Off-the-shelf materials

[Rudy Troike]

Let me reinforce what Annie Ross says, which reflects very accurately the
situation of teachers in elementary schools. Some years ago I worked with
the Texas Education Agency in developing in-service workshops for teachers
to prepare them for new textbooks then being adopted (since dumped by later
more conservative state boards of education) which incorporated the latest
results of linguistic research. While high shools around the state set up
workshops, and we were very busy trying to meet the demand, when the texts
for the elementary schools were being adopted two years later, we were
ready for a flood of calls, and had workshop materials ready to respond.
However, the calls never came, and after we got over the deafening silence,
we started calling around ourselves to find out why there were no requests
for workshops. The response was that the texts came with teachers' editions,
which had all of the guidelines as to how to present each lesson, and
activities to do, and the teachers felt that they did not need to know any
more than that to get through their days.

Sometime later I was at a conference in Arizona, listening to bilingual
teachers report on curriculum development projects. On teacher from
southern California reported that she and a colleague had worked hard for
about three years to develop a large detailed syllabus for the bilingual
program, but after three years they had abandoned it and "went with the
flow" of just following the materials provided with their textbooks. So
even idealistic teachers striving for educational innovation may get worn
out after a time and just give up and take the route of least resistance.

Obviously the answer is to provide as complete a "turnkey" system as
possible if you want it to really be adopted and survive in use.

      Rudy Troike