I thought I would republish this article describing some work Bernard did a few years ago in Las Vegas:
I learned something while coaching Bernard that I would like to share bc it seems like kind of a secret. I learned in watching Bernard be coached, more by the group than just me, that what is on your face counts when you teach.
Some of us blow this – we become so concerned about delivering the instruction that our faces kind of get distorted and the kids see that and lose interest because the last thing we ever want to do in a classroom is let on that we are teaching anything, but rather convey one thing above all – that those kids in front of us are the most important thing to us in the world. (It’s not true, but we have to act that way if we are to succeed with CI.)
It’s just that way in a classroom. When we try too hard and stay focused on the lesson, the kids see it and turn off their minds and close their hearts, kind of packing up their interest and shoving that interest into their book bags so we can’t get to it.
When our students do that, they are sending us a huge message, they are teaching us something that we need to do in order to reach them; they are trying to tell us, through their boredom, that we are not doing what we need to reach them.
We are telling them that language learning is a big complicated deal but that we can teach it to them if they but listen. Ah, but there’s the rub – they don’t WANT it to be a big complicated deal; they don’t want it to be hard. After all, most of them already speak one language and some speak two or even more.
By their refusal to participate, they are really yelling at us to chill out and relax a bit, so that we can in fact teach them something real. (Languages are based on the real need of human beings to communicate and therefore cannot be taught in false, plastic, one dimensional ways. Bring some heart.)
By shutting down, our students are doing the only thing that they can to try to show us that interacting with other humans in a different language doesn’t have to be fake and it doesn’t have to be painful, and in fact it mustn’t be those things. We blame our on that shutting down thing, but in reality it’s us.
(The single biggest reason for that shutdown by our students, to be clear, is not the human interaction piece being described in this article, it is because we speak too fast for our students to understand us.)
So what was on Bernard’s face in that coaching session spoke eloquently. Actually there were two faces, as there always must be when one is teaching. There was Face 1 – Bernard’s teacher face (the face the kids must not see) and Face 2 – the person face (the face the kids must see). I was sitting to Bernard’s side and for some reason could see that better.
If you look at your face in a video of you teaching, and you can only see the teacher face, you need to address that. You need to switch over to the face of the person that you really are because of what was said above, that you can only reach kids with the face of the person you are. It’s called being human.
Or you could try the deliver-of-instructional services thing and use a book/and or a computer program and walk the walk with that while you talk the talk of CI. Good luck with that – the kids will see right through it and shut down.
Bernard’s Face 1, his teaching face, as he was being coached, was really struggling. I could see that. But his Face 2, his real person face, is the face he showed us as he was working. Face 1 was busy trying to remember the mechanical things he was working on in the coaching session, but Face 2, the real Bernard, was front and center in the human way to the class of adults he was teaching.
That is the glory of it, perhaps because Bernard is French and they really are a glorious people in many ways, if for no other reason than what they do with food and that Molière was French. Bernard never took off his Face 2, his real person face, even though his Face 1 was underneath there struggling to learn the new method. His Face 2 was smiling and having a great time bringing the CI to us.
Bernard’s Face 1 was saying, “I can’t do this! This sucks!” It stands to reason. That week at NTPRS in Las Vegas was his first exposure to the approach! Bernard’s Face 2 was saying, “I’m doing this! I’m laughing with my students! I’m teaching them real French!”
So Bernard taught us all a lesson in that coaching session – use Face 2. Brilliant!
The update on that, from two years ago, is that Bernard has had much success in his classroom. We would love to hear from him, and from anybody, as it’s time again for those reports from the field that we enjoy reading from our friends throughout the academic year.