It makes my head spin sometimes how easy it is to just slip into old habits and all of a sudden you’ve spent a whole week losing the kids and allowing relationships to grow cold. Not intentionally. of course. You think you’re doing good work but at the end of the week I realize I’ve stopped doing TPR, cut down on personalization, laughter and celebration.
It happens all of a sudden just because I’m trying to “teach” something that doesn’t come from the students and doesn’t focus on making what is inside of them important. We still had laughs, had some good language use, but it wasn’t magic and it didn’t have flow.
So now I’m trying to pull the ox out of the mire and get back on the flow train towards meaningful language teaching. This week my main focus is student interest, student created content, student centered questions, small bites of information, and staying in bounds.
Craig