This information is taken from the first of the Invisibles trilogy books, A Natural Approach to Stories (ANATS, 2015), which preceded A Natural Approach to the Year (ANATTY, 2017), which have now led to The Invisibles/The Invisibles Supplements (2019).
If the classroom rules are not the main subject of the first weeks of class, you may as well do a silly walk out of your classroom and stay gone, because nothing significant, except lots of headaches and heartaches, will happen in that classroom for the rest of that year.
Enforcing the rules is really a question of personal power. Is the teacher going to exhibit enough personal power to stop, from the very beginning of the year, each and every little side conversation or ill-timed comment they hear during class? Such side conversations and comments can grow like brush fires. The students are watching. Is the teacher going to grab the fire extinguisher (the appropriate rule) in the instant that it happens, or skip doing it?
Such little sparks are nothing more than students testing your level of personal power in the first weeks of the year. That’s what kids do. It’s their job. Don’t take it personally. Just respond to each spark with a bigger spark of your own in the form of calmly and slowly walking over to the rules poster and pointing to the rule and smiling with an edge to it, and do it every time.
When you don’t confront these bullies—that’s what students who frequently disrupt or make rude comments in your classes are—you are sending a very clear message to your other students that they aren’t important enough for you to assure their right to learn in a quiet and focused setting. That’s the wrong message to send them.
Here is a commentary on each of the Classroom Rules. You might want to prepare a little thirty-second “elevator speech” about each one before launching into CI, so that you are ready to give those constant little explanations of the rules each and every time a student fails to comply with one of them.
1. Listen with the Intent to Understand
Such a foundational behavior as this one is rarely done by students in schools. Instead, many students listen with the intent to get a grade. If your students do not cultivate this first and most important of the rules, if they think that your class is, like most others, a game built around testing, then they must be constantly reminded to listen with the intent to understand. Point at it, smile, and enforce it. If the kid can’t do it, tell them to fake the behavior until they can do it or invite them to leave the class.
2. One Person Speaks and the Others Listen
Left unchecked, some students will take only a few weeks before they have nearly complete control over a classroom. When you see a side conversation, explain that you are going to be doing most of the talking this year because you are the only one in the classroom who speaks the language. If they are not OK with that, then invite them to change their schedule. Do not waste your time talking to the kid if you do not see an immediate positive response to this rule. Go to the adults who have the power to change the student’s schedule or who can support you in disciplining the kid. This bears repeating— much damage has been done because teachers have trusted a student, after a brief talk in the hallway or after class, to change, when the child has, over the years, made a profession of lying to adults about changing their behaviors in class. Go to the adults. On this topic, don’t forget the suggested advice on seating charts offered earlier in this text. Wait a few weeks at the beginning of the year, seat the students left to right in front of you and not “deep” and away from you in the classroom and then, after two weeks when you know where your problem areas are, divide and conquer.
3. Support the Flow of Language
This rule was invented by Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg in Chicago. Students who have never or only rarely experienced actual reciprocal back and forth human conversation as defined earlier in this book cannot be expected to be able to support the flow of the conversation in the class. They have been taught that sitting in a class requires that they only be physically present. Therefore, they must be reminded in class to support the flow of language in the classroom.
4. Do your 50%
We have to listen to our kids and they have to listen to us—each has to do their half. Comprehensible input is a two-way street in which we both do equal work, which then adds up to 100% effort by the group. I constantly refer to this rule when I see a student not paying attention. It is because this is a completely new concept to many kids, who have been taught to think for years that their teachers do the work while they passively write things in notebooks, or not, if they choose not to. Writing things in a notebook does not constitute learning in a language classroom. Interacting with the teacher via eye contact does.
5. Actors and Artists – Synchronize Your Actions with My Words
Actors can be major distractors if not reined in. That is one reason I don’t use props, or rarely. Studies have shown that most of human communication is visual. Therefore, an antsy actor with a prop can completely draw the class’s attention away from the language and onto the actor and prop. Be very careful in choosing actors. Avoid attention- seeking students. Quiet focused kids of good will who are kind make the best actors. You feel their strength and positive listening energy next to you as you teach. Kids who lack self-control are very hard to teach next to. Actors absolutely must be corrected or told to sit down if, during a story, they make a single move or do anything that you have not said—that is why we have this rule. So, whenever you notice an actor going to the bus stop when in the story they are still back in the restaurant because you said nothing up to that point about sending them to the bus stop, stop the actor and laser point to this rule. With a smile, of course. Or not….
Artists, too, must be trained not to interrupt the story but to follow along from their workspace, only calling on you once or twice during the story to freeze the action if they need a better visual on what is going on. They must also have the patience to not get all creative and start adding details that have not been established by the class. It is just as important to find patient artists who work quietly and independently and who wait to see what emerges from the class’s ideas as it is to find artists who have visual talent.
6. Nothing on Desks Unless Told Otherwise
It is a lot easier, when a class enters the room, to remind a class about a rule than to say in a threatening way to one student, “Take that backpack off your desk!” which can immediately become confrontational. Just don’t allow anything on desks. This nothing on the desk rule especially includes coins, pencils, etc. As output, writing in a comprehensible input class is rare, so kids need to see the “unless told otherwise” part of this rule. This rule is a big one in terms of classroom management because backpacks on desks are code for I’m-going-to-be-on-my-cell-phone-in- class-today. Enforce this major rule before class even begins, as they sit down in their desks to start class, every day.