To view this content, you must be a member of Ben's Patreon at $10 or more
Already a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Subscribe to be a patron and get additional posts by Ben, along with live-streams, and monthly patron meetings!
Also each month, you will get a special coupon code to save 20% on any product once a month.
4 thoughts on “Coaching Notes from Cascadia Sessions”
Turn on your community sensing radar: One of my big takeaways from the conference is that this is one of the best ways to start building community in your classroom. I think that community is where the group has real chemistry and gels on a deep level. Perhaps it is when we are truly able to dip into the collective unconscious together… I feel it when we’re all sharing in the experience of looking at and participating in something beautiful, something that takes us outside of ourselves, something that makes us smile, laugh, gasp, and wonder.
As Ben said several times at the conference community is key. It’s been mentioned that CI (at it’s best) needs to be compelling. I think Ben has also hit on the fact that the next level of depth to some high octane badass CI is having a class that works as a true community. Of course, this is getting into the “Pure Land”, and we have many classes and many times where it’s not there, but I think that this is a worthy ideal to strive for. OWIs are a fantastic tool to help get us there.
Community + Compelling Comprehensible Input –> Life-changing Acquisition
Good insight Bryan. I was in Wade’s Cherokee language lab and the community was so tight in both learning and focusing on form. Once there was a great reveal and once there were actors, we let our teacher hats by the wayside and laughed like children, together and in a safe and fun space.
… and laughed like children, together and in a safe and fun space…
When people are thus connected by an image of their own creation as a group, language must naturally follow, and it will be far more compelling because of the source of the lesson that day – an image that THEY built and not a set of words that SOMEONE ELSE thrust on them. To create a sense of l’intime in class, we build shared images. Otherwise, the class is under the thumb of the few, and then language cannot be there in any compelling way. All of the members of the group must like each other first.
That is why in an Invisibles classroom there are at least 14 and up to 30 jobs happening at any given moment.
When the norm in the classroom is laughter at the expense of none, we are moving in the direction of what we want. No curriculum needed. But if we need a curriculum for adults who have forgotten how to laugh, because everything is so dark and serious in school buildings now, we can give them that. Bless their hearts – they don’t trust that when people are laughing “like children, together and in a safe and fun space”, that language gains will naturally happen. They are like the people whom the Petit Prince meets on those planets, like the businessman and the king, in charge of everything, sharing nothing.
Thank you so much for those wonderful notes. They keep reminding me of what is essential when all is said and done: The human relationships, the community.
I believe it’s also the true basis for any kind of aquisition/learning albeit learning can be forced to some extent. But what does this to our well-being. I just know it is destructive.
As to community, I think doing a play with a class can also help build it.