The current discussion here about sheltering vs. targeting seems important so I’m just writing this to say it and keep it out there. Maybe we can develop it even more from last week’s thread and see if it actually takes hold in our teaching, where ideas like this are tested and proven.
In my view, this topic of sheltering vs. targeting has the potential to redefine our basic agreed upon shared perception of what comprehensible input teaching even means, how we define it now.
In the past, in Denver Public Schools for example, our goal was always, so it seemed to me, to backwards plan using stories in order to read novels/chapter books. We isolated and targeted vocabulary in each of the leveled readers, did enough stories to allow the students a good vocabulary base to read the novel, and they read it. It is still the curriculum in DPS, to my knowledge.
Now, we seem to be talking more about communicating with the kids. Some teachers here like Leigh Anne have put thier focus front and center on stories, sharing that for them stories bring the highest form of personalized authentic human interaction with his students, and saying that most of the other stuff can’t do that. I agree with that assessment and have had a great year myself so far doing only stories. When I don’t do stories, I feel the drop in interest.
I don’t care so much about the words I’m teaching them in order to teach a novel as I care about the quality of the interaction with the students – that is the difference.
Yes, we need some targets in stories as a train needs tracks to go on, but the train, the communication with the kids, is more important than the tracks.
Diane Neubauer has said this about this change in her own teaching:
“I liked thinking of sheltering better. I felt more relaxed about where the discussion could go. I felt a little more free to go with their answers.”
Jim Tripp has said this about the topic:
“If I say to myself that I target the storyline vs the structures, I may find myself relax and yet unable to avoid hitting on my targets anyways.”
Activities that are up there with stories in bringing this kind of new sheltered “focus-less-on-target-structures-and-focus-more-on-the-kids” are:
Jody Noble’s “Special Chair” (2003)
Bryce Hedstrom’s “Special Person” (2009) – based on “Special Chair”
Sabrina and Nina’s “Star of the Week” (2012)
Angie Dodd’s “House” (2015)
Are there more?
The above activities along with stories can claim to be getting a lot of use right now by many of us here in our group. Enough of us can be said to have become over the years “experienced” by now, and we are making instructional decisions based less on our ability to get kids to learn a set of words in order to read a novel or for any other reason but rather to get them hopped up and excited in class about talking about crazy stuff with themselves at the middle.
This of course is not to dismiss the valuable role played by many of the other targeted strategies and activities we have developed here over recent years.
To say it one more time: the new focus – if it is even a new focus – seems to be on authentic communication with kids. We do so by limiting the number of new words we use in order to make sure that our students understand us in a kind of new effort to honestly and authentically negotiate meaning with our students – and have that be the new central focus of the class – in what I can only label as a more human and real and interactive way of teaching where negotiating meaning becomes the most important thing, not any words.
There is far less negotiation of meaning without significant sheltering of vocabulary. The beautiful sheltered process of just talking to the kids so that they are unaware of the language brings unbelievable gains in grammar.