This discussion about blurting is the most important discussion of all with no exceptions. Why do all this work to learn how to teach like this and then have some kid ruin it all by blurting?
I am also going to work with Linda and Zach to bring all our students together to talk about blurting in a big combined 3-class meeting on Friday. We will tell them that blurting will derail everything and that we as a department are determined to not allow it.
After that meeting, we will go observe each other’s classes for ten minutes and then reconvene as a big group of three classes to process what the kids saw in the other (Chinese, French, Spanish) classes in terms of blurting.
Of course there will be no blurting then, but then we will tell them that we will meet like this again in a few weeks and discuss how certain kids who can’t stop blurting might be able to stop, with advice from their peers. We will thus make the entire combined three classes a kind of police force for those blurting when we meet again as a big group.
I feel that L1 blurting in a CI class is so hard for just one teacher vs. an entire classroom full of teenagers that we need to draw the attention of the entire WL department to it and function as a group to not just quell but completely eliminate the blurting. I will report back on this later.