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Large Classes – Responses/Ideas Needed
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27 thoughts on “Large Classes – Responses/Ideas Needed”
I would like to hear what others have to say, and I’ll share a little from my own experience with having large classes. They have certainly taught me that classroom management CANNOT be ignored!
Last year I had a large freshmen class of 45 total, right after lunch with a very challenging group of friends who were determined to derail the class (I’ve mentioned this class before). I felt that this class taught me like never before how to be consistent and fair in enforcing the rules for any slight infraction. I also learned that unlike in my other classes where I could start things easily and a little casually, this would not work for this class. I was on the offensive even before the bell rang: by the door bringing people in who were trying to socialize instead of take their seats, looking around the room for people in their correct seats and for clear desks, having my clipboard in my hand to mark the chronic tardies as they came in on the seating chart, etc. I knew that if they didn’t see I was serious about us having a structured class for the day, the rest of the block would be an uphill battle. The first 30 seconds set the tone for the next 90 minutes.
And to add something here… I’ve been thinking some about having big classes in general. I learned that for my situation at least they are a reality that I have to live with and I’m going to rise to the challenge of learning how to manage them well. Here’s why:
I used to have small classes, even some as small as 10 at AP a few years ago! But that all changed when the economic downturn happened and my district had to raise the ratio in order to not RIF teachers. When my classes of 20 were combined into single classes of 40, I knew that the Latin program would be downsized if I didn’t change things. And that’s also when I adopted TPRS and my numbers started going up.
So I when I see my big numbers I see my own job security and I comfort myself with the fact that more kids are getting the opportunity to learn Latin in a positive and encouraging classroom. I also feel they will help make me a better teacher and last year I had two 40 person classes that weren’t like my 5th period, but were lively, well behaved and fun classes to teach. Next year I’m looking at two Latin 1 sections of 42 and 31, one Latin 2 of 43 and two 3/4 combo classes of 41 and 34. Numbers will usually go down a little as the year starts, but as far as I’m concerned I don’t mind if they stay where they are. I know I’ll be better prepared for them than I was last year.
I’ll add one more thing… keeping the attitude with a big class that everyone is important is also a big part of preserving order. For example, with “circling with balls” last year – it took me nearly two months to get through everyone but I kept telling the class: “Thanks for being patient. Thanks for understanding that this is a big class and I WILL talk about everyone, but it will take some time.” They understood and were patient and I think that message let them know that I did believe they were all important and were going to succeed and be a meaningful part of the class, even if I couldn’t get them in every story right away. I would also keep a list of students and every couple weeks highlight names of kids that I needed to bring into the spotlight for attention. That way I didn’t just focus on the “stars” who always volunteered answers and to be actors. I also think that the job list is a good way to communicate the worth of each student in the class and shoulder the mechanics of running the class at the same time.
Hi there. Large numbers are very auspicious. Big classes are Good! Keep in mind that in all large classes the effects of one’s decision-making are magnified and feel ‘weightier’ than in smaller classes. There *is* more at stake.
Are these elementary, junior high or high school classes?
1) Be proactive with your own attitude — Visualize/ imagine your large numbers as a portent of positivity. Picture the kids faces as multi-color poppies waving in a field, or some other image where more is better. Corny, but what the hey?
2) Discipline — Higher numbers in an ‘honors’ track group mean nothing. You do not have to change a thing, in my opinion. Those kids generally will not get in the way of one another’s learning. There are exceptions, of course.
Less-academic groups need special attention, months of patience, and lots of phone calls and meetings. It is not easy, but think of the sincere kids who are stuck in the class, and you will find the motivation to make those phone calls and document those behaviors, right up to the last day of school.
3) Flexibility – Stick to your schedule. Large groups, especially the ones with slower learners, are not at all flexible! I’m not kidding. You may find need for exceptions, but they should be very few indeed.
3) Planning – Plan and plan and stick to your plan. Make sure you stick to the three structures with PQA and your story. Try your best to follow Ben’s advice [as I understand it for myself] re: nearly eliminating point – and- pause. Slower learners in the big classes are really sweet at first, but they can be really big problems later on. This is because slower learners DO NOT generally learn from point-and-pause. They will try to fool you at first [I find that high school kids in large groups act very different when they are in small groups]. Everyone will pay a high price if you point-and-pause with these large groups.
Eliminating or nearly-eliminating point and pause, and only teaching the three structures will keep the slower learners feeling like part of the class, making the class stable, helping keep the kids calm further into the year, maybe up to the end of the year. Who knows? Could be your best year yet.
Good luck – if I think of anything else, I will write more. 🙂
–Leigh Anne in So Cal
Leigh Anne,
Like Ben Lev I am not sure where you read about eliminating or reducing point and pause .
From my perspective pointing and pausing is essential. It gives the student time to process the sounds , and to construct meaning or bind the form (structures) to their meaning. Furthermore, it allows the teacher to slow down.
But perhaps I missed that point from Ben as well.
Ben, can you please interject and advise on this.
Thanks
Looks Like Leigh Anne has read/experiences “The Art of Teaching” 🙂
OOPS – I meant “Art of Possibility”
Oops — grammar alert! I meant to type ‘the kids’ faces’.
Good advice, thanks all.
Leigh Anne – I missed the entry about reducing point-and-pause. Can you “point” me to it?
Here is what Leigh Anne wrote about Point and Pause:
Make sure you stick to the three structures with PQA and your story. Try your best to follow Ben’s advice [as I understand it for myself] re: nearly eliminating point – and- pause. Slower learners in the big classes are really sweet at first, but they can be really big problems later on. This is because slower learners DO NOT generally learn from point-and-pause. They will try to fool you at first [I find that high school kids in large groups act very different when they are in small groups]. Everyone will pay a high price if you point-and-pause with these large groups.
Eliminating or nearly-eliminating point and pause, and only teaching the three structures will keep the slower learners feeling like part of the class, making the class stable, helping keep the kids calm further into the year, maybe up to the end of the year.
Point and Pause is when you clarify anything that they have never heard before. The use of Point and Pause should be extremely rare, because in an ideal story sequence there is never any new vocabulary being introduced. Otherwise, it is too hard for the students to grasp what is going on. But, whenever something entirely new to the students does creep into a story, we just go to the board, write it down, pause for about four or five seconds, and then continue on with the story. Whether it is a target structure or just something new doesn’t matter. Anytime we use go out of bounds, we use the Point and Pause skill. Point and Pause is dangerous for exactly the reasons Leigh Anne gives. It is impossible, in the time given, to address and get repetitions on more than just a few structures. The optimum number seems to be 2 or 3 per hour or so. The brain mechanically needs to hear each of those structures, and no more, taught within a context that is interesting and if possible compelling and captivating to the learner. That’s the research as I understand it. By trying to add in new expressions, we ignore 20 years of experience in the field. Why would we do that? Even three structures is too much and people have moved down to two, like Laurie. I usually present three and then end up really teaching only two. That’s the way it works. That’s all we have time for. Point and Pause is nice for the really fast moving kids – it gives a wider scope to the discussion, But, as Leigh Anne says, slower kids – slower PROCESSING kids – just can’t handle all the new sounds. And that is what it is about, handling new sounds and being able to fit them into the overall sounds so that the unconscious process of building a language system in the deeper mind can occur. It’s why we write scripts the way we do, with each location being the same story line with minor changes in details but no new structures to confuse the brain as it works so hard just to process the new structures each time they occer, in its hard work of creating meaning out of sound without focusing on individual words. It just works that way. That is our experience. If in Las Vegas you saw my Thursday session, 40 or 50 motivated adults who are actually teachers of language needed well over an hour to get a basic handle on two expressions from the story Lazy by Anne Matava. And they were focused with all their strength. If Von had not told me right before the session to remember to keep checking for understanding by asking more yes/no and one word answer questions than I ever thought I could in a million years, I would have lost half that group, as often happens. We just can’t check for understanding enough, and we certainly can’t keep going out of bounds and expect the clever and creative tool of Point and Pause to solve all the problems of understanding. Well said, Leigh Anne and a great reminder at the beginning of the year – go slowly, stay in bounds by avoiding Point and Pause unless you absolutely must use it, and keep checking for understanding until it makes you feel like you are talking to a bunch of two year olds (you are). That is what you are referring to, Sabrina – the practice of going slowly and making sure that everyone understands which is not so much Point and Pause but just good teaching. It really is a confusing term, but the way I understand it now is that Point and Pause refers to those instances in a class when you are giving out truly new information, even though you shouldn’t really be doing it, because all the comprehensible input we ever do in an ideal class is with structures that the kids have previously acquired, plus those few new ones, which makes for popping fast acquisition. It’s so counterintuitive – the less new stuff you try to cram into a class, the faster they learn. But that is they way it works, and it is our best attempt to align with Krashen’s research, since we don’t have a full 24/7 schedule of available hours to teach the language, as happens with our L1.
Thank you Ben for the clarification. It is a confusing term. Here you were talking about out of bound words. And I was thinking about the structures of the week. When I do PQA or even when we start a story, I will point to the structure again and again just to be sure they associate the sound to the word and see its meaning again. This way it slows me down and give them the time to process . Eventually I wean them off when I feel they don’t need it anymore.
Yes that’s it. And it shows how much confusion there is in all of this. I was told by Diana that Point and Pause only referred to the use of structures. I tried to rethink it, and then I realized that that is not what Point and Pause was for me. But then I got what she meant – that Point and Pause should only be used with the target structures, that is, as you defined it above in your comment. Do you see the source of the misunderstanding? Diana was saying to use Point and Pause with only the structures, so she was saying to not introduce any new structures (ideally) into the lesson, and to me I was thinking of Point and Pause as a tool to introduce any new structures other than the target structures. It can be very confusing. It’s part of developing something new from scratch over years by the seat of our collective pants. And yes, I do not in fact understand what I wrote above. One time I was told by Susie not to introduce more than five minutes a week of dictation per week into my classroom bc it was a form of output, but I had to do what I felt best on dictation, (because it is also a great form of input and teaching reading and writing, and so has become a very useful tool in my urban high school classes on tough days even if it wasn’t for her in her suburban middle school classes). I’m glad you asked for clarification on that term. There is a lot out there that has never been fully defined and we are the ones defining what is new. We are doing our best to walk on the razor’s edge of staying true to what Krashen and Blaine gave us and yet see it expand ever further into more and more simplicity and grace in the classroom. It’s always changing. New forces continually mold it in unexpected directions. The Latin presence here is an example of that. As Laurie said earlier today, it’s a shift in paradigm and therefore always fluid and that is a good thing. That one fact should take a lot of pressure off the new teachers in this group who are trying to figure out how to do it the right way. Ennh! Thanks for playing! There is no right way. There is only good clear slow interesting comprehensible input. With the emphasis on the word slow and comprehensible. Now you younger teachers just go do that next week and stop stressing. I am certain that our planet is in very capable hands even if it doesn’t look like it right now. Maybe we all need to emulate our wonderful Stuart Smalley:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/11/05/stuart-smalley/
When were you told by Diana that ‘point and pause’ refer only to the 3 structures?
I’m just curious.
Thanks, Ben!
She told me that about two years ago. Maybe she was saying it before, but I didn’t hear it. I remember we had an argument about it, bc I really liked being able to go all over the place with new stuff – I do that naturally anyway in any language. But she kept insisting on her point, and since I was starting to train a lot of her teachers in DPS, she kept grabbing me whenever we did a learning lab, telling me stop going out of bounds all the time. My board should have convinced me on that point without her repeated admonitions – it was a total mess at the end of every class, but I never seemed to get it and we did have a number of very good arguments about it over the past few years. Now, with the points you have raised here, I think I finally get what she was saying with that seemingly odd sentence, “Ben, you only use Point and Pause with the three structures!”
Very much agree. It’s tempting to expand a story and make it comprehensible by putting up new vocab, but not workable. Same for 2-3 new structures. My periods are 50 minutes and I can barely get enough reps for 2 structures, plus the 8-10 minutes at the end I need for the quiz, plus announcements…
Back to big classes: One thing I’m focusing on is giving students jobs to help me in class and with the paperwork (alphabetize test papers, etc).
The description above, Ben, shows that we are not similar in name only. What you describe above is a photograph of the overall approach I take. PQA 2-3 new structures, do the story, give the quizzes, involve the kids with jobs. Simple. I actually have that weekly schedule on the newly updated resources page of this site for anyone interested.
Let me see if I can clarify what I meant about the ‘limiting of point-and-pause’
– I believe that I am referring to Ben’s post from early July titled:
Circling with Balls Ramble
by BEN SLAVIC
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/07/02/circling-with-balls-ramble/
But, I think I put words in his mouth. I just reread the entry and he doesn’t mention point and pause at all. My understanding of this entry what that he emphasized the importance at the beginning of the year, when so many slower-processing students quickly and almost invisibly start to fall behind, is to find a way to do PQA with circling with balls and not getting taken off track/out of bounds at all costs.
Soooooo, when I think of times when I ‘point and pause,’ I am pointing to something on my word wall, despite the fact that the word is not being taught that day in my classroom. I am pausing, hoping that the slower-processing student in my class of 37 students will catch it. They never do!
I use the phrase, ‘the 3 structures’ to mean what is written on my white board and what I am ‘supposed’ to be teaching on any given day. Of course, I am going to point to it and pause until they get it. That is the easy and fun part of TPRS for me.
When I say, ‘Point and Pause’ I am talking about what happens to me at the beginning of EVERY school year when I go out of bounds due to the information on someone’s PQA/circling with balls card taking me in an unanticipated direction. Inevitably, I will ‘point and pause’ to something out-of-bounds that is on my word wall, in the hopes of making my point. Disaster!
Sorry for the confusion! I really want to stay inbounds all of the time, but find it so hard to do so.
Should I take my word walls down? That might be a possible solution, mightn’t it?
I find it so funny that I was writing with the intent to help someone else, but I really did need some help with the same issue.
We all need help on this one. It is a big bad secret that nobody seems to have control over. We say one word that they don’t know and we’re screwed because the train will be off the tracks.
If we add in three words that are new plus the three we are targeting as structures, now we are trying to get them to listen to three hip hop, one opera, one rockabilly, and one blues song all at the same time. They can’t process it anymore than we can process five song selections at once because their brains can’t handle too much new stuff.
I have always wanted to figure out why everybody gets so pissed about not being able to learn TPRS properly. We always tell them to go more slowly as the key to it all, but the confusion rages on year after year for most of us.
Maybe Leigh Anne is pointing our faces right at the real cause of all the TPRS confusion here, and asking us to at least pause and think about it.
I don’t think taking the word wall down will help, though, Leigh Anne – we just need to vastly limit how many we introduce every day, which I do at the beginning of class as a way to get the class going, like starting an engine, it needs to warm up a bit. I do notice that I spend about a month on the first twelve new words on the list. The kids can handle that many. Then the curve of acquisition of new words goes up very fast after that.
This may be the key to this entire discussion, right here:
…I am talking about what happens to me at the beginning of EVERY school year when I go out of bounds due to the information on someone’s PQA/circling with balls card taking me in an unanticipated direction….
Most teachers who are new to this process just get so into it that they think that they can just add “one little teensy bit of information” more into the discussion – that Aaron’s cat is smaller than his sister’s cat. If it’s the first week, the kids know none of that. If it’s the second semester, they know the “smaller” part. If it’s sometime in level 2, they know the “sister’s cat” part, which in many of the languages we teach is not easy to grasp at all structurally.
Leigh Anne, I think you may have uncovered one of the true problems in TPRS. The “disaster”, as you rightly calls it, of introducting too many words, too many unrecognizable words, into the Circling with Balls (or whatever PQA activity you use to start the year) too early, with no respect how hard it is for the student, is truly a disaster.
That, of course, leads to another observation by Leigh Anne about the effect that this hubris of too much information too fast has on the class as a whole. The teacher might as well carve the class into little shards and experience that division in student processing speed for the rest of the year, completely ruining the year in the first weeks, if she points
…to something on my word wall, despite the fact that the word is not being taught that day in my classroom. I am pausing, hoping that the slower-processing student in my class of 37 students will catch it. They never do!….
OK now what don’t we get about this? Even if we go supremely slowly, we lose our students by creatively (in our minds only – it is a disaster for the kids) pointing and pausing to new words on the word wall or we just add them onto our increasingly messy board and expect that all the kids will hang with us.
When they don’t, and the class starts to fracture into all those shards in the first weeks of the year, we say that TPRS doesn’t work, but it is our own failure to limit the amount of incoming words. Each of those new non- targeted structure that we point to and pause at are like incoming materiel into a platoon of soldiers in a war – each is more than the soldier can handle – there are just too many overwhelming new sounds coming in too fast and the soldiers have no recourse but to hit the ground with their hands over their heads.
I’ll have to add this discussion as a post so we can find it more easily and I will also add a category on Point and Pause, which we may have just figured out thanks to Leigh Anne’s honest assessment of this so-called handy little tool how it can wreck a class unless it is used only on the target structures.
Dang, this is getting interesting! What if it not just about SLOW but is also about not going out of bounds via too much casual use of Point and Pause? I do know that the best piece of advice I ever got in my 12 years of trying to master TPRS ocurred when Von came up to me right before my last session in Las Vegas and reminded me to check for understanding by asking millions of yes/no/one word questions of my group before going on to the next thing. I’ve never been able to hold my entire group together in full understanding before, in those sessions or in my own classroom, but I did this time, and it was because of all the questions. I really want to thank Von for that advice. It was the perfect thing to say and an antidote to Point and Pause in that it kept me focused on what my audience was actually understanding.
This is HUGE: “When they don’t, and the class starts to fracture into all those shards in the first weeks of the year, we say that TPRS doesn’t work, but it is our own failure to limit the amount of incoming words. Each of those new non- targeted structure that we point to and pause at are like – each is more than the soldier can handle – there are just too many overwhelming new sounds coming in too fast and the soldiers have no recourse but to hit the ground with their hands over their heads. ”
A question though…. I thought that AS LONG AS I WROTE THE MEANING OF THE “NEW WORD” ON THE BOARD, AND THEN KEPT “POINTING AND PAUSING” WHEN I USE IT – THAT WAS CONSIDERED “IN BOUNDS”
Not true? Just writing the meaning next to the “new” word doesn’t keep it “in bounds?”
I think it’s a rhetorical question… but OH MY GOODNESS it is weird how we do stuff for so long thinking it was what we were “taught” (I know I have heard Blaine say that that is how you keep things “in bounds”) but how, when pushed to think about it, IT JUST DOESN’T WORK!
So how do we learn to stay in bounds and not allow “incoming materiel into a platoon of soldiers in a war?”
Thanks Leigh-Anne and Ben – very helpful!
Skip
Yes Skip they often teach that at NTPRS in different forms, like some presenters would say that whenever we wanted to present a new word we should put it in a “supplementary file” in a certain section of the board and draw a line around that section so the kids know that those words don’t have to be learned and that they are not responsible for it for testing.
But I am firmly with Leigh Anne on that point. It’s new, it’s up there, it’s being used, and it’s confusing as hell to the kids.
I was the worst. I always just wrote the word haphazardly on the board wherever I could find room, at different angles, in corners, wherever I could find room. Very stupid move. Only the 4%ers got it. And since I was a 4%er, there we were back in collusion against the rest of the class, only using TPRS and not traditional methods this time. And I always wondered why it didn’t work and why my kids were so lazy.
All those years I did it. To the kids, it was like seeing their teacher draw a picture for them of scribbled nonsense all over the board and then telling them to make sense out of it.
We all do it. We all confuse our kids in this way. But I can’t do it anymore because it confuses my kids.
Now this leads to a point of supreme importance. Don’t we NEED those words to further the lesson? I mean, it just seems impossible to teach them anything without those supplemenary words, right?
My answer is no. In fact, I say that it is impossible to teach a class using any new words. I am not talking about the question words. We use them and point with the laser or our hand all the time and that works just fine. I repeat – I am not talking about the question words.
We repeat the target structures over and over and over and over in different and interesting ways, never saying a single thing that doesn’t have at least one of the target structures in it, personalizing all the way, and we do so until we feel as if can’t say those targets one more time, and then we try to get another hundred reps on them.
However, if we limit those all those randomly presented words now, and totally establish meaning on only the structures (this includes expressions like “plays football” in the Circling with Balls types of activities), then we move the learning to the level of true acquisition. The result is that, in the first few months of painful slow going, the train will begin to pick up genuine speed because it will have genuine moment, and soon it – the entire class – will be speeding along the tracks at a good rate of speed with all the cars (students) attached.
Another image to describe that process of starting the year out at the right speed, the speed of a train starting up its engines and moving ever so slowly in the first minutes before it gets moving beautifully down the tracks later, is to think of an exponential curve.
With traditional teaching, there was no curve, the kids didn’t learn a thing. With TPRS, when we went too fast too early (this was called “diving right in”), the curve was a miserable kind of “wanna be” geometric curve but it didn’t go up like a real geometric curve, it was just a slight straight line upward until June with classes that never really worked together.
And we took that shitty geometric curve to be a big deal. We celebrated and tried to tell others about this great new method but other teachers would look at our kids and say, “They’re not that great!” and they weren’t, because so many of our kids spent the year with their faces planted in the dirt and their hands over their heads. Of course, that pissed us off because we were convinced that Krashen had indeed turned the language acquisition world on its heels and we so deeply wanted to prove that we’ve all become kind of nutty.
But think of that exponential curve. It starts so slowly, you can hardly see it as different from the base line for a long time, and then suddenly a point of critical mass is reached and bang there it goes straight up. That is what limiting Point and Pause and really limiting extraneous words early on is going to do for us.
We are going to reach that point of critical mass and get the rocket ship effect if we canjust limit the new stuff and stay properly in bounds for those first two or three months of the year until the train is rolling easily down the tracks. And yes, any English teachers out there, that is a mixed metaphor on three levels and so what? It works for me.
Let’s all echo what Diana told me (and I didn’t hear for two years until Leith Anne sprinkled a little stardust on this discussion yesterday) one more time:
…you only use Point and Pause for the target structures….
Let’s chant it:
…you only use Point and Pause for the target structures….
…you only use Point and Pause for the target structures….
…you only use Point and Pause for the target structures….
…you only use Point and Pause for the target structures….
…you only use Point and Pause for the target structures….
So your observation here is very accurate, skip:
…it is weird how we do stuff for so long thinking it was what we were “taught” …but how, when pushed to think about it, IT JUST DOESN’T WORK!….
To conclude: I know that my own tendency to go all over the place has been the single reason my teaching has not gone to the next level over all these years. I would lose those kids who just were too dead in their lives because they had experienced things I don’t want to know about. Those kids, that 25% tp 35% who just act like they are waiting for a bus instead of wanting to learn French in an immersion setting because it’s fun, will be all be my barometers this year, and I will not blow this idea of reaching them. I think I can I think I can I think I can, to extend the train image.
Those kids are literally going to have to show up in my classes this year where they didn’t in previous years. Why? Because the class is going to be so absurdly clear and easy to understand – clear to the nth degree – that they HAVE to be a part of the action.
This is what Leigh Anne was talking about in terms of those first few months when they would be lost bc of that splitting process into those who want to process (some people call them fast processors) and those who don’t want to process (some call them slow processors).
I feel that I can avoid that splitting of the class by not sending in so much materiel with all that accompanying shrapnel and the fast processors will literally turn on their soldier buddies with their heads buried on the ground under their arms and say, “Hey, it’s not that bad, we can handle this incoming. Pick up your head and do what you are supposed to do.”
So the real answer about how I am personally going to respond to this new knowledge, the Leigh Anne Principle in TPRS, is that I am just going to SEVERELY LIMIT my use of any new words. I am not going to use Point and Pause except for the targeted structures, but I will break that rule maybe once or twice in each class. Maybe four times. You get the idea.
I don’t know yet how this will play out because I’ve never done it before, except maybe I did it in my Thursday session at NTPRS as per this recent post which is so important to me, the most important post of the past 3,000, in my opinion:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/07/28/checking-for-understanding-we-verify-by-asking-more-yn-and-one-word-answer-questions-than-we-ever-thought-we-could/
It will be like wearing a big ball and chain around my mind but my kids need for me to do that if they are going to be successful. It’s not about me, but about them and what they can understand.
In Circling with Balls, just to repeat a point made earlier but one worth repeating, what the kid does, plays football or whatever, would be considered the target structure, and so on with all kinds of PQA we do.
Another closing detail worth mentioning: we limit ourselves to words that they already know. It’s not like we don’t use any words except the three structures for that day – just to be ultra clear on that point. Thus, the system is designed to teach two or up to three (three if we can) target structures per day, or per week in my case since that is how I structure my week (see https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/01/19/suggested-weekly-schedule/), and then more and more is possible in the CI, which then exhibits that exponential quality of increase of language mastery over time as those acquired structures become part and parcel of the students’ hard wired language system. We use:
1. the three structures
2. the question words
3. words that they already know
in our fluency programs.
GREAT discussion here. I am also an inveterate point and pauser because I feel that it lets me roll out new stuff faster; but that’s about me, not about them. And truth be told it’s a bit of laziness on my part. I’m asking for discipline from them, so they should get it from me as well.
So right up there on my “this year it will be better” list will be to trust the process and accept the challenge to see what we can spin out of the same basic words. This really underscores the necessity of sequencing instruction (especially early instruction) around high frequency words, so you have those to expand the discussion with later instead of needing new words. Sort of a basic ethos of making do with what what I have in the pantry instead of running off to the store for a new ingredient every time the mood strikes me. The goal, after all is not to get the most amazing story out that day, but to stock THEIR pantries and model how to milk the basic words for all they’re worth.
I need to work on choosing my story sequence based on giving them the high frequency words we’ll need to be creative with rather than just going to the well of my favorite stories. Game on.
Also guilty. Pardon me while I make some analogies and comments.
When I was learning piano, there were several different skills that I needed to learn, but we never practiced them all together. As I was learning fingering and phrasing, the mantra was “SLOW”. Once the notes were in muscle memory, I could gradually begin to speed up – on that piece. I think it works that way in language learning: after structures have been “learned” SLOWli, we can speed up when dealing with them, but new things need to return to SLOW.
Occasionally a piece had a Cadenza – a section that was intended to allow the performer to show off his virtuosity through improvisation. There was always a written cadenza, and I had to “acquire” the written cadenza before I could begin to improvise. That, to me, parallels Point and Pause. When we Point and Pause the structures, we are acquiring the written cadenza. When we start adding words on the board, we are improvising. If we do it too soon, the result is less than satisfactory.
I also used to sit down at the piano with a hymnal and simply “play through the hymnal”. That was a Sight Reading exercise. It didn’t matter if I got everything right as long as I got most things right and kept going. For me, that’s like free writes and FVR – as long as you get most of it right and keep on going. BTW, the exercises in Sight Reading have stood me in good stead many times, partly because there are very few hymns that I haven’t already played and partly because of having learned that I don’t have to play every note (understand every word) for people to be able to “get it”.
I think there are several sources for our common failing. Knowing what they are can help us guard against continuing to make the same mistake and remind us to warn others.
1. Confusion about what Pause and Point really is and the purpose of the tool. Yes, it helps keep words in bounds, but it is really designed to keep the target structures in bounds, not the improvised “notes”. (See cadenza above.)
2. Overapplication of “add a detail”. In most training sessions, we are encouraged to “add a detail” when Circling starts to falter. Then we start adding details willy nilly and taking all sorts of suggestions from the class. Suddenly students are overwhelmed with the details, with all those non-written notes in the cadenza or all those pieces of shrapnel that they have to duck.
3. Boredom. We get bored with the discussion and project that onto our students, not realizing that the look on their faces is either lack of comprehension or effort to process. Because we think they are bored, we either pick up the pace or start adding new information, when what we really “should” (need to) do is slow down and stick with the structures.
4. Failure to strive for automaticity. Ever seen a pianist or organist who can keep right on playing while carrying on a conversation, singing a song or leading worship? The playing has become automatic because skills and the music have been acquired. That should be our goal with students. Usually we – and I definitely include myself here – are satisfied with recognition and (re)production without automaticity. There was a discussion about this some time ago.
I’m sure there are other causes, but those are four big ones I can identify.
I like Nathan’s analogy of making dinner with the ingredients on hand rather than going out to “buy” something else. My mother used to make delicious meals with rather limited resources. (She still makes delicious meals, but her resources are not as limited.)
Great analogy with learning a piece of music. It’s been years since I’ve done anything with a piano other than encouraging my children to practice, so I don’t think this ever would have occurred to me on my own. Nice work.
Ben, I suggest you transfer Herr Harrell’s remarks to a blog post. We can NEVER hear these suggestions enough–even though you just said them in your post. I will, also, remind you that I disagreed with you years ago about the purpose of point and pause–big discussion about staying inbounds w/the structures and SLOW. Once again, I believe I was channeling Diana Noonan (or myself, he, he). This is an ongoing learning for sure.
I have had very large classes before. Once I actually had 60 in an ESL class. The enrollment never dropped below 46 the whole semester. Creating relationship with teacher, positive relationships among students, and a group identity (membership in the “English” club and membership in their “class” club) stood out as even more important than in a smaller class. Starting on time was probably the most important thing I did. Holding to a clear schedule, analyzing how transitions (physical and mental) could be made w/the least disruption, making sure I built in physical movement: tpr, acting groups (clustering students so that everyone in the room re-enacts the story as I retell it ONE MORE TIME), drawing, having different kinds of “applause” and using them a lot, etc.–are just a few things I remember. I remember lots of effort, on my part, to get concrete “physical engagement”. It was too easy for those in the back to space out and not “be there”. Hard to teach to all of those eyes.
You are right – you did point that out. I had it in my mind that Point and Pause was something you did for everything BUT the target structures and it stuck and I couldn’t hear you. If this kind of confusion exists in this method, then it is no wonder that few people can get a clear idea of what it is. I find it slightly amusing that we are not even sure if the phrase is Point and Pause or Pause and Point. We just have to keep on talking and working it all out.
You know, reading and re-reading through the posts on the topic of limiting ourselves to the target structures has reminded me of a technique that Michele and I have been talking about in preparation for teaching distance learning this upcoming year. In my school’s distance learning lab I don’t have the luxury of teaching in front of a whiteboard very easily, so I took to grabbing three mini-whiteboards and put my daily target phrases on those. That way whenever I used the term, I could hold up the mini-whiteboard to the camera to reinforce the meaning, sort of like subtitles to my audio track.
One side effect of this is that it forces you to stick to those terms unless you want to be juggling a host of mini-whiteboards all period. I probably should start doing this a bit in my normal classes as well to resist the temptation to keep adding new words.
So on my big board each day I’ll have my target phrases written in a section labeled “Zielwoerter” (target words) and have matching mini-whiteboards sitting in the marker tray for uses as subtitles. When I start walking around and working the room, I’ll take the little boards with me. If I do write additional words on the board I’ll limit myself to words they already know and park them in a section labeled “Wiederholung” (review). I’m pretty sure that I need built-in structural reminders to keep me in-bounds, and I think this might help.
Hmmmmm…… me like idea. 😉