Here is the link to the second part of that class:
My comments:
I see that the artist is working on transparencies for later use on the overhead projector. Perfect. It could be done on regular paper if you have a document camera and I like to hide the artist’s work on the back of the big rolling white board that I like to use.
Where are you writing words down? If you are not, then that is mastery bc it means you are never going out of bounds and so don’t need the board. Now, the asking the girl’s birth day scene was NOT out of bounds. I could tell that they certainly had acquired that. By the way, that is a good way to work with terms associated with age and one’s birthday. You asked Betty Crocker what her age was. Very effective. I need to learn to do that instead of just asking the class the age of the actor. And then you did the same thing with the date and establishing Jan. 22 as the date of her birthday. Really effective.
Great use of gestures. Fantastic, on “together” and “went”.
Awesome to hear a kid doing Où/Where. Loved that.
You got Randy and Betty going to the first location perfectly. Great job on staying with something a lot of us forget, Get the actors through at least two locations. That spatial referencing is huge for the kids’ ability to comprehend and keep things straight in their minds.
Masterful use of MAKING them – this was at 7:00 of the second video – add a detail to the fact that Randy and Betty went to Buffalo Wild Wings in Florida but WHICH ONE? (QUEL BUFFALO WILD WINGS?) – this is the essence of the method – to trick the kids into focusing on the message and not the words by adding details. Wonderful.
Nice use of It’s obvious/C’est évident! that they went to the Buffalo Wild Wings in Miami. However, you are now seven minutes into the story and you only have their names and where they went. This is a great example of how long it sometimes takes to get to more levels of information. Obviously, you are sacrificing everything for their comprehension by going slowly and MAKING SURE THAT THEY UNDERSTAND. But I sense from this group that they have been there done that and would like to move just a bit faster.
Perfect example of unforced output of a high quality when the girl in the front row answered that they went to Buffalo Wild Wings because it was Betty’s birthday. That kid knows how to play the game!
Two awesome things you did at 8:00: 1) you recycled the information about the date, etc. Just a nice quick effective repetition on that. 2) at this point you have not once turned around and written ANYTHING on the board. Your instruction is TOTALLY COMPREHENSIBLE to them so you don’t need to. Amazing, really, when I think about how I used to go through a marker a day. And everything I wrote down, pointed to and paused at, my students DID NOT ACQUIRE. It took me so long to get that. I thought I could just write anything new that came up into the story and we would all have a grand old time. I thought Point and Pause meant to point and pause to any new word. Now I get that Point and Pause is for when we use the target structures only. This is why I suggested years ago that we stop allowing the “How does one say?” question, which can seriously make a class go way off the tracks and out of bounds.
So clearly the first target structure was “sortait/was going out”. Nice reps. How do I know? You can FEEL that the kids are perfectly fine with sortait.
At 8:56 there was a chance to do a mini-RT scene with Randy eating chicken wings. After he did it kind of half assed the first time, you could have stopped him and asked the class “Acceptable, classe?” and of course they would say no and you would make him eat the chicken wings
- angrily
- romantically
- innocently
- fearfully’
- timidly
- noisily
- fast
- really slowly
- etc.
I think this is new for all of us, the idea that RT can occur anytime anywhere in any scene in our classes.
At 9:12 you asked Randy how many chicken wings he ate. You did Not ask simply how many. You asked how many chicken wings he ate. This shows how we can keep getting reps on everything. Alway thinking reps. That leads to fluency. I would like anyone who uses ANY other method to teach a foreign language make a case for what we see here as being in any way less effective than what they do. Indeed, this clip is just a superb example of the method. What could be more effective?
OK. this is important. Susan Gross always tells us to FEEL what is happening in the story as REAL. And you do this so clearly when at 9:34 you can be seen just laughing at how she eats one wing while Randy eats a thousand. That struck you funny in the moment and you just enjoyed the banter, the contrast between her eating one and he eating a thousand. That humor and happiness is so atypical of what the kids experience in their classes during the day that they don’t even know how to react. They are in a class with lighthearted happiness that is GENUINE from their teacher. I think that on some level all the district researchers KNOW FULL WELL that this human element is what is missing in their schools. It doesn’t exist. But it does in this classroom. You kind of laugh from 9:35 all the way to 9:40. Such genuine teaching!
At 10:00 you get the Quand/When kid to do it. I can’t. Nobody will do that one. Nice! And then right after that you taught en bas/down. Then the fist bump. Good to teach those terms but remember that in the chimp world the alpa male is not the one who is biggest or fastest or smartest – it is the chimp who gets the most touches in the group.
At 10:45 this is the “suddenly” move you invented and that I have an article on here on the blog. So what if you broke out of French to get them to do it together? Fun and they were a little shy with the camera on. Doing this kind of working on connecting meaning with gestures and movement absolutely can be done in English.
Nice tie-in to being fat, he is fat because he eats a thousand chicken wings but she is not. But for me, I have banished that word from my classroom. Not these days.
At about 10:45 you used a vu/saw. I don’t know if this is because you had memorized the scipt or not. I would have been back to the script about 10 times by now looking for the next sentence in the script. Are you following a script? Either way, it’s mastery.
Fantastic coaching of the actor into a really funny scene at 12:45. He took your lead. You are the one who gave him permission to be that actor.
Man I wish I could teach like this! And you got here in less than one year!
Nice ignoring of the How do you say something? by the kid in English at 13:31. You just rolled through it. Perfect.
Now at 14:15 the screen comes into clarity and I can see all the words up there. Did they go up during PQA? Can you comment on that?
You’re gonna freak a lot of French teachers out at 14:55 with that passé simple in place of était. Freaky. We need to do that more often. Do you do that chill? Most non-native teachers don’t use the ps and they should.
And there it was “acceptable” at 15:34. You said Ça va? but that’s fine, it was RT. And you sensed that the girl in her reaction of being furious would be too much a challenge for her to act and so you accepted it and backed down and that again shows your sensitivity to the kids’ feelings of shyness.
You are up to 16:00 and could have inserted, every five minutes, a recycling for more reps. OK there is the first recycling at 17:30. I sometimes forget them altogether. In fact, it’s best you didn’t do any recyclings bc the energy and flow may have been compromised. So, we learn that recyclings occur naturally. This at 17:30 was the first natural occasion for a recycling. You recycle with questions. I just restate what happened. Same effect.
You can really see them focused on the meaning and not the words at 20:00. Krashen would love this.