This is a repost from a few years ago:
Most of us are fundamentally frightened of this entire process called comprehensible input. It is just too foreign to our natures as teachers trained in the old way.
We have been trained in ways that contradict the new ideas that will shape foreign language education in this century, and this has affected our vision of best practices in teaching languages. Now we must change or leave the profession.
How to change? We must stop thinking of ourselves as teachers, and begin to think of ourselves simply as people who are hired to just talk to the kids in ways that are interesting and meaningful to them. Comprehensible input is here to stay whether we like it or not.
I am continually flabbergasted – every day – at the fact that so many teachers who profess to understand how people acquire languages don’t see how unconscious that process is, nor how students of language need vast amounts of repetitions – far more than they are currently provided – in order to get the language.
The old model of the teacher as deliverer-of-instructional-services (Ted Sizer’s term) must go. It is time. Those days are over. All those teachers using English all the time. It has become a joke. We all know that we must now speak to our students in the language. So what is holding us back? Fear is holding us back.
We don’t think we can do it. We all say, “Jason can do it. Blaine can do it. Susie can do it. But I can’t.” That is hogwash. The cult of the TPRS expert must go and we must all become the experts that we think we can’t become. It is time for that too. How?
All that is necessary is to let go what we think we currently need to do in our classrooms. Here is a list of things to let go:
1. The fear of using comprehensible input itself. We can speak to them using the target language over 98% of the time and we will.
2. That particularly deep kind of fear of being found out as not good enough. That is such a basic fear, and yet, I have to admit, since I started doing CI eleven years ago, each year I have improved. The method is so innately powerful. It is so effective in spite of our lack of confidence in ourselves!
3. Discomfort when looked at by judgmental colleagues. Treat them as lamp posts who give off very little light. They do not know what is coming and they will lose their jobs as a result, because there are too many standards savvy administrators around now, not to mention the Robert Harrell types who are constantly redirecting the attention of people to what really matters – the ACTFL Three Modes of Communication and not the old four skills, which formed a crutch and provided an excuse for countless teachers to focus on output way too early and have faded out with the last century.
4. Spending too much time assessing and not enough in CI.
5. English.
There are more reasons to let go of the fear. I just can’t think of them right now. But today I am filled with compassion for myself and all of us when I think about all the crap that we have to professionally experience on a daily basis, which affects our personal lives so deeply, to wit:
1. Fear of losing our jobs.
2. Extreme mental stress from students who don’t understand our work due to ignorance, from colleagues who do not understand our work due to pride, and others.
3. Sleepless nights worrying about some kid whose vision of how to behave properly in a classroom has been skewed by a society in crisis and by parents who no longer believe in the authority of teachers.
I don’t want to experience fear any more. The beacon lit by Susie, Blaine, Joe, Diana Noonan and others is shining brightly now, and there are many positive things happening.
Let’s lose the fear. That is what we must do – bravely state that we are dropping the fear around our decision to become experts at comprehensible input….
If you are a teacher and you don’t know what I’m talking about above, because you experience no fear in your classroom, then God bless you.