This idea of getting departmental language classes together in the same room in a kind of town meeting format led to the blockbuster breakthrough strategy here on our blog of Two Strikes and You’re Out, which for me at last has snuffed out the blurting problem as if it never existed. Here’s the report on the first meeting we had in my school with two TPRS colleagues in October of 2015. It was a morning I had been waiting for for fifteen years, to get the problem of blurting out in the open, and the results have been fantabulous:
This morning, Linda (Mandarin) and Zach (Spanish) and I (French) brought our three classes into one classroom (they are smaller classes) and talked about what it means to be a student in our classrooms, and to specifically address the blurting problem.
First, I asked the combined groups to get with an elbow partner and ask:
Why do you think you are in this big group meeting?
A few answered and then I told them why – because we teachers are concerned about blurting in our classes and we want to address it as an entire middle school department together to see what we could do to solve the problem.
Then I asked them to get with their elbow partner and say whether they are a blurter or a non-blurter in their respective classes.
Then I showed them my Classroom Rules poster and asked them to reflect on Rule #2 – One person speaks and the others listen.
Then I asked if the rules might relate in any way to the 4 Learning Habits – Respect, Responsibility, Perseverance, and Collaboration – that our school uses to evaluate that area in our SBGR system.
They related Rule #2 to the Respect learning habit.
Then we broke up into our regular classrooms with Linda teaching Mandarin to her students for 15 minutes and likewise with me and Zach. At the end of each session, we brainstormed with the kids about what real listening looks like, since we saw excellent listening in each class due to the nature of the collaborative observation session.
We teachers admitted to breaking the rule ourselves about use of English. I made the promise to my class to not speak English (during PQA/Stories and whenever we want to be in full blast CI but obviously not during parts of class when English is necessary). The exception is I get to use “What did I say?” and they get to answer that question in English, but that is the only time that they can speak English.
We even talked about how fast processors need to behave in classes where they perceive that the class is slower than them. (Answer: be quiet and show respect and listen because as long as you are hearing the language you are learning.)
The activity was such a success that we plan on doing it in all our classes in the next few weeks. We definitely got kids reflecting on how they act when in our comprehensible input classes. We know (Zach and I more than Linda, whose classes don’t blurt during the CI instruction) that we want to establish in our school a new culture about blurting in language classes.
Our message was clear: we want to change the culture of blurting in our school. With each others’ help, and more meetings like these where we collaborate with our students in a positive way to solve a problem, maybe we can do it.