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Report from the Field – Randy Longoria
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7 thoughts on “Report from the Field – Randy Longoria”
I responded to Randy in a private email:
This is poignant. And yet it’s a common story from people with heart and who are not robotic teachers who can’t even see the need for a curriculum design that works at the heart level, which in my opinion is the level where languages should happen. We are not robots and language was given to us not just for the communication of facts, but also for the sharing of love, as I see it.
One sticking point is going to be w that principal. Your CI trained kids won’t be able to speak much for a few years. It takes that long. That is the research. Look in the category on the PLC called “Admin/Teacher/Parent re-education” or go to the top of that page and load and print a few of those articles about teaching w CI and give them to him. Teachers who provide such docs to admins quickly gain their respect.
The kids will love the Invisibles and all else looks good about your new job in your new school. This is great news. But nobody should expect speaking right away, any more than w small children who hear the language 24/7 for years can output at the level others would wish.
The kids will understand the language mightily. If they stay with you for four years, and they will with the Invisibles, then the principal will notice that as never having happened before in his school, and that will be enough. Then after two years you will see great strides w their output. The principal must be told not to expect speech output in the first TWO years and when he asks why, you are in a perfect position to educate him about the research.
However, the average tenure of admins in schools is under five years. So don’t spend a lot of time re-educating him about how people acquire languages. There is likely to be another one in that building sooner than you think. This always causes a let down. No sooner do you get things straight with one principal in favor of the research – and usually after significant conflict with the old guard language teachers in the building who still have their feet in the last century – than a new boss comes along and you have to start all over again.
So just concentrate on your kids. Enjoy this work because it was meant to be exactly that, and don’t worry about all the other garbage. It says in the Invisibles book about how we should make testing totally simple.
Keep us informed how things progress! It is always fun to keep up with each other on the PLC.
But not enough people give us reports from the field. That’s a hint for other group members. Send your field reports to benslavic@yahoo.com
What I said above makes me think of one of the main reasons I created the Invisibles. The Invisibles bring love into the classroom.
Real language acquisition happens at the heart level, doesn’t it? But that is not something we focus on in schools. But isn’t real communication about communication at the level of the heart, actually? This is what the great language reseaercher Lev Vygotsky talked about so long ago when in his research he talked about the “Zone of Proximal Development”, which is a fancy way of saying that when moms communicate with their babies, they do it in a way that can only be described as loving, and that it is from that sharing of love that the language gains spring in the child (Vygotsky and to a certain extent Krashen although he would never admit it).
Otherwise, why should a baby even listen to her mom speak to her? We are not robots and language was given to us not just for the communication of facts, but for the sharing of love, as I finally see it at the end of a long 40-year career spent thinking about it every day.
So the creation of images which is at the core of what we do with the Invisibles – which images can spark happy and loving sharing of laughter and heart-bonds in the classroom – does that a lot better than word lists.
Working from images and the happiness that they engender in our classrooms is one of the basic principles of my current thinking about language teaching. Without love or at least the expression of respect and approval and kindness and appreciation of each other, learning a language is a bore.
Randy,
¡Te felicito! I too am in a clean slate position. I am in a textbook driven district. Each year I start out (middle school) with a lot of Spanish spoken with comprehensible input but no TPRS training. Then comes chapter one and I switch to the grammar translation method and target language use goes from 50% to 10%. Each year I push to get through the grammar early so that I can focus on spoken (not memorized) and written dialogs in the 4th quarter.
Recently I’ve read a lot about TPRS and have decided to move to TPRS: “clean slate” ; )
Spring break ends this weekend so Monday will be TPRS day 1.
Thank you Ben and your PLC.
This August I will engage in a 3 day TPRS Workshop for my professional development and switch completely to TPRS from the git go this fall. Since the grade 6 curriculum is only half of the textbook (Av 1a), I believe that we will still cover the same ground but with 90%+ TL all year.
¡Estoy tan emocionante! ?
For that kind of situation w/ the principal, maybe take some video of a class in the early weeks…then mid-year…then at the end. Then simply explain (or do some captions) what the viewer can deduce in terms of growing quantity, sophistication (morphology, syntax, etc.) and incr rate of target language delivery. Less scaffolding; more automaticity.
Seeing these side-by-side/before ‘n after samples is very powerful for people who aren’t in the know w/the SLA research. All they need to keep in mind is that understanding messages drives acquisition. Clean and simple.
Orlando I would like to hear how it goes over the next year. One suggestion is that you double down on the grammar even more. Like I think it can be “covered” enough for your colleagues in just a few months. Sounds ambitious, but I have always felt that it can be done in a few months. That’s what I did but I put all the grammar at the end of the years starting in mid-March. I found that the kids could slay the grammar if they had all those months of CI first.
One thing is that I don’t do TPRS anymore – rather a way of doing comprehensible input that changed my results and class engagement dramatically and grew out of TPRS in 2015 that I call NTCI. It is described here:
https://benslavic.com/blog/why-i-prefer-ntci/
There are currently four books that have been published since 2015 that don’t describe TPRS at all, but NTCI (Using the Invisibles and One Word Images). Just so you’re clear on that. So keep that in mind this summer – there is more than one way to teach using comprehensible input. TPRS was way too complex and very nervous for me (too many rules and little shit to worry about – with NTCI we just flow).
Ben,
Thanks for the reply. I’ll read the blog and update you/PLC on this years quarter 4 and on next school year.
Orlando as you plan out next year, and what remains of this year, a few suggestions:
1. Use what’s left of this year to practice your CI skills. Start with one word images. Explain to the kids that you want to train them more in listening, bc they can’t speak unless they hear the language a lot first. Find some of the articles in the Primers above and explain them simply to the kids so that they understand why listening for full 100% understanding is the most important thing for them at this point, so they want to help you practice.
2. Tell them it is your job to make sure they understand. Don’t ask them to tell you with some gesture when they don’t understand bc they won’t. Rather, look at them and hold them accountable for showing you that it is in their eyes that you will be grading them as per the Interpersonal Skill of the Three Modes of Communication of ACTFL. Maybe practice using that way of grading a bit. Just use this time to practice your skills and techniques for the fall. In other words, start strong now, and work out the kinks.
3. See how many minutes each class can stay in the TL as a kind of game. Write each class’s best time down on the side of the board. They will enjoy competing to see who can get the longest time in the TL. One kid gets to have her phone out for that timing. But hold her responsible. Generally timers tune out of the instruction to do their job. Find someone who can do both listen and time.
4. If, when you are all trying to stay in the TL, they complain that you occasionally get to use a bit of English to explain a few things (keep that to a bare mimimum) but they don’t, tell them that those are the rules. No English for them.
5. Then in the fall think of the year in three parts. The first few months should be the slow building up to stories via tableaux as explained in that one book. Then after a month or two, after the prep work is done, you hit stories hard as per the star sequence, going narrow and deep through the winter in the whirlpool action that the star sets up, and then about March, relax and let the results of all your labors up to March give way to all the projects, book making projects and such, with some reading, so that you aren’t even doing stories for the last third of the year bc they really do burn out on them. Nobody works in school buildings after spring testing, so why should you?