Michele wrote:
Maybe all TPRS classes are more similar than they are different.
It made me think that, in a CI/Krashen department, if my bike or car had a flat and I couldn’t get to work on time, I could call one of my team members, and they would teach my class, and I could teach one of theirs later in the day. The kids wouldn’t lose any instructional time.
Plus, it would be fun for the kids to speak French with someone else. I would feel very close to my colleague, too, as we shared our teaching and our students and developed kind of a big open door community.
The kids would think kind of like, “Who’s teaching us today? They would learn to respect our differences, and we theirs, and there would be kind of a big team feeling to the whole thing. We wouldn’t need to think any more in terms of who teaches what level – we could just share, always working for the best outcomes for the kids.
This is part of a greater discussion of doing away with levels of language instruction altogether, in the interests of aligning with the new standards that, if they are not in your state yet, are certainly not too far away on a posse of fast horses.
But if my colleague didn’t do CI, and, rather, just talked in English about the language, then, I can understand, the person wouldn’t feel comfortable going in there with my kids. There would be a feeling of closed doors and mistrust. The kids would be the ultimate losers of this mistrust between the teachers.
I mean, I could teach the non-CI class. I just wouldn’t want to, because the kids would probably know that I did CI and want to hear some of the language they are studying in more than just a perfunctory way.
On the other hand, if my non-CI colleague (25% or less target language used in the classroom) were to come in and try to work with my kids in their area of strength, about three of them would be into it. The rest wouldn’t care.