A lot of what we are experiencing now in our classrooms is a direct result of what we did in the first month of last year. What is the best way to start a year off using comprehensible input? There are as many answers to that as there are teachers.
In this article I would like to suggest a few ideas to consider when thinking about starting the year next year, so that students know the deal and act accordingly in our classrooms. If we do not get the results we want, it is never the kids’ faults – it is ours.
Some ideas:
1. Use English for a few weeks. Is there any way around it? We have to norm the class to our Classroom Rules using English. We don’t explain the rules; we teach them using L1 as they arise in class.
2. Use the Circling with Balls (CWB) cards and maybe the Anne Matava Questionnaires, although doing both in the first week or two can get too busy. I wait on the questionnaires until the third week or so. I put the CWB on one side of colored (per class) card stock and Anne’s questionnaires on the back. Instant lesson plans for the year. I don’t try to get all that information processed in the first months of the year. It takes me all year to get to all the kids and I only bring the cards out when I feel like it and when the class drags when using them they are collected and gone. Find templates for the card here under the “Useful Information” category:
https://benslavic.com/tprs-posters.html
3. When the cards get boring move quickly to some work on verbs using TPR and the other strategies we have here for teaching verbs to start the year. Teaching verbs via TPR and attacking the verbs should be the main focus of our work to start the year, second only to making our expectations crystal clear about the use of English in our classrooms, which is something we model and do not tell.
4. Other options in those first few weeks are Word Associations from word walls, Super Mini Stories as discussed heavily here about ten months ago, Verb Slam Activity, One Word Images, Word Chunk Team Game, etc. – anything that teaches verbs and these are only suggestions. Make classroom management and verb mastery the total focal points of your year when it starts.
5. Be cheerful but real. You can’t get your first minutes with a new group back. Stay in the TL until some kid via his or her behavior forces you to break out of the L2 instruction and then in no uncertain terms state the rule, using what I have found works for me over many years now if you follow this little asterisk to his brother down below.*
6. Even if you had the same group in the previous year, you can change the culture that was created this year but it has to be in the first few days, especially re: mouthy kids, and it is best if you reach down deep over the summer and feel the truth that your job is not to be nice but to be consistent and clear and stay in the TL and enforce, enforce, enforce your rules in a kind way. You must never leave yourself open to any of those horrible challenges that result when you have not clearly explained how you run your class in those first few weeks. You can’t make up your rules as you go along in this game.
One plan to keep the kids in the TL, suggested by Erin or Keri, I think, is to have a light on a little board and flip it on when you not in English and make it work. I haven’t tried this and it may not work for everyone, but I think that this idea of a little light should at least be explored by some of us. If the light is on and we are supposed to be in L2 and the class clearly doesn’t respect that, we must in those first days make an absolute court case out of it. If they can learn to fully respect the little light, our implementation of jGR/iSR might be much easier and be taken more seriously over the course of the entire year. It may not. I could see the light going on and off quite a bit in the first few weeks, and then if we do that right, it would be mostly on (that means we are in the TL) for the rest of the year, and blurting would be out of the question in such a class culture geared to the highest good (no English) of all concerned, because English is a whole lot worse than any of us think it is in a foreign language classroom, as per our big discussion on that topic earlier this year. But next August is not the time for us to start talking about these things.
So let’s talk now about ways to make sure that next year we should not have to listen to unnecessary and harmful (to our mental health if not our students’ language gains) blurting throughout the year. I think it is possible to get our students to fully respect our rules, to implement jGR/iSR to its best effect, which is considerable if we do it right, and to generally not become the victims of our own unenforced rules about blurting and the use of English, especially.
*1.Stop teaching.
2.Look at the student and smile.
3.Turn to the poster and laser point to the rule he just broke.
4.Read the rule out.
5.Explain in English what the rule means to the class in general, not directly to the student.
6.Look back at the student and smile.
I developed this management sequence at East High School in Denver Public Schools and Diana Noonan makes sure all of her CI teachers-in-training use it. She recommends it highly as a routine to adapt and it kind of goes hand in hand with the Classroom Rules found here:
https://benslavic.com/tprs-posters.html