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Blue Chip Ideas – 1
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9 thoughts on “Blue Chip Ideas – 1”
jGR
Assessing according to the three modes of communication (Robert Harrell).
I think that the desire to align one’s instruction and assessment with human communication and the resultant instrument we have in jGR is truly the most remarkable thing we have done in the six years this blog has been in existence.
The Interpersonal Skill especially is unique in that it points to observable human communication* as the indicator and driver of gains in languages. When teachers used the old model of measuring how much knowledge has been gained, it left out precisely the human piece. People were said to be “smart” or “stupid” at languages. That’s not the way it works.
*for the first few years it is observable non-verbal communication, since the kids need actually hundreds if not thousands of hours to form speech themselves. Expecting kids to be able to form speech before those thousands of hours have occurred is shaming to the kid, out of touch with the research, and full of an ugly form of teacher hubris.
L&D (Look and Discuss)
ROA (Reading Option A)
On a slightly different note, does anyone have a favorite rock solid way that they like to begin class? I found this year that the weird hub-bub of morning announcements combined with kids who wander in at will during the first ten minutes of class (don’t get me started on how weak our admin is about this) leaves me a strange spot. Starting with choral response is just filled with annoying interruptions that disrupt the flow. Who has a plan they really like?
I don’t have the problem that you do, Alison, but in your situation I think I would try to find ways to make that first 10 minutes of class really critical/compelling/interesting/grade-related. Not sure just how.
I know what you are talking about. Many of us in DPS do FVR for ten minutes (or SSR). It is awesome because you get that time to recover from the last class while the kids read silently.
I don’t believe FVR actually works in ten minute segments, and I plan to ask Krashen about that in San Diego. In my own classes I replaced FVR with SSR on novels, just to get the kids some serious quiet time before going into the novel reading template (cRD or just plain R & D). So if you are reading a novel I suggest that.
Now, if you are not reading a novel, and it is a level one class, I suggest teaching five words from the Word Wall to start class. Hopefully lots are verbs that you can TPR, for the first five or seven minutes of class. It is a fun way to frontload those necessary 200 most common words (listed on our DPS website). Here is more on that – find the part describing “Word Association”:
https://benslavic.com/workshop-handouts.pdf
In general, if you add up all the lost minutes from real CI, that’s a lot of lost minutes, so I like to start in right away. I don’t know. Big topic. Everybody has their own way. Those are just a few of the things I’ve done to start class over the year.
If I have a class like after lunch or whenever tardies are common, I give the kids a point a minute for the reading. So the kids reading (SSR of he novel we are currently doing) in their seats at the moment class begins get a ten. A kid five minutes late gets a five. Those who know my grading system can see that it wouldn’t be a good move to be tardy when we are doing SSR to start class. And it’s not hard to keep up with. I just sit in front of the computer putting in scores. while they come in. Our school has a culture of being late to class. It’s a pisser.
Ben,
For how long did you do the one minute of reading equals one point out of 10? My level 1s have potential this year, but I’m keeping this idea of yours in case they start to slide. I don’t have levels 1 read yet, and definitely not on their own, so I’m not sure how I would use this idea…! Did you use it for level 1s?
We got that pesky ‘no novels’ thing again for Latin. I will have a word wall next year and use the hell out of it.