Something has to change. We cannot continue to act as if nothing is happening when kids routinely tune us out, even in our CI classrooms. One of the things that made me MOST CRAZY over my 40 years in the field was all those times I’d be walking down to the copy machine and walk by neighboring language classrooms and hear pindrop silence – that was INSANE and it was looked upon as NORMAL by all involved.
As if kids can learn a language in silence. The silence meant that nobody was doing anything that actually leads to language gains. What was happening in the tomb-like silence of those classrooms was NOTHING. And we allowed it. Think of the tax dollars wasted each year under the guise of language “instruction”. Not to mention the destroyed hopes of kids to one day learn the language.
Silence is not golden in any WL classroom – CI or not, except of course when our students are reading on their own which happens only after they have had enough months of auditory input. What Tina and I have developed is a system of classroom management that does not rely even one bit on extrinsic motivation by the students. We all know what extrinsic motivation means in our classroom – and Tina and I don’t want any part of it and why we have developed a completely new way to assess kids in our classrooms that is based heavily on observable behaviors and rubrics.
Extrinsic motivation is just too heavy-handed for the lightness of spirit that in our view along brings real language gains as per Vygotsky and other researchers who point – in our view correctly – to the human and very heart-based reciprocal back and forth sense of PLAY that alone describes good language teaching.
When we motivate kids with tests and heavy-handed rules and stern We cannot continue to act as if nothing is happening when kids routinely tune us out, even in our CI classrooms. One of the things that made me MOST CRAZY over my 40 years in the field was all those times I’d be walking down to the copy machine and walk by neighboring language classrooms and hear pindrop silence – that was INSANE and it was looked upon as NORMAL by all involved.
As if kids can learn a language in silence. The silence meant that nobody was doing anything that actually leads to language gains. What was happening in the tomb-like silence of those classrooms was NOTHING. And we allowed it. Think of the tax dollars wasted each year under the guise of language “instruction”. Not to mention the destroyed hopes of hope-filled kids to one day learn the language.
Silence is not golden in any WL classroom – CI or not – except of course when our students are reading on their own, which only happens after they have had enough months of quality auditory input.
What Tina and I have developed is a system of classroom management that does not rely even one bit on extrinsic motivation by the students. We all know what extrinsic motivation means in our classroom – and Tina and I don’t want any part of it and why we have developed a completely new way to assess kids in our classrooms that is based heavily on observable behaviors and rubrics and not on memorized material and tests.
Extrinsic motivation is just too heavy-handed for the lightness of spirit that in our view along brings real language gains as per Vygotsky and other researchers who point to the wonderfully human and very heart-based reciprocal back and forth sense of PLAY that alone describes good language teaching.
And we don’t define PLAY as requiring us to be a “playful” and “entertaining” teachers. We are not entertainers, but we are certainly capable of enjoying mirth in our classrooms, even if we have very reserved and quiet and “intellectual” teaching personalities.
The shift is all to the hearts and the kids will teach us, like they are right now in Florida. All of a sudden, the pressure to be a “fun teacher” is gone from us. We can ENJOY fun now that all this love is pouring into our classrooms, but we don’t have to BE fun ourselves. (Love has always been there in schools, of course – we just couldn’t see it before this new shift – it was hiding somewhere behind that big stack of textbooks on our shelves.)
When we motivate kids with tests and heavy-handed rules and stern countenances, we are fooling no one, least of all the students. We know it and now it is past time to change. We have to change. We have broken the old mould of what many teachers still think world language classroom management even IS. Isn’t it nice to know that that old mould is broken? It makes me smile genuinely because I waited so long myself. Color me happy now, finally!
Classroom management problems in CI classrooms happen when kids’ sense of relaxed self-expression in the group is not there, and when kids can’t get focused on the message. They happen when a few kids are included but most are excluded, usually in a ratio of 30:5, with far more kids excluded than those few who – along with the teacher to form a little “CI club” – are included.
So the biggest point to make about classroom management is that it won’t happen without inclusion of the entire group because the excluded kids will find a way to subtly poison the atmosphere in the classroom so that real communication can’t happen. In such a case what is the value of calling your classroom a CI classroom? Comprehensible input is NOT the most important CI in a language classroom – that honor goes to the term “Community Inclusion”.
A second point besides the one made above about full inclusion of all the students is: in our NTCI classrooms we can’t sweep the kids’ creativity under the desks in order to teach them what is on our next semantic set list, or in the next chapter of the book we are (mistakenly) reading as a class. When we use that old kind of “targeted” CI we show that we really haven’t broken loose from the joug imposé dès longtemps of the textbook.
In order for that to happen, in order for us to become finally fully free of the textbook and its continuing hurtful grip on our minds as teachers, in order for us to become free of the idea that we must teach from lists, we must first accept that learning a language is not about intelligence at all – read Krashen on that. It’s about everyone in the class, including the teacher, feeling included as a valued member of the group and not being stifled and not living in fear of the test.
Watch “The Music Man” (Robert Preston version) on this point. A great band program is born in a school not because of the wonderfulness and talent and knowledge and training of the band leader but because of the community’s working together towards a common goal. It only required Prof. Harold Hill’s belief that all kids can succeed for it to happen.
No wonder so many high-intelligence students (read “memorizers”) are so freaked out when they come into our classrooms. Suddenly they are being asked to get involved in a communicative flow of energy, one defined by kindness, between everyone in the classroom. This has nothing to do with what they have been taught in schools about their intellectual “superiority” and survival of the fittest and the exclusion of mostly everyone in the classroom but themselves. We must disarm those few memorizers and teach them a new way of being in a classroom. We do this via love.
A third point: we can’t really can’t get kids intrinsically motivated with targets and circling. This needs to be mentioned now and again here because – and this is just our opinion based on our own experience with the Invisibles – when kids in non-targeted CI (NTCI) classrooms don’t have to experience heavy circling and targets and forced classroom reading as a group with tests on what was read, it turns out that they behave REALLY WELL.
It is because, triumphantly for us, our students are so focused on the message and not at all on the vehicle being used to deliver it that it doesn’t even cross their minds to misbehave – they’ve got better things to do because our NTCI classes are based on things that they created and want to create more from: images.
IMAGES SPARK IMAGINATION in ALL the kids and therein lies the big secret to what makes non-targeted comprehensible input classrooms and the “Invisibles” system work so well.