Jeanette has been in the group for many years now and has a combination report from the field as well as a question:
Hi Ben,
I am still learning. Everyday. With the littles now 🙂 I’m back with the littles after 12 years with middle school. Another adventure. Happily I am doing this part time — just two days a week.
A person whom I greatly admire who also is now teaching the littles and who has posted several times on your PLC has been helping a newbie with TPRS/CI. I have been participating in their discussion via email because some of my littles (K-4 kids) were seemingly not easy to engage. This newbie recently asked a littles CI expert about how to do CWB correctly. I seem to recall that recently either you or someone else talked about CI in a new light. I looked at the PLC and tried to find recent posts about CWB, but most of them are at least 2-3 years old.
Here’s a segment of a recent comment you made on the PLC:
…we probably should decide what we mean by the term “staying in bounds”. In my view, it is really limiting new language into the discussion, terms that I know they don’t understand. Blaine is the best at this. It is a kind of internal awareness of knowing what each class knows and not stretching the discussion out beyond that. It is a constant meditation and self awareness in that sense. Then, if something comes into the discussion that I really want in there, that needs to be there, that demands to be there, then in it goes, while I get reps on the new emergent structure….
I realize that your comment above is recent and that your views/thoughts/strategies are evolving. I have started reading your new book, but I got wrapped up in trying to be comprehensible to unruly and hard to engage littles. I have yet to finish reading it.
Here’s my question. If a teacher delivers instruction in an engaging way WITH comprehensible input, is CWB essential to the CI classroom? I seem to remember a discussion on the PLC about how some of the previously-thought essential steps for TPRS might not be so essential. What is important is good CI. But maybe I read and interpreted incorrectly.
Can you point me to a discussion thread that talks about what IS essential to an outstanding CI classroom?