Leaving Vampspooder and returning now to our progressively expanding new book on classroom management:
A Fly in the Ointment
As the proficiency movement and comprehension-based instruction have moved steadily forward, one glaring problem has arisen: classroom management has become more and more of a problem as each new teacher who has embraced comprehension-based instruction has been, oddly, the victim of more and more student engagement. Why is this?
The reason is simple. Students in the textbook driven classes of the past century did not generate any behavior problems because most of them were bored to tears. So, as teachers started seeing more and more of their students actually following the discussion and wanting to know what happens in class, with that change students started actually participating in class because they wanted to.
It was this very enthusiastic participation in some classes that led to disconcerting results in terms of student behavior. Too many students just didn’t know how to behave properly in the highly interactive social setting generated by CI.
The solution to this problem for far too many teachers new to CI instruction has been to instantly throw their hands up in exasperation and say that comprehensible input doesn’t work. Such teachers then justify their return to the textbook by saying that their students need to focus on writing and grammar, even though focusing initially – for the first year or two especially – on output (writing and speaking) is not how – according to all the research – people actually acquire languages.
Teachers don’t have to quit comprehensible input methods because of classroom management problems. The purpose of this book is to show how.
