When we get observed, we often realize how truly out of touch our evaluators are. They don’t get the research. It makes for a very nervous few days of pre-observation and then the observation itself. It’s like a hospital administrator trying to figure out what a surgeon is doing wrong before a surgery – they are not qualified to evaluate anything because they haven’t spent any time studying CI.
One can say with accuracy tha, most of our admins are unqualified to even evaluate us. Yet they hold the power. What to do? Try to give them in one hour-long meeting a crash course in Krashen? I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work. I think that over 90% of admins are in their positions because they need to feel some kind of power over others. I read somewhere that the most common professional position of narcissists is that of CEO. They need to be in charge.
So when you decide in one of those pre-observation meetings to preach about CI, you will get nailed. It is the JOB of most admins – or so they think – to intimidate. Their real job is to support, but they rarely do that. This is incredibly stressful. Have you ever been between a rock and a hard place with an admin, where the rock is the research, and the hard place is the ignorant admin. (Not being mean – the verb “ignorer” in French is simple “to not know”.)
One thing to do, a brave thing, is to give them something to read. That deflects the verbal confrontation in the meeting. Of course, if you send them true things that explain how people ACTUALLY ACQUIRE languages, most admins, given their need to be the smart one, either won’t read it or will read it but not understand it bc it doesn’t align with what their department headfrom the 1970s told them – that learning a language is about worksheets and memorizing lists.
Then they will ask you what the kids will have learned after the lesson and you will try to explain that according to the research it may work like that in a math class but not in a language class, that language acquisition is an entirely unconscious process so that after a good CI class of building a tableau or story, you won’t be able to measure the what was “learned” but they sure as hell acquired a lot. That doesn’t fly too well in those meetings.
In the next five posts, I offer some things from the Ultimate CI Book 1 that you might want to send to your narcissist who claims to have your best professional interests at heart, but really just wants to establish their dominance over you.
For even more such “when attacked” articles, scroll to that category on the right side of this page and read some of those articles as well.
If you are not feeling attacked for trying out CI in your school, then God Bless You.