We must be comfortable in our classrooms if we are to fully use our intuitive faculty and learn how to thin slice (Gladwell) when we are trying to create comprehensible input with our kids. If we are comfortable with the kids and the CI, things will go well.
Little glimpses (thin slices) into what is possible will present themselves and will make their way into the class, softening, making things more interesting because of the natural emergence of funny and now personalized content, all happening in a relaxed atmosphere.
In the old foreign language classroom, the teacher would only approve of the student if they did what they were supposed to do. The message was, “I will approve of you, but you have to do what I want you to do.”
However, if we release the kid to be fully in charge of their 50% of the CI (https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=4753), realizing that class will happen as it happens, this detaching (from the kind of class in which we want to impose learning on our students) saves us.
We are not in our classrooms to try to get our students to learn anything; we are there to give and receive information that is fun and interesting to all involved, merely using the language as the medium for that interchange.
The “get them to learn what I want them to learn” mentality is not a very receptive mentality. When we are busy in the moment of teaching trying to “get them to learn something”, we can’t really be aware, in those moments, of any possible intuitive work that may be just a thin slice of awareness away from us and our students. The instruction is all hard, dry and without imagination and softness when we are standing up there trying to get them to learn. It’s horrible.
Our part in any moment of developing comprehensible input via repetitive questioning is simply to relax. If we’re there to dominate the room, make it happen, figure it all out, then we’re off the intuitive highway.
The task of teaching is to understand that the end doesn’t justify the means. Outcome based instruction, especially the Advanced Placement Exam, but really all such tests, make the teacher half crazy. Such tests take teachers out of the areas of serenity and intuition. The language becomes an end, not a process.
To get into a place of language as process and intuition and serenity in our comprehensible input, we can’t worry about the test. We can’t plan our instruction around the test. We can’t base our value as teachers on the results of a test.
Rather, we must honor our students as people first. We must genuinely try to get to know them, using the language as the medium of communication with them and not as the focus of the class. The only way we can do that is to make the process more intuitive.
Where does intuition come from? It comes from the unconscious mind, which takes us straight back to Krashen: language learning is an unconscious process. See links below for more on that topic, which I refuse to let go of on this blog:
https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=7385
https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=7296
https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=8043
Moreover, as stated elsewhere, getting the unconscious fun rolling in our classes is a function of silence, which is a function of enforcing the rules, which is a function of active communication in the first weeks of the year with parents, deans, counselors, etc. with any kids who perceive our desire for silence as a threat, bless their hearts.