I missed February, and some months last summer. I’ll try to do better. If anyone wants to nominate a T of M just write me an email. It’s a feature of our blog community that I should not let go just because of all the intense activity we are all involved in right now. By the way, click on the Teacher of the Month category and read there. It’s cool to read about what other past teachers of the month have done. You will find many familiar names there:
https://benslavic.com/blog/category/teacher-of-the-month/
In this case, Nathaniel’s award for March has a relatively long history to it. For about a year now, Nathaniel has bent that CI learning curve as far as one can bend it. He has been on a very intense pathway towards full change. It took me a number of years to move through the changes toward more and more full-on CI than what Nathaniel has done, really, in a matter of months. I have been watching the change.
Just to brag on him a bit, and I stole this information from something he shared with the group in a letter to a parent to basically inform that parent that he was better qualified to talk about SLA than the parent, who challenged him about eight months ago, but not as bad as he was challenged this week as described in the last two posts here.
My own background is one of 25 years of teaching Spanish. My training is at the Middlebury College Spanish School. My BA and BS degrees are in Spanish from the University of Connecticut, and I studied for a summer in Salamanca, Spain. Since then I earned my MA in Spanish through California State University, Sacramento by living with families and studying Spanish for three consecutive summers in Mexico, Peru, and Spain (Burgos).
In that process, I used a lot of textbooks and did a lot of grammar study and vocabulary lists, but I found that fluency did not arise out of those resources. It came rather through communicative interaction with speakers of Spanish. That is how I teach, via direct communication in Spanish with my students in the classroom on a daily basis, with lots of reading as well, since we now know that textbooks and the memorization of grammar rules and worksheets are ineffective, to say the least, in teaching languages, and the best gains are made via direct eye to eye interaction and reading.
These credentials are not enough to earn Teacher of the Month status here in this PLC, however. Just to be clear on that. Impressive though they are, Nathaniel’s professional credentials are not what make him special. His courage is what makes him special. That is what I see as the key element in making this change to comprehensible input instruction – courage. Pin a heart on Hardt – our T of the M for March. Well deserved, Nathaniel!