For a long time I knew that Piedad Gutierrez was swimming upstream trying to get to the non-targeted place along with me and Tina and about four other people that we knew over the years. She just finished a training in New Jersey in which she covered the following topics. It’s very similar to where Tina and I are going:
1. Let’s get real! – Standards and expectations – How many hours of contact with the students we have? About 100 per school year, and we pretend that with that limited time, we are bringing our students to whatever ACTFL says we have to.
2. We do not need a curriculum, alignment, or any other heavy jacket to restrain our teaching for acquisition and communication, we just need themes to orient the conversations for those teachers that are in transition from traditional/grammar oriented classroom to a CTL or CIT classroom.
3. Assessment is a process not a goal or final product. Each person acquires at their own pace. Language clicks! Beautiful anecdote from yesterday: Christian is my student in Spanish 1. He entered the school very late during the school year and has been in my class since December. I dictated six words yesterday, and he said with the most gorgeous voice and smile, “WAW this is the first time I spelled everything correctly”, needless to say how happy he was and how happy I was. I couldn’t resist and I told him that is what acquisition is about and that is also the reason why i do not quiz or test ever. We should not asses via quizzes and tests, we should assess via getting there. As long as we see progress, it is ok.
4. Activities and role-playing are a colossal waste of time. We need to replace them with real conversation, story-listening, story-asking, and storytelling. That is the only way we can have 90% in the target language.
5. SILENT period. We need to be able to train our student s in being silent. PERIOD.
6. Text books cannot be replaced with vocabulary lists. And authentic resources is a false idea. Authentic for whom? We need resources, all resources; teachers created, authors created, companies created, all counts!
7. Skills, that should be the core of the PD training. How to tell, ask, create… characters and stories, that is what we need.