Making Krashen’s ideas come to life fully in our classrooms cannot actually be described to someone in words, one has to experience it. This is especially true if a teacher is predisposed to looking for faults, and not strengths, in things that they do not fully grasp. They only see the toenail of the elephant.
Coming from a place of control in teaching causes high blood pressure and physical ailments because we are in one of the most difficult and stressful of all professions. Why not make things easier? Trying to develop self-initiated plans of instruction simply doesn’t work, never worked, and never will work. The kids just turn off and put up the screen savers. Even the kids who look interested and get A’s aren’t interested.
That is what is so unique and difficult to grasp about this work. It is not about self initiated planning, not about “taking the ball and running with it” like a football player crashing through the line. It is just about letting angels push us from behind.
All we have to do is to allow the questioning process and the kids to function as part of an overall process, and not apart from it. We don’t create situations in which the kids are forced to be reactive to us, but, instead, we allow them to be interactive with us. It means feeling and allowing the method to work without meddling with them. Angels pushing from behind.
What makes the good stories happen in a classroom is not about us, but about group dynamics. We simply dance together in the beautiful dance of unconscious acquisition. This work is about letting go, and about co-creating language.