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Posting Daily Objectives – 1
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21 thoughts on “Posting Daily Objectives – 1”
I have to do a version of this. We had a staff wide PD day to learn to write them in a specific format: I can _______ by/in order to__________. I also think it is unnatural in language class but I am reasonably pleased with my lazy nod to the directive. I’ll share in case it helps anyone else.
I have a side bulletin board where I post the learning target. Since we are chatting in French pretty much every day I leave this poster up every day:
“I can engage in a conversation in French by answering questions, using body language and asking for clarification”
Underneath is some space where I add an additional poster depending on what else we are doing that day.
For reading: “I can engage with a text by answering questions, translating to English and/or asking for clarification.”
For read and draw or listen and draw: “I can draw an illustration to demonstrate my understanding of written/spoken French.”
For dictee: “I can write what I hear in French to show what the language looks like in my mind.” and “I can correct errors in my writing to improve my awareness of spelling and grammar in French.”
For write and discuss: “I can co-create a text with my class based on our discussion to demonstrate my comprehension.”
For timed writing: “I can compose sentences (later on in the school year I’ll change it to “describe a character” or “write a story”) in French to demonstrate my writing fluency.”
For Team Word Chunk Game: “I can translate written/spoken French into English to demonstrate my understanding.”
Whenever I have a rubric for something: “I can use a rubric to evaluate my _____ habits” fill in the blank with Communication Skills or Writing or whatever I have a rubric for.
If I am being observed I tell the kids to turn and talk and read the learning target to their partner and explain what they did to reach it. The targets just describe what class is so they say what they just did and everyone gets a pat on the back.
There’s NO WAY the kids can have their metacognitive filter craked up on ‘high’ while they are taking in and comprehending L2. AND it’s ludicrous to think that the Ss being able to articulate the teacher’s instructional goals aids in L2 acquisition. Does a toddler know ‘why’ mommy and daddy are reading to her at night? Should she? What kind of a response would we get if we asked? Hopefully, “Cuz it’s fun and I like it!”
This ‘students’ understanding of the WL lesson’s purpose’ goal might apply to other academic domains, (Math: working on percentages to figure out the sale price of a discounted item) but the admins make no distinction for unconscious SLA. They think that doing so is: unfair/inequitable (to hold their WL employees to a diff’t standard than the rest of the faculty – they hide behind this excuse); a pain in the ass to create a different evaluation rubric (we already have a WL-redo of Danielson); too much of a departure from their one-size-fits-all off-the-shelf paper routine.
I love that Carly has it all posted in the rm so that student ‘training’ is straightforward & fast. But all this mechanical asking and answering with rote responses is a waste of time and energy, not to mention slowly (or not so slowly) eroding kid’s faith in the very value of the educational process…
“There’s NO WAY the kids can have their metacognitive filter cranked up on ‘high’ while they are taking in and comprehending L2.”
Yes! In fact, this is why ANYONE including adults have trouble with the stop signal. It has occured to me a couple of years back that when a student is trying to understand the language they have trouble notifying the teacher of a lack of clarity because their brains are busy decoding the language.
In traditional TPRS (targeting), there is so much attention to the form, that there is less attention to the subconscious. That is why in trainings teachers are using the stop signals because they are only attending to the form and are not using their whole brains. I’d argue that there is less acquisition and more learning via memorization/form.
This is only one of the many ways that TPRS has slowly turned Krashen’s research away from what he actually said to what they want him to say. It’s been a slow 25 year turning of the screw on his research. It’s odd bc just an hour ago I was mulling the stop sign over in my head, why it didn’t feel right. You nailed why, Stephen and Alisa. We’re talking about mixing in a conscious analytical piece into instruction when the research clearly states that the process of acquisition does not occur in that part of the brain. It’s a neurological impossibility!
From another of Ben’s articles on Curriculum:
The students don’t have to worry about how the soup is made –
they just enjoy it. That’s what the research tells us about how fluency is attained.
From another of Ben’s articles on Curriculum:
“The students don’t have to worry about how the soup is made –[this includes the teacher’s instructional objectives!] -they just enjoy it.
That’s what the research tells us about how fluency is attained.”
There’s a company that will remain un-named here that sells methods training to unwitting districts who pay them tens of thousands – probably more – to fly in trainers from all around the country to attempt a paradigm shift to teaming activities involving deduction and other higher-level thinking skills with a huge de-emphasis on whole-group instruction.
It’s clear that the approach was never intended for use in World Language classes, because initially, following the various walk-throughs and “coaching” observations, we were being told that our activities in lower level classes “lacked rigor” because kids were doing simple novice-level activities. (Duh! – Never mind the fact that kids were doing these things in another language).
Every time we requested implementation suggestions adapted to our subject area, asked how other districts are making it work, asking why their video library and sample lessons didn’t include any language classes, we were basically ignored. .
However, for us it is a district-wide initiative across all subject areas and grade levels. We are required to use a textbook, of course. I’ve been around for a long, long time and have slowly been seeing the value in implementing more CI and less grammar (that’s why I joined this group this weekend). That also means that I’m old enough to read the political landscape and remain eclectic enough to go along to get along. The young rebels willing to die on the CI hill were blasted on their observations, and two have left world language instruction, – one appearing to have left education altogether, and the other to middle school language arts in a neighboring district.
So we’ve been through two years of misery, and now, in year 3, all coaching is being conducted on the building-level, and implementation is tied to our year-end evaluations.
This year’s “non-negotiables” are team activities, learning targets and success criteria posted and IN THE HANDS of students in English and in the L1 of ELL’s, and a clipboard with a “tracking sheet” on which we are observing eavesdropping from afar to check-off individual performance against the learning targets and success criteria.
OOH!!! THIS SCHNIZZLE MAKES ME CRAZY!!! I’m with y’all on this. And try to skate through unnocticed. If anyone comes in I pretty much put “I can…” at the front of the rule poster. “I can listen and watch to understand.” I can listen with my voice off…” etc.
Slowly but surely I am training my students in some SLA research with the goal of them making some “cute posters” to put in the hallways. With pithy quotes and such.
Paula you are absolutely in the right place for pedagogical and moral support. Welcome. We can play the shell game, too. Only we won’t spend tens of thousands on it.
This is tragic. It slays me and deflates me bc it is such an affront to the research. It’s a slap in the face of the incredible and beautiful subtly that comprises language acquisition. I kind of wonder at times if we’re just all going crazy in our society. It’s like the bad guys, the greed-mongers, the fake experts, have gotten their grubby and greasy toes into the landscape and they won’t let go.
The thing is, Paula, how are you surviving this onslaught to your own professionalism? I can’t image staying in such a WARPED setting. It’s clear that the money grabbers have not once looked at the research. We welcome you bc one thing we can definitely say about our group is that we are tough and we are survivors. This PLC is nothing if not an emotional support group. The loss of those two young CI crusaders was the hardest thing to read.
Sometimes we would do well, in order to protect our sanity, to remember that it doesn’t as much matter that your students are learning; it matters if they think they’re learning.
That’s not pessimism – it’s realism. What I mean here is that we often bow down so low to the research that we forget the severe limitations that school buildings bring to bear on what we do in the classroom and, most especially, how kids feel in a classroom while learning the language.?
In classrooms we cannot and never will approximate the actual conditions in which people acquire languages. It’s a wonder that our students learn anything in school buildings. It’s all too artificial. There are too many administrator/judges walking around, too many colleagues looking out of the corners of their eyes at us, etc. It’s a judgement-fest.
I doubt that kids would ever learn even their first language in a classroom if that was all there was. The invisible forces of confusion and self-consciousness and that feeling of being judged by those around them are too prevalent, too noxious in schools.
So, when we teach our kids, maybe we should go at least in part for creating the illusion that learning is going on by including a lot more activities that involve output and other activities that conflict with research. What would that look like?
More output. More writing. Working consciously on accent, having them read aloud, putting them in groups more often to make drawings, doing more writing too early – anything that gets their little pencils moving.
If we did that, we really wouldn’t be seen as slackers in our buildings. We would be the only ones who knew that we weren’t aligning with the research because few around us actually know the research sufficiently and in that sense they are teacher-babies. Rather, in allowing more busywork in the form of output activities we would be showing a healthy response to what is an unnatural and very unhealthy setting that will not change anytime soon – school buildings.
In this way, we take care of ourselves best.
Teachers have always fought too much against the unnaturalness of schools, trying to do too much in what are really crushing conditions.
In 2015 while teaching in India I had sent a detailed description of each one of my reading options to Dr. Krashen. He was reading my new book at the time called A Natural Approach to Stories, which he called “important” and “clever”. However, he sent me back ten emails about the reading options (I counted them) detailing how most of them conflicted with his research. I told him in response that I got his points, but then asked him if he had ever taught in a school building.
That was a little snarky but not really. He is the first person to admit that he is a researcher and not a teacher and that we are the ones tasked with bringing his work to the light (or actually the darkness) of school buildings. He has said so many times.
My point is simple – we need to think of ourselves in the most loving ways possible, and not think so much about how to teach best but rather how best to take care of ourselves best.
My prayer is that we work in that direction, instead of in the direction of making us the “best” teachers on the planet.
Yes. Sanity. Currently I am teaching 1 week Book, 1 week CI. It is a trade off and it has some major ups and downs but it appeases many.
Well said, Stephen, and not the worst idea ever in this work, although we never would have said it ten years ago, right? I like the softening of the hard edge we used to have. I like that we’re learning how to not make it one way or no way. This is a natural change we’re in, and the troops who try to storm the machine gun turrets don’t always fair too well. I prefer the siege warfare approach – just keeping our mouths shut and teaching well. We just wait. We know it’s gonna happen.
Stephen you mentioned ups and downs for the one week on/one week off approach. Here’s my prediction: the up on the grammar side is that the high achievers who like to dominate the class via memorization, their strong suit, get to perpetuate their vision of what school should be all about: a survival-of-the-fittest pipe dream, and so they are happy. The downside for the grammar week is obvious: it’s a total Snore Fest, to use the apt term from Jenna in a comment here last week.
If anyone is in a battle with their admins or colleagues about CI or just want to keep up with the research I 100 percent recommend this book
https://www.amazon.com/Research-Talks-Motivating-Acquisition-Centered-Classrooms/dp/1073118800/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=research+talks&qid=1572279305&sr=8-1
The benefit of this book is that it has research that supports CI from a ton of other researchers other than Krashen and BVP.
I notice that some anti-CI people tend to shut down when you mention Krashen and BVP.
The book is kind of a “quote-a-day” type of book. Much like many self-help books. From what I see a lot of what Sandra Savignon says really supports what we do in the Invisibles System.
Sandra Savignon is a goddess pioneer.
And Greg my own background is that Denver Public Schools and Krashen were practically married back in the early days over 20 years ago. He came here all the time and so did Blaine. So honestly I’m not in need or have no interest in other researchers, since I found my thrill w Krashen. This is excepting my work in studying Vygotsky before I heard of CI. I have no interest in BVP. SK’s work and Beniko Mason’s has been sufficient to give me a more than firm grip on the research. Honestly I can’t even imagine having TIME to delve into those other researchers. However, since here on the PLC over the years I’ve been on the receiving end of more than a few snarky comments about my one-pointedness on SK and so it’s a very good thing that you shared this title with us. It’s a good addition to the many articles posted here in various places like the Primers hard link above that defend our position against incoming howitzer strikes in our buildings.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQQCPrwKzdo
I too am required to post these, although I often forget and rarely mention them to students.l I have tried, it just isn’t part of my routine. Cameron Taylor’s Square Peg Round Hole is filled with these, broken down by activity…card talk, TPR, WCTG, Reviewing Artists’ Work, FCR, Dictee, etc. I typed a bunch according to activity, and laminated. I use that magnet tape and slap them up on the white board (when I remember).