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Tina Hargaden on the Emotional Piece
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5 thoughts on “Tina Hargaden on the Emotional Piece”
Personalization is a double edged sword. It is essential to establishing a connection with our students, and making the class into a community. By doing so, we are going to have a lot of student emotional buy-in, and that is nothing to take lightly, because people can get hurt when they invest themselves into a group.
As a white man, teaching mostly white and privileged students (ironically, the children of white professors who “care deeply” about personalization), I have the option of not engaging my classes on an emotional level. Personalization is optional. Students will still do what I ask, whether or not they feel a connection to me, because they want the grade, they want to move on to the next level (Harvard, etc). In fact, the more I personalize, the more pushback I get from these students, because for them learning is objective and impersonal (=rigorous and serious).
All this to say that white professors talking about personalization really don’t get how important this work is in our classrooms. If we teach, or want to teach, diverse classes, we need to engage them. But if you are teaching a privileged AP-track group and plan to do CI/TPRS, beware.
…if you are teaching a privileged AP-track group and plan to do CI/TPRS, beware….
John could you expand on this? I think I know what you are saying because I have been in that situation a lot. Those privileged white kids have had the fun beat out of them so much that some of them can’t even take a joke. They think it’s all about preparing for the test and so oddly they shoot themselves in the foot because they literally cannot learn a language when their focus is on assessment. Moreover, if we try to get lighthearted and play, they kind of short circuit and misunderstand our intentions and screws and nuts and bolts start flying out of their bobbing heads, and they tell their parents who, since they, being white and privileged, think that they can come into the building and complain because they got an A in French in college and they weren’t taught with stories. Yeah, been there done that. But now one parent who felt that way in the fall has been taught by her daughter that French class is her favorite class. So we gradually win those battles. If we don’t quit first from battle fatigues. PTSD is real, very real, in teaching. We can’t ignore that.
Regarding John’s comment on PQA, I read Terry W’s book, TPRS w/Chinese Characteristics: Making Students Fluent Through Comprehensible Input, and it is a wonderful overview of our practices. She has a definite opinion on personalization, well articulated among the many worthwhile nuggets in her book:
Here’s one of many excellent passages:
“TPRS captures student attention through personalization. Originally, personalization… meant finding out actual information about students in the class and talking about them….
However, in today’s public schools in the US, personalization can be problematic….Many districts have very specific policies (or worse, unwritten rules that teachers only find out about when someone complains) about what can and cannot be discussed…or what is or is not deemed ‘appropriate.’
….There are also some teachers who are not comfortable with delving …into students’ private lives….For these situations, instead of personalization, ‘customization’ is a good option.
Customization involves learning what students like. Instead of talking bout themselves, the discussion centers on things that students like (or don’t like — talking about characters students love to hate is also very engaging!)… Many teachers will use a mixture of personalization and customization when asking questions in the classroom, both before (or instead of) a story-asking session and during story-asking. It really doesn’t matter which one you use, or how much of either one you choose. What matters is that you find the right balance and the right direction to fit your particular group of students and your school.
The amount of personalization versus customization may also be different for different age groups or even for different classes within the same age group….”(pp.23-24)
I would say that for elementary age kids, personalization is very different and centers on more predictable questions (favorite foods, pets, games, hobbies, etc.) and that we do tons of customization (as opposed to personalization) in our classes.
What a shame that we can’t rely on a trusting teacher-student relationship within our classrooms. However, even customization is more personal than the content delivery model our kids get the rest of the day!!
I have heard of PQA going sour, like when, during a story, a teacher implicated a romance between 2 classmates who were just friends in a 7th or 8th grade class…it was humiliating for the kids and the parents came in and were not pleased….
I think this is why using the Invisibles is so powerful. They are loved by the kids…they come from the kids…but they are not the kids themselves. I am trying them out in class and I can see great potential.
Yes! The Invisibles are the definition of customization!