I am just making a comment from today into a post here so that I can reference it from a category. We have been talking about lesson plans for iFLT in Breckenridge next week and I posted this in response to something that jen and Dori said:
jen you said:
…you will be able to sense the group energy and you will either feel compelled to try or compelled to stick with something tried & true….
dori you said:
…you must go with the flow. That will be an important part of the debrief session, I imagine, and for me, one of the scariest parts of TCI when I first started–okay, true today also….
So now – in my opinion – we are talking about the real deal. We are talking about the way a true comprehensible input class actually and truly really works. These comments get to the absolute core of comprehensible input. Why?
Because in your two statements, jen and Dori, there are these phrases:
…sensing the group energy…. …going with the flow….
then jen said:
…you will either feel compelled to try [something new] or [feel] compelled to stick with something tried & true….
Now how can a lesson plan address this? Do you see how key this idea is to an understanding of what we do, especially for new people who are just beginning to realize that they have stepped into a much more vast arena than they ever suspected?
It’s like NASA planning a flight to the moon and telling the scientists who program the orbit technicalities, so that the spacecraft doesn’t miss the moon, to just wing it. Let the feel of the spacecraft and the vibe of the astronauts just fly the damn thing up there and see what happens.
But we are not scientists, we are teaching artists, and if we plan too much, as scientists must, we squeeze that human element (Beauty) out of it (after all, language is a very very deeply human thing, a deeply beautiful thing) and we can’t squeeze it like scientists can. Our classes have to be beautiful with the personalization and the humor pieces or they are boring.
And we can’t legislate personal things and humor that would be of interest to the class. We can’t plan an interesting conversation and we can’t program in humor, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/10/14/lart-de-la-conversation-and-tprs/
So we have to “go with the flow”, which used to seem such a hippy thing to say, but now that expression becomes the very lifeblood, within a practiced framework, of a good comprehension based class.
It is amazing how we are being asked to be completely loose with the entire class and yet work within a framework. This is what jen and Dori are saying. They are basically telling me that I need to frame my lessons with these kids in such a way that I honor the Cycle – and that term is a keeper, by the way jen, it’s perfect to be used in place of the Three Steps.
What does it mean to honor the Cycle? It means to calculate the general path of the spacecraft but not squeeze the life out of the flight so that the astronaunts become robots. Krashen has said that robots don’t converse and that idea keeps popping up in our discussions here so it must be a powerful indicator of the change we are creating as we speak about what real teaching even is.
Honoring the Cycle also means creating space within a framework that does not go so wide that the spacecraft goes to another planet instead of the intended moon, which would really confuse the student/passengers who thought that they were going to the moon.
Honoring the Cycle. I love that. Odd images pop into my mind to allow me to grasp what this means as I plan a two and one quarter of an hour class with an odd mix of twelve kids ranging from 6th to 10th grade most of whom are girls and whom I have never met in front of 20 teachers. Hmmm.
An image, prompted by what jen and Dori said, keeps coming up in my mind. It is an image that supports the main point we are discussing here, which is that we need to teach such a class with enough flexibility and yet strength (describes what we do in yoga) so that the content of the class remains flexible and changing and therefore interesting.
We don’t want the class to go so wide that we run the train off the tracks and confuse everyone (by using too many words and going too fast and doing all those things that we aren’t supposed to do when we do TPRS/CI. Here is the image:
There is a fountain with various jets of water that, in whack-a–mole fashion, shoot up a word at odd moments and support that word up in the air until it the jet d’eau suddenly stops and then the word falls back down onto the concrete floor of the fountain.
Our classes are like that. Words come up that have energy and we have to go with the flow of that particular jet d’eau and not with some word that is lying on the concrete. If we succeed in our game of Fountain Whack-a-Mole, we have a good class. If we try to teach the words lying on the floor of the fountain, we quit TPRS and start going around telling everyone how ineffective TPRS is.
<em>What we do in comprehensible input classes is stay with the word that is being supported by the energy of the water as that particular jet d’eau holds it up in space. </em>Then, when, because of the particular nature of these fountains, these TPRS classes, the word then tumbles back to the ground, we have to get over to the new word/word chunk that has come up and talk about that one until the interest is lost on it and thus make our way through the class in that intuitive way.
Doing that, which is the art of teaching, requires responsivenesss within the framework of the Cycle. We have the framework of PQA/Story/Reading, we have absolutely no idea where it will go, and we yet have to respond to “what is happening” (what jen called sensing the group energy), and be willing to trust our own teaching ability to create a class from that, but not just create it, co-create, as Jason Fritz says.
Anyway, I am sure that I have over-intellectualized this with some fairly wacky images, but I don’t apologize for that, because I at least for myself have conveyed here, once more, what I feel TPRS/CI to be – a loose framework in which we avoid squeezing the life out of our classes like we used to by having an overly rigid lesson plan and, through faith and trust, let the lesson develop on its own, yet sticking to certain words (can they really be pre-planned?) and making it all interesting, meaningful and even compelling for our students.
So this long ass ramble has helped me. I can have fun this week hanging out with my family instead of getting all weird by over-planning my classes for the conference. I have to trust the method to work for me, just like everyday during the academic year. I have a strong framework, the Cycle, and it rarely fails me if we trust in it. It totally fails when I don’t trust it, though, because then the squeezing need to control happens and I am basically screwed.
And so what Katherine Burke said about this stuff having a metaphysical side holds true again, as we talk here about space travel, trust in something greater than ourselves, fountains and yoga. It’s a blending of science and faith. TPRS is the God particle. OK, now I’ve gone too far. Hee hee!
Thanks to jen and Dori and skip for telling people to get off their assess and help me get ready for these classes so that we make maximum use of our time together.