I’ve been reflecting more and more about how it’s not about how smart you are, or how fast you process languages, but about the community piece.
That’s why, even when instructing online, we can’t let that piece fall aside. We need to increase it. Indeed, everything is based on recognizing our students as people.
And I am starting to see with our Zoom group how it’s easier to do on Zoom than in a classroom. Not a lot easier – what we do is always hard. But easier.
What better way to do build the community piece than talk about them in class? They very rarely get recognized as human beings all day, and with many that doesn’t even occur before or after scbool at home.
Then we criticize them when they don’t engage in a real human way in our classrooms. Are we teachers to help kids or not?
We’ve been fooled. We have been worried about using CI to teach the language. We should have been using CI to reach the kids. And the benefit is that when we do the latter, the former occurs as if by magic and according to the research.
This has been a slow realization for all of us. We have watched Craig – a noticeable example – and others here increasing yearly in this growth toward just hanging out with the kids, which is the real pathway to acquisition.
Let’s change even more!