Last September our group member Joe Eye in New Jersey shared his experience with a direct frontal attack on him by others in his school building. Below it is a very important position statement and possible response to such an attack, provided to the group by Robert and thank you Robert. Here is Joe’s a repost of Joe’s dilemna (September, 2013) :
Hi Ben,
I hope all is well. I need your help and the help of the PLC.
I’m in a new school district this year which is an IB school. I am in the middle school which has the Middle Years Program. My administrator is not totally sold on teaching via TPRS/CI. She said she is going to be doing a lot of pop-ins, I have to give her any and all material I plan to give to the students and she also wants to see the skeleton stories before I use them. She said she wants to and will support me, but she has an obligation to make sure the students reach the goals of the IB Middle Years Program and that my students are being taught the same things the other students are being taught by other teachers. I also must go by the units that have been created and give the students the vocabulary lists with all the words for the unit already filled out. I know this may sound a bit aggressive, but she is trying to support me. She already got 2 complaints from parents saying the students don’t feel they can learn from me since all I do is speak Spanish, yet I’m getting high comprehension levels from the kids.
I feel frustrated and uncomfortable and I don’t know what to do or where to turn. All the teachers are very supported, welcoming, helpful and generous as is my administrator, but I am beginning to not like what I do and to second guess everything and this is only my 4th year teaching and I LOVE teaching Spanish!
I need help figuring out how to incorporate the Middle Years Program’s enduring unit questions into the CI process and show her that the kids will be speaking about themselves so when they get to the high school next year they can speak Spanish.
I’m not even sure what kind of help to ask for from you and the PLC. Ugh!!
Thank you Ben!!
Joe
Here is Robert’s response:
First of all, this is the mother of all Administrator/Teacher/Parent Re-education tasks. Everyone in this scenario needs to be re-educated. Since you can’t give them the whole course of study (It would overwhelm them), what can you do?
I suggest zeroing in on the implicit idiocy (but don’t use that word) of the complaint: She already got 2 complaints from parents saying the students don’t feel they can learn from me since all I do is speak Spanish
1. Since when did students become subject area and methodology experts? Would the administrator entertain the same doubts if students who “aren’t good in math” complained that they didn’t feel they could learn trigonometry? If not, why not? The complaints are equally valid (i.e. not at all valid).
2. Since all of the modern researchers (e.g. Chomsky, Pink, Asher, Krashen, Omaggio, Wong, Van Patten) agree that the single most important element in the acquisition of a language (whether foreign or native) is “comprehensible input”, i.e. understandable messages in the target language, what is the research base for questioning this method? Do the students, parents or administrator have any studies to counter the consistent statements of the experts, especially when they disagree widely on other aspects of language acquisition? (Even the most vehement proponents of the “output hypothesis” readily admit that comprehensible input must precede output and is absolutely essential to acquisition.)
yet I’m getting high comprehension levels from the kids. 3. There’s your data for our data-driven monster. If you can show high levels of comprehension (on quizzes, interpersonal communication, etc.), what is the basis of the complaint that students are not learning? Where is their data?
Beyond that, you need to correct in everyone’s mind the misperception and misconception of what it means to “learn” a language. They seem to think that it means knowing a lot of facts about the language and isolated words from the language. That is an absolutely false idea. That’s the way most of the parents were exposed to a foreign language. Ask them how fluent they are. If some of them do speak a second language, ask when they became fluent: in the classroom or when they were immersed in the language? If they acknowledge that the old way did not make them fluent, why do they wish to perpetuate a method and curriculum that do not work?
If someone objects that kids need to know the grammar, you have the following options: 1. Explain to them how CI teaches the grammar in context 2. Ask them if kids need to know the technical grammar terms in order to know grammar. If they think it is necessary to know grammar terms, you can point out 1) millions of people spoke excellent English, German, French, etc. for centuries and managed to do it without knowing grammar terms because they hadn’t been introduced into the language. (Vernacular grammars weren’t written until at least the 1600s – and most of the time people were writing about a vernacular language in Latin.) 2) Give them a “modest grammar quiz” in English. Ask them, for example, to give you the first person pluperfect subjunctive of “know” and use it in a conditional construction. (“Had I known”; “If I had known you were coming, I would have baked a cake.”) Or perhaps they can give you the third masculine singular future perfect passive of “hang” in its judicial sense – or even the passive infinitive. (“He will have been hanged” – “To be hanged”, as in the sentence “to be hanged by the neck until dead) No? Then how can they possibly claim to speak English with any sort of fluency? [Be careful with this, though; you want them to see the absurdity of the notion that knowing technical terms equals knowing a language, not feel like you are making fun of them.]
What are the enduring questions? I don’t teach IB, so I am unfamiliar with them. I do know some German teachers who use TPRS/CI in their IB programs with excellent results.