This is my response to the idea put forth in the first article by the above title:
OK I’m weighing in on the “student actor output during circling” thing. This is my official position until tomorrow, when I reserve the right to change my mind.
(I never want to be guilty of having just one opinion on TPRS, which is such a joyful spinning thing that I wouldn’t ever want to try to tie it down. It would be like trying to tame an animal to do what you want instead of letting it run free. Yes, we get to take what we want from CI because its nature is to give with both hands to us, but no we do not get to say to the world that the best way to do it is OUR way. We all drink the water from those very lovely and giving hands differently, so there is no one right way to do it.
The CI beast must be free to show up differently in every classroom and be what it is is – wonderful – relative to each of our own teaching personalities. It shows up individually in each of us, and since each of us is different, we will all do CI differently. Every teacher who has ever had the courage to ride the beast – that means try CI in their classroom no matter how scared they are – gets to ride it in the way THEY want. Then they ride a version of the beast but not the Beast itself, which will remain forever in the Land of Purity.)
So MY opinion on this current thread is that when I saw Carla in that video, I felt that she was holding back there, having to listen to Blaine and she may not even have been aware of it. Maybe I am wrong on that, reading too much in, because she does state how nice it is for her to be able to bring that 15% of confidence in her student up to a much higher level due to Blaine’s coaching her to promote more output from the teachers working. She also says:
…I will definitely be using circling in this way quite a bit now…
But I see her doing what Blaine said to do. He’s the dude, so she did it. But I myself felt the class slowing down with each repeated utterance and even getting into a kind of a boring place. I can SEE that those are girls up there. Now can we move things along and play? I don’t want my class tuning out when (they are so smart!) they see what I am doing, focusing on speech output at the expense of meaning. What I would want to do there is laugh, not get reps on output, and I think the one gets in the way of the other. (The Taylor Swift thing wasn’t that funny.)
Do most students enjoy speaking in front of their peers anyway? These were teachers.
So I stand by my position – and it is a hard-fought one over other aspects of my teaching self over many years – that the best thing is to never force speech output. Ever. It comes at the cost of too many laughs. And speech emerges anyway from students to an amazing degree without our own having to force anything. And this world sorely needs a laugh or two right now. And some relaxed teachers. At least a few.
I think Blaine was going for increased gains in speech output there when he was coaching Carla. That ‘s great. It’s what Blaine wants. But I feel, like Krashen, that the word “unforced” means not even a semblance, a shred, of force.
Besides, I don’t do CI because my students will learn learn more by using it. Rather, I am in it for myself, for the longevity of my career, for my mental health, which impacts my physical health.
It’s all about me. I can’t serve my students if I am alway trying to get them to do wonderful things. That’s feeding my ego, not me. I just want to hang with my students and make a living. Oh, and yeah, I almost forgot, to get a laugh or two while doing it.
This job is FAR too difficult for me to not put myself first and to put my students and all of those other dark shadows (in my mind) second.
So yeah, that’s what I think. Today.