Michele and I were talking about what to do next year and here are some of her resolutions with my responses italicized. I think that there are more in another email she sent me and Michele you can add them as a comment if you find them. I think it is good for us to know what we intend to add and what to cut away from next year (like English!). I am also going to add a category called “Beginning the Year” for when we get ideas like Jim’s summer prop idea to start off beyond the level one classes – I will make his comment into a separate blog so that we can maybe access that category in August when we are trying to get our thoughts together. Michele said that these are in no particular order:
1. Consider doing Scott’s schedule of thematic circling with pictures in level 1. At this point, I feel some need for more structure. I probably won’t feel that way at the beginning of the year. Pictures – a moveable feast and an instant lesson plan. They will be a big player next year with all of us. Those of us who feel insecure about teaching using comprehensible input have a friend in pictures – all we need is a little practice circling and we don’t have to know all that story stuff. Pictures make delivering CI simple!
2. Do a song a week. We’ve been much better about that lately, and the vocabulary is sinking in beautifully. What’s more fun than a bunch of kids who want to sing? Yeah, but the best intentions… I don’ t know – those readings get going and it’s hard to stop ’em. But the music must get into our week! Ah, the tribulations of having far too much good material for our classes. Makes me long for the old days with the book – NOT!
3. Have something that could potentially be graded every day, to keep both me and the kids in line and focused. We dropped daily quizzes, because we fell out of habit of handing out the red quiz book to the quiz kid for the day. Then kids stopped handing in their writes for missed days. I’m not sure the writing does anything, but at least it makes them recognize that they missed something. Dude I am down to getting a grade in the book while hardly looking at what they did because I am a lazy person. Don’t tell anyone. Those first ten minutes do it. They write a dictation or a free write and if they did it they get a grade of 8-10 and if they were unexcused tardy or absent the zero stays in the book. If you are not there in time you get to wait outside the locked door until the ten minute writing (could be FVR or SSR as well) is over, when I collect their work. This simple collecting plus participation grading is about all I have to do. And I don’t do it every day. The grades pile up, and kids who are on time and don’t skip class and pay attention get the A’s. It’s nice. It works for me. I think that one of the tragedies of our profession is the idée reçue that we must work hard at grading and give big tests and all that shit. Who said that? We don’t. There are other ways.
4. Find a system that won’t let anyone slip through the cracks. I found one kid who never got a writing conference and was feeling left out. We sat right down for a celebratory session with his notebook. Maybe I need an old-fashioned paper grade book. Dude no. Keep your energy for the classroom.
5. Get verb charts and case charts back up on the wall. Again, not for me. I think they are confusing. I know this goes against party line, but I don’t think those verb charts, any charts of anything like possessive adjective forms and stuff like that, just clutter the walls. The kids don’t understand them. Over the years with this stuff, my walls have gotten simpler and simpler, with just the rules dominating.
6. Remember to train kids at the beginning of the year in how to lead reading and circling groups, especially if I get a couple of native speakers. It helps so much because when I train the kids, everyone else re-learns the routines. Students coach one another, and when there’s a sub, they fall naturally into the right behavior. Can you imagine having the right native speakers in a class from time to time to do reading groups? As I begin my new big thing in CI – just a personal quest – of figuring out how to make reading the number one thing by far in my CI classroom, I think such smaller translation/discussion groups would be an ideal thing. Another first from Michele, I think. At least I haven’t formally been trained by anyone else about this idea of smaller reading groups led by native speakers. And how honoring to the child who is the native speaker!
7. Go back to posting lists of words so that there’s a clear goal. But limit those lists to 50 words. Yeah this year I went down to strips of 18 words or so because the charts were too big. It’s the old issue, unfortunately, of wanting to start class with a free write or FVR as described above to get a grade, and then want to teach five new words or so (I stopped that mid year for lack of time and a lot of kids said they missed that part of class), and then not getting the CI going for fifteen or twenty minutes. I’m thinking these days that a fifty minute class is just way too short for what I want to do.
8. Mostly, go back to the basics. Slow. Point. Pause. Ask for ten-finger checks. Ask for meaning, as I repeat the sentence. Ask often just for single words. Practice routines and basics at the beginnings: what to do if you’re late, if you miss, if someone farts, if you are lost. Talk about how everyone will benefit from slow. Talk about how they haven’t heard it enough if the words aren’t just falling out of their mouths. Have kids count structures. Be tough on myself. Don’t worry about the flashy stuff. That can come from the kids. Yeah kids counting structures is a big one beyond the basics you describe above. And having them write the quiz and the story line for the reading I’ll write after school. It’s such an odd thing, all of this change that we are in with this, and truly expressive of the idea that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
What are your resolutions?