Visuals for foreign language instruction

A cool little site with drawings of all kinds of scenes and dialogue bubbles, meant to be used in World Language classrooms.  I can see it having applications in other classes, as well. 

In my class, I'll use these as story starters, as follow-up activities, or as end-of-the-hour last-few-minutes exercises. 

H/T Free Technology for Teachers

News for some more processing

Washington Post: What Americans keep ignoring about the schools in Finland: They don't have any private schools.  Or any private colleges, for that matter.

The Answer Sheet: Instead of closing schools, how about this?  Try NOT closing schools. 

So just in case you haven't heard, Lansing has cut every teacher whose subject doesn't get covered by the MEAP.  That's not what the pink slip says, I assume, but come on.

Michigan Public Radio: Art, music, and gym teachers get the ax in Lansing

Community Music School, Michigan State University: Statement regarding proposed cuts to art, music and physical education in the Lansing School District.

School officials fail standardized test

It's always fun when this kind of thing happens.  It's doubly interesting that it was organized by the school's student union.  I always wonder why more schools don't have those. 

What was the last standardized test you took?  How did you do?  I think the last real one that I took was the teachers' licenture test, and as I recall, I smoked it.  I also took part of an AP Reading practice  test, and did...erm...less well. 

Wherein I ramble about parents

So you've probably seen it by now: the CNN article that purports to say what teachers really want to tell parents.  A friend of mine posted it on some other social networking site and (somewhat foolishly) solicited opinions from her teacher friends.  (The "you" is my friend and the little girl is her less-than-1-year-old daughter.)

I responded.

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I have an easy solution to this. I never talk to the parents, ever. For any reason. During parent teacher conferences, I set up a cardboard cutout of myself with a motion sensor; when a parent sits down, a speaker plays the pre-recorded phrase, "¡Hola, y bienvenido a nuestra escuela! ¿Qué tal tu estudiante? ¿Le gusta la escuela?" I'm told that parents say, "Well, thank you for your time," leave my table, and never come back.

No, really, though. I read this article from time to time, and I know I have co-workers who feel this way about parents. Some of them are real pains. I don't know if I do, strictly speaking. I DO know that parents are the #2 reason I will never be a principal. (Having to catch kids chewing tobacco or having sex in the bathroom is #1.) Everbody wants what's best for their student, and everybody wants to work with their teachers. But riddle me this: your little girl is likely to be on the bright side of the comprehending-things spectrum. She will probably understand lots of things faster than her classmates, and that's okay. What will you do when a teacher paces her class to accommodate people who don't learn as fast? When she's not learning as much in her classes as you know she could be, because her classmates need more practice at a concept? When she has slack time because she finishes her in-class work faster than everybody else? When she uses that slack time to do things that get her into trouble? Working with teachers looks a lot harder all of a sudden.

Or worse--imagine a student who is NOT crazy intelligent, one who, in fact, has a hard time grasping the simplest mathematical concepts. Or one who doesn't understand how squiggly lines on a paper mean words. Or one who doesn't know that THIS face means "happy," and THAT face means "angry." Or one in whose family nobody has ever graduated high school ever, and they all turned out "just fine." In short, imagine the whole pile of students that school was always MEANT to serve, but hasn't historically been very good at it. Imagine you're the parent of one of THOSE children, and you want what's best for him, but no matter how hard he works and no matter what you do, he's falling further and further behind all the time. How do you work with a teacher now? 

I want my students' parents to trust me. I also want them to take an active interest in their students' education, to advocate what is really best (not just what is easiest) for their students, to understand the role education has in their students' lives and the transformative power of what an education can do for them. Honestly, what I expect for them is to be busy people with an agenda that only deals with their child, and for them to cover for that with the phrase, "I know you have 30 other kids to deal with, but...". I expect them to not understand why it's important for EVERY SINGLE KID, yes, including yours, to take a world language or to learn to multiply or why we "waste time" on skills and knowledge that they'll "never use in the real world." (Is there a more odious phrase to a teacher?) I expect them to associate me with the teacher they hated in high school, and to view my interactions with their student through the prism of their experiences with their own teachers. I expect that when I say, "Your student has a problem I'd like your help solving," they hear, "Your student is a problem I'd like to get rid of." So what I'd reallly want to tell parents is this: I'm on your children's side.

...You did ask.

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The rest of the exchange is worth noting.  I'll try to get permission from the involved parties to re-post here.

Language acquisition research

For a long time, I did my level best to avoid speaking English in my Spanish classes.  I would use pictures, gestures, comparison charts, whatever, to avoid telling students what a given word or phrase meant.  The idea was for me to create "Aha!" moments*, situations in which it was easy and natural for students to engage, and for engaged students to accurately guess the meanings of words and phrases.  Somewhere around here I have an article that suggests that this is what language learning is--the transition from confusion to creating meaning.  Inherent in that idea is confusion: you have to start out not knowing what's going on, and use the tools available to you to create first a broad sense of a communication, then increasingly more accurate detail as you get a better base of the language and more skill at creating meaning.  I saw speaking in English the same way I see shouting at students as a classroom management technique: it does more harm than good, it's a failure of good practice that nevertheless happens because we are after all only human. 

When I went to the TPRS training (see an earlier post), I had a minor crisis of faith.  It was fairly public, and it wasn't pretty.  Everything I thought was essentially undermined--constant translation, followed by repetitions ad nauseam, was sort of the root of how to do it right.  There was no confusion, just a continuum of processing speed.  You start out as a slow processor: you have to look up at the translation, listen as the teacher enunciates every word very clearly, watch carefully as she points out every word she says, and in general try to pretend you're paying attention to the meaning.  If the story hook is good enough, you will.  As you go through, you have to look at the translations less and less, and your confusion between similar-sounding but very important words starts to clear up.

There's another article in support of what TPRS does, and what I'm trying to do.  (The link is to a German website, but the article is in English.)  It feels a little heavy on the interpretation and a little light on supporting "clinical" trials, but it has enough to be a credible source.  It argues in favor of using a learner's first language to support learning a second language.  I find it faintly troubling that the author appeals to 2000 years of language teaching practice as a reason to ignore recent developments--what did the Romans know about language acquisition?  He does, however, take pains to point out that the learner needs to use the new language: "We do not learn any language by using another one."  

At any rate, another point of research in a growing body.

*Like "teachable moment," I hate this phrase.  I'm beginning to think that I just don't like the word "moment." 

If students designed their own schools....

On the long list of things I want to know more about, we have the Independent Project.  Students designed their own questions and found ways of answering them.  They also wrote a white paper about it, which I would like to read, you know, soonish.

Their website.  Their blog.

Hat tip The Answer Sheet

UPDATE: Stanford charter school study

Earlier I wrote about this CREDO report on the effectiveness of charter schools in Michigan, with the headline, "Charter Schools More Effective."  Today my MEA e-newsletter sent me this gem from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research, which links to a review of the study by somebody else.  (I believe this is why people refer to the self-sustaining nature of bureaucracy.)  That person, one Andrew Maul of U Colorado Boulder, writing for the Think Twice Project (not a project I'm familiar with), suggests that there is almost no difference in performance between charter school students and public education students.  The effect of charter schools was responsible for a performance improvement of .1%, considerably less than the effect of having a teacher that knows how to use compare-and-contrast charts effectively.

Caveat lector: I still have not read the original CREDO study, nor have I read the full Maul report.  I pass this along as a summary of news, not as a position.  However, clearly this new summary of other people's research matches more neatly with my biases than the summary of the original report.