I videotaped a Look and Discuss class yesterday and came away with some insights:
1. As a first question, I prefer simply asking the students what they see, rather than picking out from the image the structures that I want them to know and teaching them. I can’t assume that my students’ eyes are drawn to the same things mine are. An advantage of my asking what they are seeing is that I don’t have to prepare anything, I just respond to what they say and scaffold my questioning off of that. By responding to what my students see first the discussion is:
a. spontaneous and therefore interesting.
b. under the ownership of the students because they started it (it wasn’t me trying to “teach” them something).
2. I found myself spending most of the period on the first thing my students’ attention was drawn to, which was two faces of two men holding three tiger cubs (I think it was Siegfried and Roy). Instead of saying a lot of different things about the photo, staying with that first thing the kids said to me and doing the circling/scaffolding process led me to a chance to compare the size of the faces of the men to the size of the faces of the tiger cubs. I stayed with one thing and developed it, thus going narrow and deep, as opposed to jumping in a shallow and wide way around other things going on in the picture. An additional advantage of this was that we were guaranteed not going out of bounds.
3. I could see in the videotape that what I thought was a natural scaffolding process (using circling to get to more and more complex levels of grammar instruction via proper speech – that’s my own definition of scaffolding anyway) was too much for them. I bet a lot of us do that. We see an opening to make things more complex and go there, when our students are still working on the previous more simple grammar. It’s like offering someone at a table who is eating a first course of a meal the second and third courses too quickly so that they can’t digest anything.
4. In the videotape I started slowly enough but soon was going just a bit over the speed limit. This happens so easily to us when we are repeating the same target structure over and over and over in class, which we should be doing (never straying from the target and including it in each thing we say), but we should know the speed limit as the car imperceptibly (to us, not to them) gains speed.
5. Using L and D to videotape yourself is better than videotaping stories. They are so complex that it is hard to sort out what is going on when reviewing the videotape. When you videotape yourself doing L and D, you are giving yourself a chance to see things more simply.
6. By staying with one structure for a long time in L and D, you can:
a. observe when you imperceptibly speed up, losing the class.
b. observe when you offer too large a quantity of new information, making what you are saying incomprehensible to your students.
c. watch the subtleties of what is going on between you and your students, thus gaining insight into how many of them, more than we think, insist on faking learning, which brings us straight back to how important a daily quiz and a daily dose of jGR in the grade book are, to keep them in line, not to mention our need to react instantly from our core to defend our class from their inattention. (We should never think we are boring when teaching CI, our job is not to entertain and we can be as boring as we like, as long as we are delivering slow and clear comprehensible input to our students. The fault lies much less with us and much more with the age and levels of maturity of our students, not to mention the cell phone companies.)