Q. What do I do with my fast processors who are always trying to get me to speed up?
A. Don’t acquiesce to their demands. Tell them that you will not speed up to the level they want in your instruction until all the kids in the classroom understand. Tell them that you are doing your job as long as they are hearing the language, and that they don’t have your permission to push you to “go faster” with the language. Tell them it’s your job to reach all the kids in the classroom and that, in spite of what they may currently believe, they don’t get to run the classroom that year.
Q. I find that hard to do. The faster processors are always speeding me up.
A. This is a serious matter and you must meet it head on.
Q. Specifically how?
A. Well, isn’t it true that historically classes in all subjects throughout the school have been about dividing kids, getting them to compete with one another, with disastrous results for all but the few?
Q. Yes. That is probably a big reason for the intense stress found in school buildings these days.
A. I couldn’t agree more. Nobody can relax in schools these days. We’ve made it into a race. So I think it has A LOT to do with the competition vs. cooperation piece that has been ingrained into the culture of most schools, unnoticed but very much there and actively continuing to destroy kids’ belief in themselves as language learners.
Q. And those split classes take an actual physical toll on many of us. I can’t stand teaching divided classes but they always divide in spite of my best efforts.
A. I believe that my blood pressure was at least ten points higher whenever I was in one of the seven buildings I worked in over all the years. Some buildings were worse than others. In one building in one year, I was getting my blood pressure checked weekly because it was becoming an issue and it was consistently higher than what it was in the summer. How are we supposed to teach a simple and loving and highly understandable class when we are running around all day with that kind of stress in our bodies?
Q. It’s certainly a big topic.
A. But one of the things that the StarChart™ gives us is more time. It allows us to slow down.
Q. Exactly how?
A. By giving us structure within the chaos of story creation. It gives us a structured classes in which we always know what to do next. We are not meant to kill ourselves in the interests of comprehensible input language instruction and so we must have structure in our teaching. Unstructured free form TPRS/CI is its own worst enemy.
We must learn to relax and take care of ourselves so that we can live to fight another day. And for that to happen we can’t have the old “whatever happens” attitude of the old CI models of the past. We need to know what we are doing at all times during class.
Q. Those are wise words!
A. They are words born of hard experience and no small amount of personal emotional suffering over decades. I used to lie awake at night thinking about how to deal with some out-of-control kid instead. I worried about what ill-informed supervisors would think of me in their ignorance. I yearned for colleagues whose legs were not encased in the hard concrete of 20th c. language instruction.
Q. I can only imagine….
A. But I am happy that some of the younger teachers I am mentoring with the StarChart™ are clearly starting to break through to swim above those things.
Q. Any examples?
A. Here’s one from Madi Cabral:
“I love the fact that there’s so little prep needed for both my well-being as a teacher and theirs! I find myself using the free time to either read more research or prep Social/Emotional Learning activities for them that are desperately needed after the damage of the past two years. I don’t have to pour so much into the ‘language’ planning and can focus on the humans in front of me!”
Q. Boy, that sounds good.
A. That’s what the StarChart™ does….
Q. It’s amazing if you think about the collective mental state of language teachers and student in general over the years. I mean, if you look at it objectively and honestly, it’s not been good!
A. And so true for many of us over the decades. But when we teach to our students’ SEL needs, and they learn to relax and trust us more and as we learn to relax more and more ourselves, everyone’s stress levels are lowered. At the heart of the Ultimate CI approach lie the SEL and inclusion pieces.
Q. TheStarChart™ has advantages that I obviously have missed so far in my study of the first book….
A. Just to be able to lean all of our teaching selves into the wonderful and complete support that the StarChart™provides, and to be able to teach simply and in a relaxed fashion – it’s a win-win. Yet we have to consciously make the effort. It’s not something that’s given to us. The place to start is with tableaux in Phase 1 of the StarChart™and stay there, and not go deeper into the questioning levels in order to build a story until all of our students , and we ourselves, are ready to do so.
Q. What if the fast processors force you forward?
A. As I said before, you have to tell them that your job is to reach everyone in the classroom and that they can and that they will wait for the slow processors. Tell them that as long as they are hearing the language, they are learning. Tell them that the way you teach is based on equity and that you will not change to favor them just because we live in a country that favors the few on every level of our society including in education. Well, maybe you shouldn’t say that last part. We must fight for the slower processors that make up the vast majority of our language students. They are not slow processors because they are stupid or lazy – their life situations are causing that, and they are not to be blamed if they can’t process as fast as some others who aren’t wondering if their dad will be home that night.
Q. But the inclusion piece is being addressed now in language education, certainly. Right?
A. Where?
Q. In lots of districts. I thought we had reached that point in our profession.
A. It may be being addressed in some places, but in words only, I fear. In meetings or at happy hours perhaps, but not in the classroom. I only know of one district in the country that is consciously addressing the equity piece – in St. Louis County under the direction of Jeff Tamaroff. Even in my old district, Denver Public Schools, I don’t see much happening to directly tackle how we exclude kids from our language classrooms as a matter of course.
Q. How will I know when I get to that point?
A. You’ll know it when it happens. I’ll give you a hint. You won’t get there by looking at any test scores. You’ll know by looking in their eyes during class, which is a point about our work that I’ve been making for over 20 years, since I first heard it from my mentor Susan Gross.