Last month I had a good ending to a class story with the cloze technique. I don’t know how many of us use that. I forget to do it a lot because there is often the quiz and the artist’s work to process at the end of class.
However, I have found that when I retell the story to end class and leave big pauses/blanks of single words for the kids to fill in during the retell, the kids end up revealing exactly how much was learned. Why?
Because when they end up shouting almost the entire story back at you, then you know that you in fact got enough reps to make them actually acquire/internalize (and sometimes be able to thus output – with energy!) most of the story.
For those folks who believe in forced output and who think that we never do any output, we are doing a very sophisticated level of natural unforced output and it is particularly noticeable with this cloze technique.
So, if you have been wondering how you can test/elicit output from your kids, you may want to try this technique at the end of class. It’s a way to evaluate if what you did that day was successful. I should add, however, that the class that made me see what a valuable tool this is was a third level class, albeit in their first year of stories/CI instruction.
Whatever the level, to get this kind of natural and unforced output response, the one thing that has to have happened in the story is that you got through at least two of the locations with plenty of reps and the story was a simple one, you didn’t go out of bounds and you barely used Point and Pause, and you went slowly enough, and you got a nice choral response from the entire class on each question you asked.