It is so nice to teach in a SBGR school where the four learning habits of respect, responsibility, perseverance and collaboration are not just meaningless but terms to describe how a child learns. In fact, I am firmly convinced after almost forty years of doing this that the learning habits/social skills/EQ are FAR more important in learning a language than collecting knowledge/mental skills/IQ.
The learning habits, especially those of respect and collaboration, align with the Classroom Rules of listening with the intent to understand and one person speaking and the others listening and doing their 50%, etc.. If this is not happening, if the learning habits are not visible and apparent in class, then not much language will be learned, no matter how smart the kid is.
So what to do if we don’t see the behaviors that we know are essential to language acquisition? This morning I said to a child in English that right now/at that moment in class her behavior was only “approaching” the standard.The child spent the last half hour of class focused, quiet and a perfect example of the interpersonal skill. Approaching is not a good word to the kids, whose parents expect their child to be meeting the standard at all times.
Pointing out behaviors that don’t meet standards changes behaviors fast. I am so happy to be in a school that addresses learning habits formally, connecting them to assessment. Yes there is the academic piece and it is of huge importance to some people. But how much a child knows is not important to me. I can’t control that because it’s a language. It’s too big. There are too many words.
By connecting a child’s focus as per jGR and the entire discussion on this topic here over the past four years, and to the Interpersonal Skill of the Three Modes of Communication in particular, we move language teaching into an area of assessment that it should have been in all these years. Once your school starts connecting assessment to visible non-verbal rsponses in a child during class, things will change. Behaviors will change and greater gains will be there.