Greg has some questions for the group:
I just got this e-mail from this company that is doing a supposedly “comprehensible” version of a Telenovela: https://www.edunovela.com/
As department chair I’m trying to transition the department to CI. Full support of admin. It’s been an uphill battle though. People know what I am doing with the Invisibles is working and that the kids love it but they (the ones that are nice about it) just look at it like, “That’s just Greg, he’s really passionate about it, I MYSELF can’t do that. I need the structure of a textbook and I just don’t have the time to change.”
The new hires coming in we can work with to a certain degree (since they are starting off with that expectation of CI), but even they are not the same as someone who came to the conclusion of TPRS/CI on their own . I am also finding that many people who are hired to teach CI (without being totally convinced of SLA first) tend to approach it as immersion rather than CI. There is also a lack of real initiative. Heck for me, I was reading your blog on Christmas morning. It’s my career but it’s also become somewhat of a hobby. For new hires they tend to want any training to be done during contractual hours- although I have convinced one to go to Saturday events.
What do you do in this situation? TPRS/CI (even non-targeted) teachers would have full freedom (if they wanted it!) but we just can’t find the right people and the people that are already there won’t budge. They definitely won’t do TPRS or the Invisibles. The most I can hope for is they just make tweaks to their thematic or textbook teaching and get them to focus less on grammatical accuracy in their own classes…. all the while I have freedom to do what I want.
So is a program like the Telenovela above a good option say, for the Honors track? My plan is to focus on CI for the regular track (the majority of the kids) for levels 1-2. That way we set kids up to want to go on in the language. The other option I was thinking is have even the traditional teachers teach one novel per semester.
I know you are against the class reading of novels, but I am looking at this in terms of not what is best (because that would take buy-in) but as far as damage control.
I’ve heard of a school that implemented Blaine Ray’s “Look I can Talk” curriculum by force, but I heard some of those teachers that teach with that curriculum actually just teach with it because that’s the mandate (some even secretly hate CI but need to keep their job).
I really don’t want to force people to teach with CI because the kids know when the teacher is not into it and the “CI” done by a reluctant teacher actually works against us.
Has anyone had success with any such online “CI” programs as the telenovela above? I know that Senor Jordan recently contributed to an online “CI” curriculum that also seemed like an option for these reluctant teachers in a CI department.
My other question was this….is there anyone on this blog that came to TPRS/CI because their department chair asked them to and THEN they became convinced of it? Or anyone that learned TPRS/CI after they were hired for that purpose?
Or is everyone on here a person who became convinced totally on their own intitative?