Report from the Field – Anne Matava

3 thoughts on “Report from the Field – Anne Matava”

1. Sean Lawler

   November 1, 2018 at 2:54 pm

   Great! The quote from Anne’s student reminds me of a a question on a survey that goes out every year to all students and staff in every Chicago Public School across the city. The question is, “Think about your period 5 class. Do you have to work hard in this class?”
   It’s called the 5Essentials created by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. Every one of our schools gets ranked based on a serious of questions covering what they have determined the 5 essentials, 1) effective leaders, 2) collaborative teachers, 3) involved families, 4) supportive environment, and 5) ambitious instruction. These rankings can make or break a school. Families look at these rankings to determine what school to send their child to.
   Most of the questions on this survey are legit. But this one, “Do you have to work hard in this class?” is problematic. I don’t think it’s just our subject, foreign language, where learning happens through play more so than through hard work. At least, I think just about anyone, child or adult, would say that they are learning more when they feel like they are in a state of play rather than in a state of work. This is what Csikszentmihalyi says in his book, Zone of Proximal Development. I think we all read this book in our teacher training courses.
   We are being misled.

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2. Ben Slavic

   November 1, 2018 at 6:40 pm

   I think the only way to get around this “hard work” point you make so well above Sean is to make sure that our constituents (students/admin/parents) know exactly what rigor looks like in our classrooms. We have to go out of our way to show people that our classes only feel like play but are in fact quite rigorous.
   So that means getting out one of the primer articles and just telling people. The venues for this would be parent nite for parents/hallways when we see admins/students in class during the day, esp. when we explain how people learn languages to them in the first two weeks.
   What you say about this really makes me have to just accept that we really do have to sell our product and educate in a pre-emptive manner. Some days I tell myself, just close the door and teach and ignore the bozo factor and other days I realize that we have to make sure that everyone knows what we do, for the very kind of reasons you point out above.

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3. Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg

   November 2, 2018 at 1:55 pm

   Ugh the Bozo factor.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_the_Clown#/media/File:Bob_bell_bozo_roy_brown_cooky_1976.JPG

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