There is a point of critical mass where, if one too many students is confused, heads go down on the desks and we lose the chemistry of the class, to which all must contribute. Then we feel like fools and blame the method.
In order to avoid getting to that point of critical mass, we absolutely must make sure that, when doing PQA, for example, we keep our focus less on the actual PQA and more on whether or not our students understand the PQA. We must do both.
Accordingly, we must train our kids to always tell us when they don’t understand by using the fist slap or with their eyes or however they can.
They don’t understand, of course, because we go too fast or try to introduce too many new terms so that they get overwhelmed trying to keep all those confusing new sounds separate. How discouraging that is for them, we can only guess.
We must go slowly and limit our pointing and pausing, thus severely limiting new vocabulary. CI that they can understand is the point, not how well we speak the language.
If we are to be successful at this, if our kids are to truly understand what we say to them, we must go slowly enough, personalize (our part) and hold our students fully accountable to communicate with us in each instance that they don’t understand (their part).
When they let us know that they don’t understand, we praise them for that action of expressing to us that they don’t understand – which they usually do with the fist slap. We must work very hard to build a culture of approving of them for letting us know the truth of what they are experiencing – up or down.
The entire question of kids putting their heads on the desk is really up to us. We may not like to hear it, but, except for the micropercentage of our kids who have bigger issues and may be misplaced in our classrooms, it is our wrong focus on the language and not on them first and the language second that is often the cause of our distress with this kind of teaching.