Circling – 7

6 thoughts on “Circling – 7”

1. Keri

   March 22, 2015 at 3:13 am

   I learned this very quickly in the beginning of the year! Since this was all new to me, I was circling just like I thought I should. After just a couple classes I thought that this is just not working out and it really disheartened me. Everything I prepared for all summer, I thought, was just a waste of time because circling is one of the most important things we do and I felt like I was doing it wrong because I could clearly see the looks of my students and they were quickly becoming uninterested. I also thought that even if I was doing what I should be doing, it didn’t matter anyway. I could tell they just wanted more details. I almost felt as if I was insulting their intelligence by repeating so much. This was during PQA and I felt the pressure of moving on to more details even more with our stories.
   I still don’t know if I am circling like I should. I rarely ask “yes/no”questions, “either/or questions” or negative questions. Maybe I should. I know I do repeat the target structure a lot in other ways and it seems to be working well with my kids this year. Then again, I teach all level 3 classes so maybe this would be different in a level 1. Maybe I should start to ask these simple “yes/no” questions, etc. along with what I do now. I’m not sure.

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   1. Michael Coxon

      March 23, 2015 at 10:16 am

      Keri,
      I recommend trying to use circling questions that push your comfort level. If you aren’t doing either or questions…try it. Maybe you think they are too simplistic for your students. They don’t have to be one word either or questions either. If this time of the year warrants it, ask long ones…
      “Is Johnny tall, good-looking, rich and athletic and living in a big house in the hills?”
      OR
      “Is Johnny tall, unattractive, and poor and clumsy living in a small apartment in the valley?”
      I think circling throughout the course of the year grows and matures with any level class. In the beginning, I view circling as slow and methodical. Once students understand what the teacher is doing we must create the next phase of circling “novelty.”
      In the 4th quarter with my students I do less pointing to question words because they do not need it. I also am asking more individual questions and asking for complete sentence responses. I think this is a natural progression of circling after 140 days of using CI.
      Good Luck!

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      1. Leah LePage

         March 23, 2015 at 11:29 am

         I haven’t done this, but I think you can also use either/or questions to assess acquisition of grammar nuances, which may be appropriate at level 3 (just guessing; I teach middle school). You could make the options two different forms or tenses of the same verb, or a masculine vs. feminine adjective, or a singular vs. plural article. If you teach Spanish you may want to give reps/assess por vs. para or ser vs. estar.
         I think it might be appropriate at lower levels (to use either/or circling questions to assess grammar nuances) if you’re just curious whether students have acquired these nuances, or if you want to emphasize the nuances to prepare students for grammar-focused study in the future or mandated grammar-focused assessments.
         Does anyone already do this? Does anyone think giving grammatically incorrect options could interfere with acquisition of the correct version?

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      2. Keri

         March 24, 2015 at 7:41 am

         Thank you for the advice. I, too, find myself pointing much less at the question words now. I will try to push my comfort level a bit ad see what happens.

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   2. Ben Slavic

      March 23, 2015 at 10:18 am

      … I felt like I was doing it wrong because I could clearly see the looks of my students and they were quickly becoming uninterested….
      There are at last three directions we can take when we get to this point (disinterested looks from the kids):
      1. If, when we keep adding in details, we need to remember that we are not there to entertain them but to get reps on target structures. If the vortex process of circling and adding in a new detail lacks energy, we can skip to adding in a new character or event. We can use PSA and the Annoying Orange for that if they don’t want to play.
      2. We can work from a script, skipping the PQA, or doing very little PQA circling, and move into a script and go through the script line by line as is discussed in various places on this site. I will put a link to it in the primers called Sample Story A taken from TPRS in a Year!.
      3. Do Visual PQA. There is a Primer link on that topic up already. The kids are so visual that when they look at a slide (still working on that) they can be brought into the PQA more easily. I do apologize for the delay. Been working on that book.
      This whole thing about bored kids is so complex! We seem to naturally think that their bored looks are a failure on our part to be interesting enough. The fact is that many times entire classes are filled with boring kids, not through any fault of their own but due to school beating the fun out of them. See what James wrote about that here as a post today.
      All we can do is do our best. I hope that the three options mentioned above help in some way. It’s such a big topic. We really need to meet in the summer and work on it together. Go to a conference.

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2. Judy Dubois

   March 22, 2015 at 12:54 pm

   I hardly ever ask yes/no questions unless I’m working with beginners. I think with experience you get atuned to your students and as soon as they’re answering quickly, without stopping to figure out what you’re asking them, you just move on. I always try to use the intonations I’d use for an authentic question. I think it doesn’t matter if you don’t get in a lot of questions at one go. You’re going to be doing it again and again, so in the long run you always get as many questions as your students need.

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