We’ve been answering this recurring question for at least ten years now. It’s so common! My responses are in italics below.
Hi Ben –
Q. I am in a grammar-centric department and am required to give all the same tests and quizzes (dictated and provided by the department head for level 2) as the other teachers, including verb synopsis quizzes on verbs that are often not even being used in context in a book chapter at the time. Though I like TPRS and want to get better at it, I have not felt comfortable using it often, because I fear my students will not pass the tests they are required to take, including for example, “pull out” (not tied to textbook order or vocabulary) grammar unit tests such as ser vs. estar with also choosing reasons, and one with large numbers of every type of preterite verb.
A. I have strong feelings on the practice of targeting vocabulary like you mention. I have written extensively on it and ask you to find and read in the categories on the right side of this page an article called “41 Reasons I Prefer NTCI”.
Q. Do you know of anyone in my situation who has managed to make TPRS work while still giving their students what they need to succeed on department-wide tests and quizzes? I am pretty sure I cannot even add quizzes (story quizzes for example) because parents in the district are very involved and administrators would hear about it and not approve, since it might skew the grades vs. other teachers’ classes of the same level.
A. My response to the all-too-common situation you’re now in is that the people are silly. They know, or should know as professionals in this field, the research, which screams against their traditional department-wide cookie cutter textbook-based poor teaching.
And yet after 20 years of fighting the system, I have accepted that the dinosaur language educators – who are so utterly oblivious of what the research has shown us is true about how people learn languages, so much so that they are utterly unable to properly align with the Communication standard not to mention the ACTFL Three Modes of Communication – won’t leave on their own, and so there you are “wanting” to use comprehensible input in your instruction but literally unable to bc of the fossilized ignorance surrounding you.
I have one solution and I think it’s a good one. It’s very simple:
Point 1: avoid trying to put TPRS per se into your program right now. TPRS is outdated. There are new ways to teach using CI. I have the credentials to make this statement bc I have written four books about TPRS but now have shifted, since 2015, to a new way of teaching using CI, my non-targeted Invisibles approach, which I call NTCI. So point one is to really explore the Invisibles as an easier way than TPRS.
Point 3: Use the Invisibles approach for ten to fifteen minutes at the end of each class next year. Just teach the stuff you have to teach in 30 instead of 45 minutes. (So you only bore the kids for 2/3 of the time…).
We both know that you can teach that book stuff and those word lists in 30′ just as easily as you can in 45′. It shows mercy. So with the new block at the end of class you can do the NTCI approach for 15′ at the end of class. Just have fun working from kids’ drawings – the Invisibles.
Over the course of the year, the kids will want much more than 15′ on the Invisibles. But just teach traditionally 2/3 of the time and keep your job. What will be the result? You won’t have to do anything. Slowly, maybe over two years, word will get out that your class is actually interesting and parents will talk and heat will be put on the dinosaurs. Stay out of it. Let the change happen by parents and kids clamoring to “be in a class like Ms. Fuhs”.
But don’t fight the establishment. You can’t steer others to the research if you don’t have a job.
Slowly you may find that you are doing 30′ of the Invisibles and 15′ of the mechanical stuff. BUT THEY WILL STILL NAIL THE DEPARTMENTAL TEST QUESTIONS and in fact your kids’ scores will be at top of the heap. Don’t believe me? Try it.
Don’t you agree that you can teach 45′ worth of memorization type of stuff in 15′, 20′ at the most?
Watch how the kids orchestrate the change.