Greg wrote this yesterday:
…are we still in agreement that a strong choral response is key? I think strong responses from everyone will be one of my few main objectives in starting the year next time I’m teaching French. I had a little mental break-through during my French 1 class yesterday. It’s 32 kids and several of them are VERY chatty. I stopped class for the umpteenth time yesterday to wait for silence. I waited literally about 2 whole minutes for chatting and fidgeting to stop. I opened the blinds so I could stare out the window at the sunny courtyard. Those two minutes were a gift though, because as I stared out the window listening to the chatting slowly die down for the 100th time that period, I realized that I will NEVER have a class like this again. I will train them right from the beginning. We will practice strong choral responses and when they get weak I will stop class like Ben did above and we will practice again. Engaging in the big class “conversation” will be the only talking going on, mostly in choral responses.
Ben’s reasoning on why I don’t do this already is spot-on:
“We don’t get a good choral response on our y/n questions because we lack spine. We are afraid to make a group of surly kids who are used to being allowed to not show up for class answer us loudly and with enthusiasm.”
Is anyone else having to step up their game in enforcing strong responses next year?…
James responded:
…choral response, jobs for kids, teaching to the eyes. The big three….
Look carefully at James’ “big three” – they have more to do with function than with form. Those sine qua non (hope I used that right) keys to classroom discipline focus on things the kids do rather than things the teacher does.
In the past, and I see this as THE biggest reason for the general failure of TPRS in classrooms in the past (let’s be honest, only a few out of 100 who try it stick with it) is that we have up to this point relied on teacher generated strategies and forms like Circling and SLOW and Signing and Gesturing and Point and Pause to get our classes up and running, and then we have looked on in shock that our classes were falling apart right in front of us and we concluded that we suck at the method.
This is not true. Our classes have fallen apart on us because we have not focused enough on function. By that I mean on the how and not the what, on the moment by moment invisible world interaction with each kid, especially with each kid who tries to act like a bully in our classroom. We have lacked spine is all. When the moment to confront a student bully in our class happened, we failed – we ignored the kid and ran to Mommy Circling’s dress and hid.
This idea of having a spine in our teaching is therefore something we all need to focus on for next year. Greg has led us to this point and we must now make this a topic of upmost importance if we are to Most kids in the U.S. have had their way with teachers for decades. It all happens in the first week and within two weeks the class belongs to the strongest bullies, the quiet kids have given up hope that anyone will confront them, and the year is effectively over.
What Greg wants to know is what he has to do to never have to go over to the window and wait for things to calm down before he can start teaching next year. His focus on the skill of waiting for a choral response is the perfect answer, in my view – Greg, you have grabbed the brass ring on this deal. We will talk about what this means in the next segment of this article.
We as a group know that we just spent over a year talking here largely about function. Yes, we have talked about the mechanics of teaching using comprehensible input, but we have focused not on the mechanics so much as finding ways to make those mechanics work in terms of interaction with our students. In particular, we all agreed that jGR was the big hitter in this focus on function and not form. Over time the importance of the class choral response was forgotten. We let it slide. Big mistake and if we all have good years next year with great classroom discipline it will be because Greg reminded us of it here in this exchange. He asked if it is the key because he feels it is for him and I want to support that by underlining what he said a thousand time. Either we get the choral response thing together next year, something I learned from Von Ray, or we kiss off the year. That is how important it is in my mind. Yes, jGR is key, but so is the group’s choral response equally key, if not more important than jGR.
Now this is an astounding shift we have made together over the past year from focus on form to focus on function and look at the results – many of us now have control over our classes in a way we never have before. Again, it’s mainly due to jGR, the breakthrough of the century. But the focus on the choral response may be the breakthrough of the milleninium. It’s also something I am going to have to make into an acronym right now for this (if you are new you have to read this; required reading):
vCU
That’s it – I’ll call it von’s Checking for Understanding, because he’s the one who told me about it ten minutes before I did a story in front of 50 people in Las Vegas last summer, which is another story.
James we can talk about this in terms of the templates (we are going to have to meet in Kansas to get this template thing hammered out).
I apologize if you are new – this makes no sense. But you would do well to make sense out of the acronyms listed in the categories here that we have developed by hard work in our classrooms together and that basically kick ass .
Certain among us like jen and James and me and Greg and Brigitte have dug and dug and dug to make sense of it all, and the results are beyond fantastic in terms of our classroom management and instruction so it may be an odd collection of acronyms but it also insures our mental health in a world where just about everyone is rapidly becoming crazy, and not just in education.
We have struck gold because of our focus this past year on function – how we interact with the kids (do we lack spine or not is the bottome line), and focusing only secondarily on form (the old stuff like the Three Steps that is great but doesn’t get the entire job done).