Reply #34: Oh, yes, there are some basic principles

[Lydia Leftcoast]

In foreign language teaching, for example, beginning instructors have to be cautioned against the "helpful" practice of saying something in the foreign language and then repeating it in English right away. All that does is train the students to wait for the translation. :-) They have to learn methods of getting the students to try to speak the language, and there are a few tricks that work with any curriculum, such as role playing, cuing responses with pictures, and having the students make up dialogues in pairs.

But when some dogmatist comes along and say, "You must teach out of this textbook, which will make all your students proficient in Japanese, or else you're a heretic," then I have a problem.

I once adopted a curriculum designed by someone I knew and admired. It had a lot of fine qualities, especially in the type of natural, conversational language presented, but I found that it didn't work with my very average students (as opposed to the Ivy League students on whom it had been field-tested), because in its pure form, it required the students to do a lot of independent listening and speaking work, with almost no written homework. My very average students believed that if they had no graded written assignment, then they had no homework. I finally had to make adjustments to the curriculum and add written exercises, just so the students would open their books once in a while.

The next year I switched to a different textbook (much to the dismay of one of the true believers in the other curriculum), one that included a lot more written work. The students thrived on it.

So in answer to your remark, I'd say that yes, each subject has some proven techniques, but set-in-stone curricula are not appropriate to all teachers or to all classes.

Techniques, yes. Set-in-stone curricula, no.