What a language teacher's job is

 On Thursday, I had a long, intense conversation with my colleague Kris.  She's our instructional coach this year, and I strongly hope that she will continue that role in the years to come, even as she returns to full-time teaching duties.  She expressed the concern that I jump the gun in my classes--I move too quickly from building buy-in, directly to speaking Spanish.  She worries that the students don't get why they're doing what they're doing, and thus never engage, and thus never really learn.  I take her observation to heart, because I'm pretty sure my kung fu is strong, but my students are not learning Spanish at the rate they should be.  Good practice done badly is bad practice, and if my students aren't learning, I'm not quite doing something right. 

According to Krashen, as cited in Lee and Van Patten (1995), "...as long as there is motivation and the right affective environment (e.g., low anxiety), a person cannot avoid learning a second language if there is sustained comprehensible input" (29).  They cite other researchers that say this is overstating the case somewhat, and they themselves stake out the position that using the language in communicative settings is necessary for learning languages.  However, to the extent that this statement is true, it has powerful implications for language learning and, by extension, language instruction.  The whole rest of their book is dedicated to outlining what those implications are.

But for now, I just want to worry at that one sentence for a little while, pick it apart and apply it.  I'm writing lesson plans right now, so the action items are immediately applicable--I can go from this blog screen to my unit plan, to my weekly plan, and apply what I figure out.


It looks like this: 

motivation + affective environment + sustained COMPREHENSIBLE input = language learning.


According to a source I don't remember right now (it was in an audiobook I borrowed from a friend, which I've since returned), as cited by Sprick (2007), motivation is a function of value times expectancy of success.  So, if students value what they're learning, their motivation increases.  If the students expect to succeed at a given event, their motivation to do it increases. 

The updated equation looks thus:


(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained comprehensible input = Language Learning


I don't know enough about what Lee and VanPatten mean by "affective environment" to perform any cute faux mathematical operation on it.  I believe, though, that this largely refers to classroom management issues, about which I've typed extensively.

Lee and VanPatten dedicate most of their book to outlining the concept of sustained comprehensible input.   They later add "meaning-bearing" to the list of qualities of valuable communication.

(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained, meaning-bearing comprehensible input = Language Learning

This means that a student has to catch that there is a meaning she is supposed to understand in the utterance.  The student also needs to be able to understand some portion of the communication.

This is a pretty clear description of a language teacher's job.  These work out to these action steps:

1.)  Sell the value of the learning.  This means explaining reasons that a student should learn languages, but also why a student would want to.  (I always think of the Rosetta Stone ad: "He was a farm boy from Iowa.  She was an Italian supermodel.  He had one chance to impress her.")  This corresponds to increasing the value of learning.

2.) Increase the expectation of success.  Celebrate baby steps.  Define milestones, and move heaven and earth to drag your students towards them.  Once they get there, make a big deal over it.

3.) Run your classroom well.  I've had a lot to say about this.  Marzano has a lot to say about this.  Jackson has a lot to say about this, Wong and Wong have a lot to say about this, and Sprick has a whole lot to say about this.  It sort of boils down to these.

• Have a very few rules which apply all the time.  Be consistent about reinforcing them positively and correcting them when necessary.
• Have procedures for everything.  Teach them explicitly and rehearse them.  (Behaviorism at its finest, but it will help if the students create their own procedures.)
• Make your classroom a place where it's okay to make mistakes, and teach students how to make GOOD mistakes.  As Kryza likes to say, "This is a risk-taking, mistake-making classroom."  In fact,  Corder (as cited in Lee and VanPatten (1997)) says that mistakes are "indispensable to the learner himself" (in Lee and VanPatten, p. 22.) 

It feels like I'm missing one or two, but we'll go from there.

4.)  Give your students language they can chew.  Lee & VanPatten say that if your students are at level N of comprehension, then you should communicate with them at N + 1.  That's a hard number to hit consistently, especially with a class of 20, 30, 40 language learners.  (Not that I have a class of 40 people, but it's probably not far off for many of my colleagues.)  Lee & VanPatten have things to say about that, too.

So, there.  I've defined what a WL teacher's job is.  Not exactly my original goal, but that's okay.  My next trick:  Matching this up with Marzano's 10 reflection questions from The Art and Science of Teaching, Jackson's 7 principles of master teachers, Kryza's "Chunk / Chew / Check" lesson-planning and differentiation model, the National Board's teacher assessment tool, and Kris's "Hook your students" principle.  Also, what this means to what my class looks like.

Resources:



Jackson, R. (2009).  Never work harder than your students.  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Lee, J., & VanPatten, B. (1997).  Making communicative language teaching happen.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marzano, R. (2008).  The art and science of teaching.  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Sprick, R.  (2008). Interventions audio.  Eugene, OR: Northwest Publishing.

Components of lesson plans

(REALLY long.)


 In the last year, I've blogged a lot about curriculum and lesson planning.  These are the hardest things for me to understand, I think, although every year, every week, I'm getting better at them.  (Classroom management isn't the hardest thing to understand--I get it.  I'm just not very good at doing it.)  Planning a good lesson, much less 5 good lessons, much less 5 good lessons a day for a week, is mind-bogglingly complicated and massively important. 


Planning a lesson is always an interesting trick.  In Robyn Jackson's outline, you start where your students are.  This takes into account their interests, their skills, their emotional needs, etc.  Then, you know where your students are going.  Again, that's Jackson's phrase, but Marzano says the same thing--the first part is learning goals.  We've been working hard at learning goals at our schools this year.  After you know what you want your students to learn, you break it down into steps.  (I think this is something that I'm only just starting to do since Winter Break.)  After that, you see through time in order to pick out the potential challenges--Billy will certainly have a bad day on Tuesday, he always does; I'll have a guest instructor on Friday, so I won't be able to teach anything new; et cetera. 

There's a lot to consider in there, and I'm starting to get a good enough feel for Learning Goals that I can start worrying a lot more about the efficacy of Learning Activities.  I was already pretty good at Learning Activities, and a lot of my training has been focused that way.  Learning Activities without a solid grounding in Learning Goals don't mean much, though.  Now I've got a much better handle on the Learning Goals (so when I rewrite my curriculum again this summer, I might finally have something to work with), so the more specific things are coming back up.


When I'm writing lesson plans, I want to know the students I'm teaching.  For every group of students, I want to know: 1.) what they're interested in; 2.) how they learn most effectively (or at least think they do); 3.) what they want to know about the topic at hand.  Having some idea as to how they react to certain stimuli is helpful, too.  For example, every time I utter 3 sentences of Spanish together, a number of my students want to know why they have to know Spanish at all.


While I'm designing learning goals, I need to make sure that I'm really writing learning goals and not communicative goals.  The difference is that my communicative goals outline a situation in which, if nothing weird happens, my students should be able to talk their way through.  Learning goals go more universal.  At the moment, this tends towards a comparison of that social situation in our society versus the society we're studying (Mexico, Spain, Ecuador, Argentina, Puerto Rico, whatever--there are of course sub-societies in those countries, of course), or even an examination of what that social situation means for the human condition.  It makes for more of an aspiration than a goal, but it's what we're working towards.

One of the things I'm trying to do when designing lesson plans is this--how am I going to model this?  How am I going to help them practice them?  How am I going to get them to practice without help?  How am I going to get them to do it?  The general phrase is--I do it, We do it, You do it.  (That's Kathleen Kryza's phrasing.) 

In the World Language world, there's a similar structure in communicative methodology theory.  You start with structured, comprehensible input--utterances in the target language that a student can nevertheless understand (using context clues, illustrations, acting or other things).  You have to check a student's comprehension for the language--yes/no, true/false, point-to type activities are usually what goes on here.  The students have to process the information and then respond to it, but their response doesn't require a huge language output.  Then, you move to structured output--there are only a limited number of responses, but the responses aren't formulaic or meaningless.  Then, you can go to more and more unstructured input.

Then, of course, the National and State Standards and Benchmarks prescribe the communicative modes--conversation, comprehension, and presentation.  And in living languages, there are two different vehicles of communication--oral/aural speech, and written/read texts.  So you have to work your way through the "structured input / structured output / less-structured output" assembly lines on both of those lines.  Not all of these things fit into a single day's lesson plan, but there should be some examples of all of them throughout the week.  Some of these things lend themselves better to different stages than others, of course--listening and reading comprehension are obviously much better structured-input activities.

Kryza's lesson plan structure is "Chunk, Chew, Check," and that method really helps me think about what each activity is meant to do.  It means that when I'm really, REALLY writing out my plans, for each of the above things, I write a "chunk"--what Marzano calls a "critical input experience"--a short bit of structured input (usually), either spoken or written--with a lot of examples of the vocabulary or grammar or culture I'm presenting, and a few non-examples that the students are generally already familiar with.  Then there's a "chew," something where the students have the opportunity to process what they've just heard or read, and have to react to it in some way.  And then there's a "check," where I see how well the students are doing and change instruction accordingly.  (Marzano calls this a "formative assessment.")  Mostly, like I alluded to, I focus on input activities, so I may be stiffing my students on practice time opportunities.  I make our practice activities count, though.

 Mix into this mix Gardener's multiple intelligence theory, the need to work culture into everything, a burgeoning realization of the importance of social justice as a component of Spanish instruction, and a disinclination by disposition to pay attention to details, and I begin to see why my struggle with lesson plans has taken up so much time.  It's likely to keep doing so for some time, but I finally feel like I have a usable document that covers most of the bases.  Have I ever written a complete plan?  Nope.  Has my plan ever gone off without a hitch?  Not even close.  All I know is that the more time I spend planning, the better on average the week goes for me.  So I keep doing it.

Update, 1 hour later:  And differentiation!  I forgot about differentiation!

"So, what do you do in Spanish class?" (2 of 2)

Different kinds of activities and their educational value

This is a messy kind of post.  It's the blog post equivalent of tearing everything out of your closet and shelves and throwing it in heaps on your bed and on the floor, as you install a new closet shelving system and re-organize everything you've just been cramming anywhere they'd fit for the last 3 1/2 years.

The heaps I'm going to try to throw things in look like this:
A.)  Kind of activity.  These, hopefully, will be broad descriptions of the sorts of things we do in Spanish class.  Refinements to come as necessary.
B.)  Chunk, chew, or check?  Are these activities' primary value as a tool for presenting new information (chunk), as a way of processing or practicing information (chew), or as an assessment tool (check)?  This is directly from Kathleen Kryza's work on co-teaching (and, indirectly, differentiated instruction) with our ISD, and thus probably from one of the several books written by Kryza, Duncan, and Stevens.
C.) Outcome, engagement, and materials.  These are 3 of the 6 qualities from the last blog post.  The others are less activity-specific, so I shouldn't need to include them for each activity.

A.) PAIRED and SMALL-GROUP SPEAKING ACTIVITIES.  Examples: Information-gap activities, interviews, ask-and-answer sessions, etc.
Initial thoughts:  This is the kind of activity where my thinking most needs clarification.  I do these spontaneously all the time, and so they're probably the least structured.
B.) Chew [check].  Done with each other, they're definitely chew activities.  So they require some prep work first; namely, how and why to say what they're to be saying.
C.)  Outcome:  Students will have the experience of performing the communicative task.  In addition, some will result in new content knowledge, others will have a written element to them.  In the tasks that have no written or drawn component, an oral checkout of some kind becomes necessary.
Engagement:  Students are speaking in Spanish, trying out new words, asking questions, writing information as it becomes available or necessary.
Materials:  Teacher-provided handouts, self-generated information, paper, pencil, etc.

2A.) WRITING CONVERSATIONS.  Examples--passing notes, threaded on-line discussions (i.e., Moodle), instant messaging, text messages. 
Initial thoughts:  I have never, to my shame, done one of the technologically based activities.  The reasons for this include a lot of bad reasons involving time management and my capacity for building online classes. 
B.)  Chew (check).  Just like spoken conversations, these are mostly a chance for students to mount up on their new vocabulary and take it out for a test drive.  It can also be used as a formative assessment--I would hesitate to use it as a summative assessment, though.


More of this in a future post.  I know it says 2 of 2 in the title, and need to be getting on with my day, but I'm not done with the topic, so more to come.

Huh.

Teachers sell their lesson plans.  School districts ask for a piece of the action.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/education/15plans.html?_r=1

I don't really know what I think about this.  I've bought stuff from people who are better at making stuff than I am.  I don't really have anything I'd want to sell, but I have stuff I probably could sell, if I format it differently.  So I don't really see anything wrong with it.

But the music industry just lost the "selling content you can find for free on the internet" fight.  The movie industry is ripping itself apart over the same issue.  I'm not sure that I'd want to wade into waters that somebody else has already filled with chum.

So I'm not sure where this goes.

Driving test on the redesigned lesson plans

I've now sketched up three unit plans in the format I described in my last blog entry--two for Spanish II, and one for MS/HS Spanish I.  I also differentiated it for a 6th grade class, in which we cover a lot of the same "immigration" materials.  (Once I get the unit plans down onto paper, and curricula written and aligned to standards, articulating the curricula is on the agenda.  Which makes it an action item over the summer of 2011.)  I've written 3 weekly plans for Spanish II, based on the unit plans, and 2 weekly plans for Spanish I.  This provides a place to start thinking about how well it's going, I think.

So far, having an overarching plan really helps clarify my thinking, and it makes it much easier to decide what's important about an activity and what's not.  This means that when reality happens, as it so often does, I have a much better idea of what part of a lesson plan I can jettison to account for, say, 25 minutes of grade-A teenage emotionally-driven angst.  (Not all at once, of course, nothing I'd feel comfortable kicking anyone out of class for.  It was just a constant drone.  As I'm sure it was for the students involved.)  Or having to re-establish, review, and re-teach respectful classroom behavior.  Again.  It's much easier now to make snap decisions--"Give 3 examples of ways Hispanic Americans come to live in the United States--" and what can wait for another day, lesson, or year--"Why do such a high percentage of Cuban Americans live in Miami?  En español, por favor"--in order to accommodate the limited time and frequent de-railings of a class.  (I'm still working on keeping on task all the time, too, but "big picture" ideas are helping me identify what "on task" and redirection skills I need to develop.  That's another blog post.)

Having an overarching picture helps write the weekly plan, too, but the translation isn't flawless.  In an ideal practice, my unit plan would contain all of the assessments, all of the practice activities, all of the guideposts that my students will pass along the way to doing whatever it is they're supposed to be doing--comparing baseball in Puerto Rico to baseball in the United States, for example.  What I'm finding is that when I write the unit plan, I'm only including some of the learning activities.  The daily lesson plan contains many more learning activities per learning goal, they're divided up a little bit differently, and they're still based in large part on the book.

In fact, one of my great weaknesses remains a dependency on my textbook to guide instruction.  For example, I just finished writing the next unit outline, about weather.  We're going to review what students know about weather systems in Spanish; talk about how to dress appropriately for weather around the word; examine weather in Michigan, Puerto Rico, Spain, and various locations in South America; and try to find some patterns based on the information we get.  For reasons that are not immediately obvious, the book contains a lesson on direct object pronouns.  This grammatical construction doesn't tie into any of our learning goals directly.  There's no reason to use it in terms of most weather conversations.  Sure, it's useful when talking about clothing and other kinds of stuff, but the book contorts itself pretty heavily to make it work.  As I'm going from the unit plan to the weekly plan, the unit plan doesn't say anything about direct object pronouns.  But the students need to know them before they can do indirect object pronouns.  (I believe they do, anyway.  Maybe it's more accurate to say that I need them to know DOP's before I know how to teach them IOP's.)  So what wins?  The less-book-based (but still book-influenced) unit plan I presumably wrote all by myself, like a big boy, or the text book?  (Have I written any "evils of textbook thinking" posts recently?  We're probably due). 

In this instance, the book wins--I'm going to teach direct object pronouns.  And I'm going to revisit the unit plan to see that the gratuitous grammatical structure makes it in there.  Hopefully, I can figure out a way to make it more obvious why it's there, and integrate it better into the "big question" learning goals.

Redesigning lesson plans and grading sheets

I'm trying to redesign my lesson plans, so that I'm doing them the right way.  I'm writing them out as unit plans--starting with what students need to know and be able to do, moving on to how I'll know if they can do it, then worrying about how to get them to do it, and what to do about it if they can't.  So my order of operations is: Objectives, Formative Assessments and Summative Assessments, Instructional Activities, Interventions.  Once I have all of that, I can teach my students to manipulate the time necessary to do the activities.  We can do station work (which a lot of my students like and are shockingly good at it), practice transition procedures, spend less time worrying about learning activities and more about learning.  It will also help move away from the text book.  In short, I'm working on making my lessons do all the things they're supposed to do.

This is as opposed to my de facto method of lesson planning--fill 60 minutes of class time a week, make it as informative and interesting as possible, and give the book-generated test afterwards.  This is a survival-level-teacher technique, and I'm trying to get beyond that now.  I've survived, I'm in year 4, I need to stop being a mediocre teacher.  And the ability to plan seems more and more important to that.

It isn't easy--I still have to fill the 60 minutes a day, I still need to make it as interesting and informative as possible.  Right now, I have a sort-of cross between the two--I have a unit outline (in a format given me (not personally, she was a presenter at a conference) by Helene Curtain) in which I try to include all the information, but down below, I have a much more learning-project-oriented list organized by communicative objective.  Besides which, the form includes a BEGINNING activity, a MIDDLE, and an END.  I'm not certain I know how to divide a unit of study into that.  I can do it for an individual learning goal, but not for a whole unit.

At the same time, I'm trying to make my grading process more in line with the principle of standards based grading, and not just a traditional gradebook with an extra column for standards.  The high school used to use a program called Standards Score (formerly WebGrader), but we don't anymore.  WebGrader has difficulty taking into account anything besides standards, and the high school divides its grades into Standards (no less than 80%), Employability Skills (10%), and Final Exam (10% plus all the standards you can grab).  That's how I figure it works out, anyway.  If any of my readers from our school want to argue with me about that, I'll happily post corrections here.


I also have to be able to assess most of my standards more than once.  It's not just that students', say, speaking skills need to be getting better.  They should also be able to perform a growing number of communicative tasks in a growing number of contexts.  (A portfolio is obviously where I'm going with this, and I've said this before.  We're still working on it.)  So, how do you figure the idea of multiple standards assessments into the notion of "you get the standard or you don't"?  The answer, I think, is that you have to be able to do (and have done) each standards some percentage of the time (75%, maybe?), and then you've gotten the standard.  Another really hard change.

But, I keep slogging through the hard work of being a good teacher.

Never work harder than your students, Cha. 4

Support your students

Jackson starts off this chapter by defining the "Curse of Knowledge," knowing something and being unable to imagine what it's like not knowing it. She suggests that it's one of the big reasons that teachers have a hard time teaching until the remediation stage. Then, she suggests that by having remediation plans without intervening during instruction is tantamount to planning on our students' failure. This, of course, leads to frustration all around.

The mitigation to this--the principle for this chapter--is to plan interventions in to the lesson. In the planning stages of a class or a unit, a teacher decides what students should know. (This is reflected in "standard and benchmarks" and whatnot.) He then breaks that up into smaller bits, steps and stages of learning goals to put together some kind of continuity plan so that he's not just randomly pulling activities out of his file drawer. Then, he builds in learning supports over the course of the unit, so that when students trip up, they have a system to help them keep their footing.

Jackson identifies the following elements of an effective intervention system:

1. The Plan is developed before students begin to fail.
2. The Plan has a red flag mechanism that triggers action--objective, based on learning objectives (not behavior).
3. A concrete procedure is in place such that when the conditions are met (less than 76%, missed standards, whatever), the procedure kicks right in. It's in the letter home, the syllabus, the class's website, on refrigerator magnets. Everybody understands the procedure, what it's for, when it happens. It's not punishment and it's not busywork.
4. Students have shared accountability in this Plan. They have a well-defined job and responsibility for their learning.
   

Jackson suggests a number of interlinking steps to help support students' learning:

• Anticipate confusion. Having once been learners of our subject ourselves, and having taught our subject every year more, we have a pretty good idea where our students will get tripped up. Prepare your students for those moments and have a variety of teaching strategies in your pocket.
• Pinpoint confusion and uncover misconceptions. Know where your students are getting tripped up. She points out that this is tricky, because you can get right answers using wrong strategy. This action step (or whatever it is she calls it) addresses the strategies that students are using, and making sure that they're using the correct strategies.
  
• Demystify the process. The process of education makes sense to educators. We live it, we dedicate ourselves to improving it, we've invested huge amounts of time to thinking abstractly about it. This is not so for student. Help them to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
  
• Gradually remove supports as students improve. Make it clear that some of your "crutch" methods may be necessary now, but they won't be available forever. She makes the point of saying that, rather than changing the learning activities, try keeping the learning activities the same and changing the students' relationship to it. I'm not exactly clear what she means by this, or what this would look like in an WL class, but I get the shape of what she's saying.
  
• Support the learning of students who have already mastered the learning goals. The teacher prep looks nearly the same for this step as the previous. Instead of taking the ambiguity out of a learning objective, leave some of the (learning-goal-relevant) ambiguity in. The students who already know a lot need to learn, too.
  

And in this way, Jackson comes back to content differentiation. These are all things that a teacher prepares for as often as possible. Jackson suggests doing this systemically, making sure that you have this process available all the time.

Our school has an "Interventions" class this year, a class we've been struggling with getting right all year long. We know that we need a mechanism to help students learn content they may have missed the first time, and this year it took the form of a 1-hour-a-day class. We've had trouble organizing the class logistically, re-teaching standards, getting students into and out of Interventions, and keeping occupied those students who don't need to make up standards. This chapter reads like Jackson has been through a number of projects like that. She's taken those experiments and tried to turn them into something.

Competing demands

There is social pressure at my school for two mutually exclusive, yet very important, elements in lesson plans: 1.) a classroom experience which places a premium on teacher/student relationships and in-class experience, and 2.) portability of lessons, so students can re-learn standards and make up assessments in places other than the classroom.

The first is important for several reasons. One reason is sort of a justification for the continued existence of brick-and-mortar schools: if a student could take what they're doing in your classroom and do it anywhere, then why does s/he need to go to school? The converse seems like it would be a good argument against brick-and-mortar schools: Students shouldn't have to go to public schools; anything they can learn there, they can learn with their iPods and computers at home. Put another way, I don't have to stay here to do worksheets, I can do worksheets at the beach! (I can't cite a source where I've seen this argument. But it doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd come up with on my own. I suspect the Mackinac Center, but then I blame them for everything*.) To be clear, I'm very pro-brick-and-mortar-school, and I'm very pro-technology-in-education. In addition, I think it's just a sign of respect towards the students that you're going to use their time efficiently.

Another reason for good, high-quality experiences in the classroom is that a much higher-quality educational experience can occur in the classroom. We teachers are supposed to be experts in edcuation, by which I mean we can do better than pass out "match-the-word-to-the-picture-it-describes" worksheets, sit back, and watch the "learning" occur. With the time we have our students in class--with all its flaws, with all the interruptions, with all the classroom management difficulties and personality-conflict issues and apparent student apathy, the experience we can give to students while they're in our presence is better in every way than the one they can get without us--it should be broader, wider, and deeper than the experience they get by bouncing YouTube videos back and forth to each other. I'm not downing on technology, of course. But technology is most effective (educationally speaking) when it's coordinated with other technology and real life (not controlled, coordinated) by an intelligent, aware adult with an eye on long-term learning objectives. And even then, there's a lot that can't be learned on the computer outside of the classroom.

On the other side, a certain amount of portability in lessons is necessary. Students are absent; they have to go to the office; you go to a conference and leave a substitute who almost certainly knows nothing about your subject (regardless of what your subject is); you have to work lessons around Picture Day and the Halloween Costume Parade. Occasionally, they spend time in in-school suspension. During these times, a packet of papers that students can take with them and interact with the lesson in a less real-time way becomes much more attractive, to teacher and student. I get frustrated when I spend a long, productive day full of kinesthetic learning activities that students seem to enjoy, and the next day another student comes up and says, "What did we do yesterday? My mom needed help frosting cupcakes." (Or I was on my death-bed with strep throat. Whatever.) It seems really lame to say, "Remember the vocab sheet I gave you on Tuesday? That's what we did." ¿Meh?

Also, if a student doesn't understand a lesson the first time you teach it, it's not going to do a whole lot of good to simply repeat the way you did it. So you need to have a backup plan. So twice, I've now come up with a reason for having more than one lesson plan--one, full of classroom-intense, socially- and emotionally-rich lesson plans, another that has students teaching themselves your material somehow. *Sigh* The good news is that most textbook companies already have the second lessons covered.

*This is tongue-in-cheek. I'm willing to listen to any idea that supports education that the Mackinac Center for Public Policy comes up with. As soon as they have one, I'm sure someone will let me know.

Of the many things I wish I had more time for...

creating graphic representations of vocabulary is pretty close to the top of the list. I ask my students to do it, of course, but then I give it back to them. It would take as long to scan it into my computer as it would be to do it myself. There's also the potential issue of intellectual dishonesty--you know how it is when a thousand pieces of paper come into and (at least in theory) go out of your hands in a week; you forget who gave it to you, you use an image off of it and forget to give credit where credit's due, etc. I don't know what case law on that is and I'd just as soon not find out.

But because I don't have an infinite amount of time to generate graphics, I depend pretty heavily on clip art and royalty-free images. And my two favorite sources of these images are 1100 Pictorial Symbols by the perennial clip art favorite, Dover, and Clip Art Image Gallery: 500 Model Poses, by Barron's (alas! Amazon doesn't seem to have new copies anymore), who seem to print most of the most useful books on any topic (except education methodology, for which the honor goes to ASCD, and World Language methodology, for which I still seek a reliably excellent source). Both of these books have useable images that describe a wide variety of the vocabulary you're likely to use for day-to-day life, and CD's so that you can use them in a variety of formats.

My biggest issue with the 1100 Pictorial Symbols is more of a feature: It has so many images that can be so widely used, it's a little difficult to find an image to fill any one need is a little tricky. My beef with the Model Poses is a little stronger--it has a section called "Pin-up," with pictures of scantily-clad (by conservative standards--think 1-piece bathing suit in heels) in reasonably seductive poses. So I can't just hand the book and accompanying CD to a student for use with his/her PowerPoint presentations.

However, by and large, they're winners. My job would be a lot more difficult without them.

What drives what we teach?

"Why, Señor Cosby, the curriculum, of course," cry a thousand aggrieved administrators and education specialists. The curriculum is a document (or probably several documents) which outlines the learning objectives of a particular course, and it does this in various levels of specificity. Importantly, it leaves specific implementation unaddressed, so teachers can implement a lesson plan that best addresses their students' needs and fits their own teaching style. It addresses the goals of the class, what the students expect to be able to do at the end of the class.

Where it all falls down is the "specific implementation" portion of that. Most teachers and classes have a textbook of some kind. We're smart enough and we've been trained well enough that we now know that textbook /= curriculum. Even so, I (and I'd guess a lot of other teachers) still turn to my textbook first when I have no idea what I should do the next day. I have my curriculum document, a list of the 65 learning goals per her class, which I tweak, realign, and try to implement more fully during the summer. I create unit plans, with learning goals and assessments and teaching strategies. I make weekly lesson plans during the week. And through all this process, I use the textbook as a place where I can steal materials from and then rip them apart and re-assemble them in a way that actually works. But when the chips are down, and my three-tiered planning system fails to take something into account (and yes, like all teachers, I make my plans knowing that they won't work), and everything falls apart (I plan on this happening most weeks about halfway through Wednesday of any given week), I grab my textbook and pick bookwork activities out. There are any number of problems with this.

Grammar-based fill-in-the-blank activities have been shown to be not a very good way of teaching Spanish at all. Vocabulary-based drills--a sentence in Spanish with a key word missing--are better than grammar-based drills, because they provide input and modeling as well as making a student utilize newly acquired vocabulary. The vocab sentences are like Spanish crosswords, only they look like what we think homework should look like. However, it takes no analytical ability at all to see that, in my particular textbook, two pages of grammar instruction and mechanical practice exist for every one page of vocabulary practice. And that's not even counting the supplemental materials, where the ratio is closer to 3:1. In deference to the "communicative methodology" craze sweeping the nation, my textbook has taken all the practice activities that used to be plug-and-chug writing activities and turned them into speaking activities. Same basic formulation, different communication skills. Still not so good. So the first failing of my textbook is that it dedicates too much space to pedagogically flawed activities.

The way the students interact with the textbook also leaves a great deal to be desired. It's as if the textbook is the embodiment of school work. We now have a lot of format options for activities of all kinds--we can make activities on Moodle, or turn them into whiteboard activities or overhead transparency activities or board games, all with relative ease--and while the students still know that they're doing work, it seems to feel less onerous. But pull out the textbook, especially first thing, and the students know that they're in for a day of what my high school Spanish teacher referred to as gruntwork. [Interesting mini-study idea: Take a textbook project. Give it to the students in 3 or 4 different formats, including straight out of the text. Compare completion ratios and success rates. Control for instructional strategy and classroom management issues.]

But because I'm a big-idea type of guy, I have a more fundamental reason for distrusting my textbook, and that's that textbook companies are sort of the devil. In his article "The Muddle Machine," Ansari (2004) takes down the textbook industries in a number of areas, including the way pedagogical philosophy is artificially tacked on as a marketing ploy, the manner in which materials are recycled from other textbooks, and the way textbooks are designed to sell lots and lots of copies and Texas and California, which leads to an almost-uselessly homogenized blend of content. The way that textbook companies operate guarantees that any particular textbook is not going to be as useful as it should or could be, because there's no overhead in a book serving any particular interest. I understand that textbook companies have to make money (and there's a LOT of money in this publishing model). I get it. But I also have to be aware that the textbook companies are motivated by something other than my students' learning.

But for all of this philosophical and practical objection to my textbook, it's still my go-to source for gotta-have-it-now classroom content. My units for my high school Spanish I and II classes are more or less tightly tied to the units outlined in my text. I use the vocabulary lists from the text as my core vocabulary lists, and add or subtract vocabulary as necessary. I present grammar content in the order it comes up in the book, plus or minus a couple of days. (I think it's crazy, f'rinstance, to teach a student to describe where they're going before teaching them how to say where they are.) If the curriculum is the bedrock of the instruction, then my text is the foundation of the house. If the curriculum is the map to the finish line, the textbook is the schematic for the car that will take us there. And as much as I struggle against this professionally repugnant and pedagogically flawed state of affairs, turning to the text comes so naturally.

I wonder what would happen if, for a week, for a unit, for a year, I refuse to use the textbook at all....