It is hard to stay up with all the great ideas from Michele and Laurie and others. We are all each other’s teachers. Michele, in particular, seems to be able to incorporate so many ideas into what she does in a flurry of experimentation and activity that is designed to weed out stuff that will work for her from that which won’t. She’s fearless.
We all are just doing experimental CI. Laurie offered that oatmeal post about embedded reading which is worth its weight in gold. Then a lot of us mere mortals read all of this stuff with a mixture of trepidation and elation that we are actually going to try to mix what we already do, whatever the hell that is, with these new ideas to see if it combusts into glorious fireworks for us or leaves us standing there covered with soot. Either way, it’s great, because we are learning about input based teaching, which is the point.
Now this mixes in with something else – we in Denver Public Schools who use a CI/Krashen/TPRS teaching (whatever it’s called, it’s just CI) approach have been challenged by our leader Diana Noonan to teach using CI in the form of speech or reading 90% of the time. It’s a simple, direct request that doesn’t include a big bullshit level of discussion – either we teach using 90% CI or we don’t.
If we don’t, we end up being TPRS hypocrites, in the sense that most of are already, in that we don’t really do CI 90% of the time. We mix and match and we do this and that kind of stuff or whatever – what we might call eclectic TPRS, and (certainly I am describing my own culpable self here) at the end of each teaching day only Jody Noble will have done more than 70% to 75% CI – the rest of us will have been dweebing around.
Now that is a crucial point. Because I don’t think TPRS works at 75% CI. I don’t think Krashen did his research based around 75% CI. I don’t have any data, but my intuition tells me that if it isn’t above 90%, forget it – you’re not doing input based teaching in the way we all know IS POSSIBLE.
So in planning this week’s teaching, with those great ideas from not just Michele and Laurie but also Norm and others, and then with this thing unfolding fast at the district level, I knew that I was going to have to put up or shut up on the 90% thing. (Too much is at stake – if we gain district oversight and funding for this three year study under the direction of our curriculum superintendent – one of those rare superintendents who get it – we will have some serious longitudinal data for the books).
To say again, I truly believe that doing 75% or even less CI in our classrooms would not provide good data for this study. Like I said, for us who do TPRS in Denver Public, it is time to put up or shut up.
So, my eyes glazed over by Laurie’s and Michele’s stuff here trying to get get get it for real, and knowing what I used to do (75% CI or less), I was trying to figure out how to crank it all up to 90% this week, and I thought of this frontloading/backwards planning stuff that Anne Matava came up with. My prayer was that the backwards planning would combine with the stuff Laurie and Michele were talking about and I could maybe get up toward the 90% goal.
The good news is that here, on Wednesday, it is working. I took a Carla Bruni song – L’Amoureuse, a kick ass beautiful song – and on Monday did some OCD type circling on the five most important structures from the chorus. (It was fun and artsy to try to mix the auditory structure threads together in the CI as per the oatmeal reading mixing that Laurie did).
On Monday night I wrote a story based on what kinds of hallucinogenic things happen when one is in love (the song describes love in that way). I tried to include as many of the rest of the words in the song in the story.
Then, on Tuesday, we read and spun, back and forth with great intensity. So, by the end of class on Monday, I had gotten 50 min. of auditory CI around the base structures of the song, and then by the end of class on Tuesday I had gotten 25 min. of reading and introduction of new song vocabulary along with 25 min. of spun CI from the story.
Then today – a 90 min. block day – I finished the reading and spinning of the story from Tuesday’s class for about 50 min. and then, in the remaining time (got this from Michele), I asked the kids to get into groups and, choosing whatever words they wanted from the story, write a quick story based on this TPRS formula –
_____ wants/tries to _____ something/someone but fails and then tries again and succeeds.
I followed what Michele said fairly closely – the kids were given only up to ten min. to create the story in English, and then, after five minutes I grabbed the one from my superstar and wrote it in French on the whiteboard. There I had a reading text. I started the CI, the point and pause, the circling, etc. and in that way got a ton of reps on target song vocabulary via the R and D process.
Notice what happened in the first 2oo minutes, the first four/fifths of the week – I started out with massive spoken input to them and then went to a kind of reading based thing in the middle and then, with their stories on the board, returned to a spinning of their stories. From speaking to reading to back to speaking, basically.
Here are my CI totals for the week through 200 minutes:
Monday – 50 minutes listening CI
Tuesday – 25 minutes listening CI, 25 minutes reading CI
Wednesday – 60 min listening CI, 30 min. reading CI (roughly)
Next, on Friday, my intent is to start class by “mopping up” any words that didn’t get enough repetitions during the week (which I definitely as per Bryce had my best kids counting on Monday – the results were good on that – above fifty reps per structure at least). I will probably write up a story including the structures that got short shrifted and read and discuss it until about five minutes before the end of the class on Friday, and then, when they can hear the song there at the end of class, the kids will probably go home that day and find the song and listen to it. Many of them will do that, because that is what kids do, they listen to shit they like on their electronic devices.
So, with roughly 15 minutes listening CI, 15 minutes reading CI on Friday, my totals are, of 240 minutes of instructional time given me by the school, I will have done auditory CI for 150 minutes, with virtually no English (I no longer do the two words of English rule), and 70 min. of reading, or 220/240 minutes on CI (92%). Not bad and certainly not controlled data here, but it shows me what I want to know – could I even teach for a week at over 90% CI?
Eventually I need to bring the reading minutes up and move it towards incorporating more fiction (I got an email from Susan Gross on the fiction thing today, so here we go on another learning curve), but I will let that unfold naturally. But her point was a good one and one we all need to bring to the front burner – teaching language to children means teaching them real world stuff and not just fiction.
(I know that this leaves out all the other good stuff like FVR, dictation, free writes, and of course testing, but, in general, I can say that this week I made some real progress on walking the walk instead of just talking the talk on the kind of CI that I think Krashen originally had in mind thirty years ago as he began this whole thing.)