Teaching this way requires vigilant self-reflection and relentless honesty. The growth is through the ups and downs of each class. A few days ago Craig West had a bad class and reported in on it here:
https://benslavic.com/blog/advice-needed-7/
Then he thought about it and fixed it. THAT is where the gains and changes in our teaching will occur. THAT is what successful CI teachers do – they take the hit, shake it off, recover, and fix it. It is during those tense moments of introspection that usually last about 24 hours that the creative changes take place.
Here Craig reports on how he found exactly the right response to the problem, implemented it, and got the CI train in his classroom back on the tracks:
Hey Ben –
I rethought what happened yesterday and figured the problem was mostly my straying from the formula. I wasn’t giving them a reading that was clearly rooted in the film we had used for discussion. It wasn’t a script of the film. It was an arbitrarily created abstract concept. We never practiced creating an abstract dialogue like the one I created for their reading. So my bad.
Today we went back to basics and in prep for the final next week we redid a MovieTalk from this video:
We talked briefly about the targets establishing meaning, and the kids did excellently answering questions all in Spanish. Targets were: feels something, they look at each other, sees someone, smiles, knows, has left.
After the discussion, I passed out the story which is clearly rooted in the film and the questions I asked them. I read the text to them line by line as the repeated the meaning back to me. 100% improvement over yesterday because it was truly comprehensible input.
Best wishes,
Craig