Sean, Laura, Leigh Anne and any other upper level teachers exploring the use of CI at those levels please read and give me feedback even though this post is long. Leigh Anne I know you were in MN and I would esp. like to know how your experience there relates to what I wrote below. My thoughts on the topic:
I’m writing something here on upper levels on the PLC since some of us have been thinking about upper levels lately.
The way I think about levelS 3 and 4 is lots of reading, and I don’t worry about making it CI so much. Writing is done far too much at the upper levels. They aren’t ready.
The reason I really tone down the CI classes at the upper levels is that kids at levels 3 and 4 are hard to teach anyway because those classes are more populated with “thinkers” whose tendency, esp. kids who have not been trained with CI, is to want to do what they do in their other classes: show off by intellectualizing things.
Upper level kids are tricky that way. They can’t speak the language but they want parity with us because they can often subtly control things and even their teachers in their other classes because they are smart. It’s always worked for them before so why not in their language class?
So, instead of trying to make stories work at those levels, I let those kids have what they want. As long as the texts chosen to read are simple (see below), reading in class allows them to gas themselves up because that’s what they need. In this case I capitulate.
So in the upper level classes I don’t talk about the reading in the TL because even with a lot of CI for two years they are not ready to use the TL to discuss anything that we read together except maybe things we appropriate from the lower levels (see below).
This is a practical response to a problem that is real. I choose not to fight them and their need to be perceived as smart, which they can’t be in a full-on immersion CI class. Poor dears.
Please note that the above position against continuing CI in the upper levels is not a blanket statement. It is qualified. I ask the reader’s indulgence on this point. I may want to go on a two week pure CI tear on anything in the TL, but my general point of view on the upper levels is reading and the use of English. It’s what they’ll get in college anyway.
Taking this approach is just practical until such time as middle and high school language teachers are all doing high quality CI, when upper level kids will have been trained properly and can handle the privilege of CI at those levels. Maybe in 40 or 50 years.
One thing I won’t change from the lower levels is playing the Word Chunk Team Game every Friday as a reward for good behavior and participation. That is a non-negotiable with me. And that cuts your workload down right there.
One might ask, “Why not meet specialized vocabulary demands in AP language courses by drawing from the Invisibles and OWI and NTCI since they are so incredibly powerful? They really do contain nuclear power, compared to TPRS. But I just won’t fight those smarties. I want to teach the whole class. It is my responsibility to do so. I have so many stories over so many years when I tried to keep those upper levels in the TL using CI while preparing them for the AP exam and it didn’t work and wasn’t worth all the lost sleep.
What to read? NOT authentic texts – the kids always understand far less than they reveal. Smart kids sit there and fool you on what they actually understand in class because they are very good at that from having done it a lot in their other classes for many years.
One thing I suggest is to take stories that level 1 and 2 kids wrote and put them on the screen and just talk about them, varying verb tenses, keeping them in their analytical brain if that is what they like. I also like upper level kids seeing how fine the stories are that younger kids create. It helps them respect the work we are doing there at the lower levels.
To conclude, wiith upper level kids I really do personally feel that a shift to more and more reading (of anything but going very easy on authentic texts) is best.
The thing is, I don’t know of any really experienced CI teachers who really keep the listening thing going through four years, esp. if you had them all those years. It’s too difficult. Remember, the main focus of this site is not on student gains, but on mental health.
Too many teachers burn themselves out trying to be the best when they should be focused on being the most relaxed, and the hell with their student gains if it means mental imbalance, which always leads to physical imbalance.
Moreover, stories fade over the years. The youth who are underclassmen sill have some sense of play in them, but the upperclassmen, many of them anyway, start acting like bored college students sometimes. They are content to let the few dominate the class. They’ll take a 1 or 2 on the AP exam if they had drill and kill classes early on in order to focus on their “more important” AP classes. The few become the excuse for CI, which is a completely group oriented activity, to fail in that classroom .
So why should we work so hard to do stories when we can sit there and talk in English about some text? Everybody can fake it. They’re all happy. The few can show off their ability to hang with complex grammar notions, the rest can rest, and the teacher doesn’t have to try to pull the class up a staircase when all tied together with a rope.
I mentioned above not doing much writing at all at upper levels. There’s an exception to that. Make them write a LOT (Write and Discuss about the text they just read) if their voices need to be muted, or to put it more directly, if they need to have a sock put in their mouths.
I’ve had this position on reading at the upper levels for 20 years now. It is what I feel is best. Wouldn’t it be nice to not feel that pressure to take juniors and seniors and be the cool storytelling teacher when instead you can pull them into left brain analysis and not get a fraction of the snark that only juniors and seniors are capable of manufacturing by the truckload.
P.S If you really want to minimize your energy drain with upper level students – and who doesn’t want to do that? – all you have to do is have them come in and give them an assigned text to read in 20 minutes and then to Read and Discuss or Write and Discuss with them for the rest of the period, with a nice little quiz to keep them honest given at the end of the period. 20 min. of reading plus 10 min. for the quiz, which you write in class while they read at the start of class, and you’re down, in a 50 min. class, to 20 min. of actually having to interact with them per class period. For a block class, you can’t double the numbers since they can’t sit still enough to read for 40 minutes even if they know a quiz is coming at the end of the block, so don’t double the numbers, just double the process, so you have the 20′ of reading/15′ of discussion or writing/10′ for the quiz twice in a row. Or a variation on that plan for the block would be to do Read and Discuss (in the second section of the first half of the block) and then Write and Discuss with projecting their writing on the screen for the second and third sections of class (for the second half of the block). Hope that last bit makes sense, but the point is that with this idea you don’t have to actually teach those upper level kids under stressful conditions. Doing CI with upper level kids, those trained with CI earlier or not, is just too stressful and there is no magic bullet and so I write this in the interest of mental health for us all. I don’t know about anyone else, but upper level kids cause me the biggest stress, I think perhaps because they think that they know everything.