cCWB - compact Circling with Balls

I laughed (out loud) when Drew said yesterday:

…I did my first movie talk today…we spent about 5 minutes on just the first 2 seconds of the video and 30 minutes on 20 seconds….

Then I thought about it.

I paid attention when James said:

…we don’t need an infinite number of activities, just a few heavy hitters that can hold the weight of 15-20 minute spurts of delivering CI….

I raised an eyebrow when Robert said this yesterday:

…we worked almost exclusively with “plays” [and eventually] we will get to “plays soccer in Germany”….

I noticed something different when Diane said yesterday in her video that she has streamlined CWB because of the complexity of the Chinese language to only do Circling with Names, because there is less variation in sound and the kids can thus handle the input better.

Then I thought again about how Linda Li in her demos at conferences often only teaches “drinks coffee” during the course of the entire demo, which usually takes about an hour.

Now I am seeing what Linda does in a different light. I now see more clearly why Stephen Krashen has called her the best language teacher in the world – it is because she doesn’t try to say too much.

And I continue to reflect on Jody’s statement from a few days ago:

…when we speed through stuff, gains are fewer, the gap among students grows, and the class progress gets unwieldy….

In my own recent training video on CWB I never got beyond talking about one imaginary kid’s sport for twenty minutes. And there weren’t even any kids in the room.

And yesterday my French 1 class stretched “Nicole plays soccer in a whale” into the entire class period. In that class we:

1. spent ten minutes circling “in a whale vs. in a well” because I heard it wrong the day before from Ferndando in the final seconds of class.
2. spent five minutes arguing about the color of the whale. I was standing next to my color/number chart and only taught blue and red. I deliberately said incorrectly that the whale was red and Nicole said it was blue, and the argument caused lots of reps on those two colors.
3. spent ten minutes arguing with the class about the size of the whale. I deliberately said incorrectly (from the day before) that the whale was small and Nicole said it was big.
4. spent fifteen minutes talking about some of the other cards that we had done the week before in terms of whether they were in the whale with Nicole or not.

Then, on top of all that, John wrote an article just published this morning which is deeply connected to the idea being expressed in this article.

By the way, I got a Professeur Deux out of this (Jessica), a hero in the class’ eyes for suggesting the whale (Fernando), a Clapper Kid who is perfect for the job (Sergio), a Quiz Writer with talent (Jailene). (It is possible to get ten questions from one sentence in CWB if that sentence has been circled enough.) I also got a classroom of kids with whom I’ve bonded in a very short period of time at a level that is far beyond any in my career. Why?

It’s because I:

– listened to them.
– didn’t try to teach them too much stuff while I focused on getting to know them and their quirks and humor. I hardly had to use the Classroom Rules at all. (That is new stuff – it aligns with the fact that an authentically engaged class needs no rules or even jGR.)
– tried to feel what they were experiencing as I spoke.
– relaxed which allowed them to as well.
– gave them lots of jobs.
– went slowly allowed myself to laugh, because I am no longer such un homme sérieux who has to get lots of things done in class.

What good things to do! Getting more done by doing less, and by allowing the good orderly direction of natural and patient human interchange follow it’s own path and not the one I’ve charted out (see John’s article, which is why I am against TPRS curriculae products except for new people to use as training wheels).

I am talking here about trashing many of the cool ideas I have ever had about comprehension based instruction and instead focusing on just one thing – staying on one target much longer than ever before. As long as a target (plays soccer in a whale) is repeated in every sentence for an extended period of many many minutes if not over the course of the entire class period, the kids understand it. All of them. It is when all the kids hear the same single target structure over up to an entire class period that comprehensible input works.

This makes sense in terms of what we know about how much time is required for fluency. All we are doing when we spend the entire class period on one structure is giving the deeper mind – where language acquisition actually happens – more clay to work with.

I remember writing last year about how R and D only worked really well when I did cRD – I won’t go into that here but that article on cRD can be found in the categories. The point there on reading novels was that less is truly more in a reading class because of the same point being made in this article, that we stay on known targets longer.

In the past we used to leave targets and the result was a shallow and wide class with no real gains in acquisition and we couldn’t figure out why CI didn’t work in our classes. Shallow and wide doesn’t get it in this work, and I now see that in tackling five cards in one period of CWB I was going shallow and wide and confusing the kids.

I knew it intellectually and I felt it in class but I never put it together that I was going shallow and wide while faking myself out into thinking that I was going narrow and deep in my classes.

I am going to call this new idea, since acronyms are the only way I can remember things, cCWB, or Compact Circling with Balls. (Anybody who wants another name let me know – it’s all I can think of right now as I write this.)

I thank Drew and those mentioned above who all just happened to say the same basic thing on the same day here. This changes everything for me. I will now do my comprehensible input classes differently.