The traditional department has fooled them. From what he said, I would interpret that to mean that you have to cover the same material as your textbook-driven colleagues and if you have extra time you can be creative. They will be watching you like a hawk. There is another problem and that is that since you are inheriting upper level kids. Many of them have certainly formed allegiances to their old grammar teachers in levels 1 and 2 (and along with that a certain agreement that they can memorize for the test and get the A that way and those kids are not going to want to have to “break in” a new teacher to “the way things are done”. I personally would never want to inherit upper level kids.
VB: She also said a previous teacher last year was too traditional, and that the kids in level 3 may not be as strong since there were was a long term sub so to review a lot.
BJS: I will restrain myself from commenting on this advice that you will need to review a lot. I am beyond tired of hearing such phrases and if the advice you were given is any indication of the mentality in the department, then you are in for an interesting year, bc it proves they don’t know the research. Think about what this teacher said to you. She warned you that certain kids in a class that you are inheriting as a level 3 class did not get the training they needed bc the teacher was “too traditional” and so you need to review. Really? And you can fix it by “reviewing”. I don’t even know what that means.
VB: I was surprised by your recent post on not trying a more CI approach with levels 3/4 students and basically sticking to a more traditional approach or bridge the two methods (at least that’s the conclusion I got from the post- please correct me if I am wrong.) I was hoping to get guidance on how to use the curriculum I was given (which covers different themes / topics) but still structuring my class in a way that encourages using Spanish more as a vehicle to get to know each other, be creative, and explore topics of interest rather than just “teach about Spanish” so to speak.
BJS: These two options for what you are thinking about doing in your classes in the fall conflict with each other. The students and those colleagues around you will try to drive you to do it the way they have always done it. Do you really want, in your initial year in the building, to put that mess on your plate? Rather fly well beneath the radar, I say.
VB: What I have a hard time with is staying organized because I tend to want to “do it all” and find so many activities / methods I have read about that I want to try (from Bill VanPatten’s explanations on task based learning to TPRS / novels and even possibly inserting PBL at the end of the year that can benefit the community somehow).
BJS: I have nice end of year project-based work described in ANATTY. But that is all based on doing the Invisibles all year to set up the PBL. PBL cannot work in the beginning or middle of the year, when input ideally is the norm. Why not until the end of the year? Because how can they do projects when they don’t know anything? I also have a huge problem w the use of those novels in class. They divide classes.
VB: I have already found your work helpful, inspiring, and it’s made me think a lot about what I want to do for this year, but also I am not sure how to apply some of it since it seems to go against the ideas I’ve had (i.e. sort of bridging the curriculum I was given to CI). Do you have any thoughts / recommendations as to how to approach the year or utilize the PLC? I am open to any feedback…
BJS: I expressed above that I don’t think you’re going to be using CI much in your classroom this year w/o a lot of pushback. I don’t mean to be negative, but this is my practical gut reaction to what you are into there for next year. My Star Sequence Curriculum is light years away from the bridge curriculum you refer to and it would shock your new colleagues. I can only speak for myself when I say that there is little reason to believe that a bridge even exists that you can use. I am extreme on that, but also practical. There is no solid ground in the textbook, so how could footings be placed on the textbook side to allow a bridge to exist? That is why for years, and I’ve really been roasted for this, I insist that people do not try to bridge something unbridgeable and just teach 30 minutes or so what you are expected to do traditionally and then do the rest of class w stories or creature creation, keeping things separate. No mixing in my view. So quietly secure your new position in the building by not giving your new colleagues ANY REASON to think you are a CI freak. Sneak in some fun CI like in the books below (individually based images rock the house more than one word images!) and then over time, if they have no reason to attack you, they will want to learn what it is you are doing. By then you will know whom to trust and whom you can work with. This will take into your second year at that school, when you will be much better place to expand your CI instruction.
VB: I also wanted to say that in the Applied Linguistics program at the University of Massachusetts we do a lot of readings and work with CI, Krashen, and SLA acquisition- and I was drawn to your work because it aligns with a lot of the SLA research. The program aims to preparing people like teachers to use theory / research of how people truly acquire a language and apply it into their context (although a lot of it is still contradictory, that’s human nature I suppose). So, there is some hope I think… what is crazy to me is that this research and work has been going on for so long yet there is still a lot of push back but at the same time I am happy to see so many people like you and others are helping other teachers move forward and make changes in language “teaching”.
In one of the books I am reading for psycholinguistics (Theories in Second Language Acquisition) there is a list of observations on SLA, including “there are limits on the effects of instruction” and “there are limits on the effects of output”, which seems so contradictory to even the idea of having a “language classroom”. I almost have to laugh.. where does that leave the language “teacher”? I’ll make sure to not bring those observations up in any meetings at school hah!
BJS: I love what you say above. Precisely! Why do they claim that those limits are there? It is to justify their ineptitude. I don’t even know what “limits on the effects of output” means. It sounds scholarly, but its roots, the roots of that phrase, indicate a lack of appreciation of what Krashen says about output. When he told me he really liked ANATS, I was so happy. He called that book “important” and “clever”. I wrote it in an attempt to finally write a book that FULLY reflects his research, which none of the books I wrote about TPRS do.
Granted, we don’t have enough time. I concede that time is a limit. BUT other than that, there is no problem with limits. There are no limits to what we can do in the classroom.
Anyway, back to your new job. You will know you are over the danger period when, because of the great response from the students, they have to open up for real to CI. Then you become their trainer and they want the training and then it’s all different and you are safe. But they only want to learn about CI when they feel the boat sailing on their job security.
The vast majority who have been grammar ppl their entire lives even as favorite students and who are “really good at French” and were in high school their teacher’s pals decided to go into language teaching w/o knowing the research, and then a new person comes in and threatens to topple their empire built on sand.
