I’ve often wondered why those Circling sessions coached by Susie and others at national conferences over the past ten years didn’t work that well. Well, in my opinion they didn’t work well because people I talked to told me they felt shitty at it. I felt shitty at it.
I observed that the sessions made the participant’s affective filter go way up right away because of the questioning process, which had to be in a certain order. So the teacher was all of a sudden standing in a small group of other teachers trying to get it right.
It would be like a brand new yoga student having a group of other students and a rotating teacher checking out their ability to do a pose the first time they ever tried it. A bit intimidating.
Moreover, being made to think about the process put the participants immediately in the wrong hemisphere of the brain, because in my opinion Circling is a whole brain/right brain/body centered thing, something you feel in your body.
I tried to illustrate how Circling is a body centered thing here:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/04/05/rhythm-of-circling/ https://benslavic.com/blog/videos/visceral-circling/ https://benslavic.com/blog/videos/visceral-circling-archie/ https://benslavic.com/blog/videos/circling-with-balls-archie/ https://benslavic.com/blog/videos/circling-with-balls-archie-continued/
In addition, Circling, as CI, needs to be personalized to have any energy. Doing CI without personalization, as in those Circling sessions, is very robotic. I remember when I was learning TPRS years ago how Susie would walk around to our different groups as they practiced and not allow English and I all I was feeling was that I was going to mess up the order of questioning when Susie came by.
To practice Circling properly, therefore, I suggest that one should practice it while doing CWB or some strategy that is personalized. Yes, I know that one can practice it mechanically, but that never worked for me. It just made me nervous, so why give so many precious hours to it at a conference, if it’s just going to make people nervous?
When circling with balls or whatever activity the kid is into (I use that term balls because almost every middle school kid I ever taught was into sports), we should try to respond creatively to what is really going on in the classroom in the Vygotsky sense.
What is the Vygotsky sense? It is where you create a Zone of Proximal Development with your students as a mom does with her children, where love is allowed to come into the language learning process and mold it and form it so that it is real.