Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Report from the Field – Don Read
Share:
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Ben Slavic
Get The Latest Updates
Subscribe to Our Mailing List
No spam, notifications only about new products, updates.
Related Posts
CI and the Research (cont.)
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Research Question
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
We Have the Research
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
4 thoughts on “Report from the Field – Don Read”
Great report and thank you Don. It was great to meet you this summer. When anyone in the group has a question, you can just email the question to me and I will ask the group. The other option is to simply ask it on the Forum. Either way. And I put most of the videos I get on the hard link across the top of this page or in the Videos category. And in the next few days, by the way, I’ll post a link to a video from Brian in Detroit.
The textbook question must be met head on. You are going to have to re-educate the people around you, from the kids to their parents who are behind those questions. I would start by being proactive and sending an email to the AP or principal in charge of your team, or just ask for a meeting, and definitely start by re-educating the administrator before meeting with the parent. You will need back up before meeting with the one or two parents involved in this. So you should probably do that with the administrator this week. Then I would meet with each class and explain to them why you won’t be using the book this year. That will rile the few parents who got A’s in French in high school and college and then you can set up that meeting and have that administrator there. Such questions like when you are going to use the textbook very often find their points of origin in one or two of the parents of your students, and you need to flush them out of their holes and talk to them and this is the way I would do that. Use one of the articles written by Robert on textbook adaption or just the main article – both are on the Primers hard link above. That’s my advice – I believe that the best defense is a good offense.
Whether we like it or not, we are going to have to defend what we are doing in our classrooms if we are to win enough battles to one day win the war and not have to justify what we do anymore in our buildings after that. Tell the parents the story about my son’s teacher who went to Paris after majoring in French in college and couldn’t understand a word. (Actually I just realized that that happened to me as well at the University of Strasbourg in French. And it wasn’t the Alsatian accent.) When they say that they majored in French – many attacking parents are A students from traditional classrooms – that is your opportunity to say something to them in some nice crisp French and wait for a response that will never come. Be badass about it, yet kind, but never allow your inner thoughts to cave in the fear that they might be right. Why? Because they were never right and they can never be right. They represent a stale and outmoded pedagogy that is not useful anymore. Now, if no parents attack on the textbook point, you will have answered the question with your class and you will have staved off future conflicts by getting your administrator on your side (conflict is unavoidable in this work). I’m hopeful that others in the group will share their own opinions on how to do this textbook speech as well. That’s just mine.
We have some good Primers from people in this group on textbooks.
I’ve also read from a handful of researchers (probably Krashen and VanPatten) that say that textbook writers clearly don’t read SLA research. I’ll look for those quotes.
The 2 commonsense arguments (not that common) is that textbooks follow an unnatural order of acquisition and focus heavily on low-frequency words.
Or get the Student “Textbook” from LICT, which is not a typical textbook – it’s just a ton of readings – I think the new version is embedded readings.
In addition to the information from Ben & Eric, you can also provide some resources for parents who will worry about what their kids should take home to “study.” For instance, I copy/paste every single story my classes come up with into a page on my classroom website. I tell parents & students that resource is there in case they need to re-read/review/catch up on an absence. Each story includes the date and block in the title for ease of reference. I maintain a Quizlet account (free!) with words from each class’s word wall, which I refer parents and students to for vocabulary practice. In this way, they feel like they have the same kinds of resources available as would be in a textbook, and it takes me almost no time at all to keep those resources up to date since I am typing up the stories anyway.
Great ideas – thank you. I will implement them!