As we continue to grow together as teachers, I am heartened by our continued focus not just on best practices in comprehension based instruction but also on classroom discipline. We have made such great strides on that here over the past year in particular. More and more, I see that the focus on discipline must go hand in hand with CI pedagogy because we work in schools.
The fact is that kids are focused on grades. For most of them, if the instruction doesn’t have a grade attached to it, then the teacher is going to encounter discipline problems. Accordingly, I think that we as a team must keep offering to each other more and more ideas that connect our choice of instruction to the discipline piece.
Thus, if an idea that we start working on here is merely a good CI idea, which would be great for a group of motivated adults, for example, but doesn’t address the inherent resistance of kids in school settings, then we must shelve it in favor of ideas that do include the discipline piece. That is why I like the Sentence Frames so much.