There is a term that we are taught at workshops: “monitoring student comprehension”. It goes in the pile of all those CI teaching skills that we are admonished to learn at conferences by over-zealous trainers. We think that if we can only learn the TPRS skills we can make it all work. But I don’t know how big or important monitoring our kids’ comprehension is. I’d rather not. I don’t do that in regular conversations with people during the day. What I mean is that if we have to monitor how much the people we are talking with are understanding, then where is the fun of being with them? It sounds too much like work to me, and not that interesting. If the kids aren’t all into it, do I need to circle more or do this skill or change my delivery? I don’t think so. In my view all we need to do is find a topic that is more interesting, and Tina and I are finding out that the blast off tools for doing that are Story Listening and other forms of non-targeted input. When the interest is back up high and all the kids are all involved then we don’t really need to “monitor” (don’t like that word) their comprehension and we can just enjoy being with them because we can see it. And yes, this can and will be taught at workshops, at least at the Conference of the Elves in Rivendell/Portlandia this summer.
