Adrianne is brand new to this and reports in after her first few weeks:
Ben,
I am loving how this method forces me into the TL. In the last week and a half, my students have heard more Spanish than last year’s group heard in a month. (what was I thinking last year??). Anyway, I have had a few of the magical moments that I’ve heard all the pros speak about. Those moments when the kids are so sucked into our PQA that it seems they don’t care that it’s in another language. They understand it and it’s fun and lively and personal.
There is another moment I have started to experience in this second week of school. I am seeing some of my students get the glazed eyes. It is mainly happening when I am in the midst of asking more questions than I thought I “could ever ask in a million years”.
These are good kids that I really think are wanting to learn, but I’m losing them at times. When I see it, I will walk a bit closer to them, get eye contact, then maybe throw them one of the balls we are using for “Circling with Balls” and ask a question with their name in it….is there something else I can do?
I responded, and please add more as comments, since this is happening to all of us, from the most experienced to the least experienced, bc it almost always happens to everybody:
When you are asking those “checking for understanding” questions, are they all one word answers for the kids? Is each question similar enough to the one that preceded it to make the question easy? Are you going slowly enough to make the questions absurdly comprehensible? Are you going out of bounds when you ask the questions by adding in new words that they don’t know, which is a disaster?
These are the questions I ask myself when this happens to me. As a general rule, they zone out bc they don’t understand. That’s it. That is a 99.9% accurate statement. There are no other reasons for when they zone out. And they don’t understand when we go too fast, don’t check for understanding with one word answers that are really simple and easy for them, with no new words in them, and when we forget to park on a single phrase for what seems to us like a ridiculously long time.
Can’t wait to hear what others say on this. Here is Adrianne ready to fix stuff early on in her career with CI – that is a lot easier than getting some bad habits going for a few years with this stuff and then trying to change them. So everybody try to respond. Let’s have a very thorough answer for her that comes from all of ours separate experiences.