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Circle of Comprehensible Input/Liam O’Neill
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10 thoughts on “Circle of Comprehensible Input/Liam O’Neill”
I’m so “stealing” this! 🙂
Nice.
When I get “you failed me” or “you gave me a low mark” from kids, I say “that’s right. I didn’t do your homework, I didn’t pay attention in class, ask for extra help and I didn’t hand your things in.”
TPRS has made life sooo much simpler…i tell them “if you are here, and your eyes and ears are on me (or the reading) you will get a B, minimum, guaranteed, and you can re-do the final exam as often as you like until you get to that level.”
Liam, I like this metaphor. Thank you for sharing it!
It dovetails nicely with a quote from the December Teacher of the Month, Ms. Laurie Clarq, who said, paraphrasing, that language is like painting a picture in someone else’s mind, heart and soul. The teacher has the picture, the paints, the canvas and the brushes while the students are simply beginning to recognize the colors.
Yes, I remember reading this wonderful visual activity from Liam a few months ago. It does sound like a great thing to do for parents during Back to School night. But what? You have Interpersonal Communication Skills as only 35%? I have it as 60%.
Hah! I see I even made note for myself on my calendar to introduce this circle-dot-visual as a way to describe CI teaching to my new set off kids coming up for semester 2. Thanks, Liam!
It’s going at the top of my lesson plans as I return to school on Monday!
I’m still such a wimp when it comes to interpersonal skills.
But, worse still, I just can’t consistently remember and objectively monitor everyone’s interpersonal skills. I get too into acting out and expressing what is going on with the language. I place myself too much at the center of the class, as the entertainer. I can’t break away from this and, as a result, I don’t have space to confidently give interpersonal skill grades that are worth too much.
Instead, I’ve resigned myself to giving a high amount of spontaneous quizzes that BURN the daydreamers and kids who don’t slow me down.
It seems to be working. The students know it’s on them. None would say it’s not fair.
I would think that if we were all given an honesty pill we would all have to admit to using jGR far below it’s megatron potential. That’s fine. You are still addressing their learning and evaluating it, which is your job, and the “high amount of spontaneous quizzes that BURN the daydreamers” is exactly what the doctor would order in this case. I have myself gone to the double quiz format because I suck at jGR as well. It’s fine. The real purpose of jGR is to keep the kids in line.
I would add that in my opinion the two concepts of 1) learning a language and 2) testing are so diametrically opposed in nature that it is amazing that we who are so focused on bringing the living language to our students are able to grade our students at all.
One more point – we must stay within ourselves when that entertainer part of our personality emerges. When we feel that entertainer personality emerge, we must stop it. The entertainer is not contatinable, and Jason Fritze, for one, gets exhausted from being the center of attention all the time. Not good when you have five classes.
Stay within yourself, Liam, and find the balance that comes with not needing the students’ approval but rather keeping your focus aggressively on their comportment and the respect that you require from them.
We are not entertainers. Our job is to create a natural understandable flow of language between us and our students. There is a difference between doing that and entertaining. The entertainer must be held in check, and the focus must not be on you but on the language, the message and not the words. The focus in a comprehension based classroom must always be on the decoding work of their understanding the message.
“The entertainer must be held in check, and the focus must not be on you but on the language, the message and not the words. The focus in a comprehension based classroom must always be on the decoding work of their understanding the message.”
Thanks for this. It points to the crux of most of the shortcomings that emerge in my classes.
Something along the lines of what you wrote should be near the top of my classroom Ten Commandments.
Hi Liam,
Thanks for sharing this! The symbolism here seems good for both teachers and students.
A lot of what Ben shared about the entertainer seems relevant to my situation too. Sometime I’ll get off on a funny tangent; the kids love it, but it can drastically reduce the number of times I hit those structures for that day.
I made a GIANT circling chart with construction paper (Y, –or–, N, Wh…) to put in the back of my classroom. It’s really helping with my 50%. Since it’s big and ostentatious, it’s helping me stay focused, which, in turn, seems to be helping my students stay focused too.
Thanks again for sharing. I’m totally going to use this!
Best Regards,
Daniel