This is a repost that I include here because it fits in with current threads:
We have to turn in lesson plans. Many teachers in our building don’t. So we get notes from our administration teams like this one that say:
…your weekly lesson briefs are very important to your continued planning for next year, to build academic fluency in the building, and to be prepared next year and beyond. Please start and/or continue to submit them on a weekly basis…. This is a specific strategy in our UIP that helps the administration show downtown administration….etc.
The argument given is that once we do them this year, we have them for next year.
The only problem is that, with languages, if we are to believe Krashen, language is much too fluid to be captured in a lesson plan. Language is like water running down a mountain – we don’t know where it will want to go next, and it is in the free and naturally beautiful downward flow of the water that our minds actually capture the language, absorbing it at different rates depending on the individual.
Most of us don’t believe that, however. Not really. Even after having studied Krashen and agree that he is right, we don’t teach in ways that fully align with his theories of natural order, flow, the net, and the unconscious process, which alone bring fluency.
On a trip, isn’t it precisely the meandering that makes the travel interesting? When we meander without a set plan, aren’t we better able to share the wonderful things that spontaneously occur along the way? Time is not so structured when we relax and meander, and the learning and the enjoyment of the learning take on a different quality. It’s better. It engages our souls. This language learning stuff becomes compelling to us, and no longer a chore.
In terms of my own weekly schedule that I follow to teach CI to my students, it’s just a template, really, a framework. I tell the administration that I am going to do PQA on Monday, a story on Tuesday, reading on Wednesday and Thursday, and a song or poem on Friday. But that is not what I actually do.
If the PQA river is flowing strong one week, I let it flow all week. If the story wants to live more, we stay with it for days if we want. In that way our learning has joy. It’s natural. I don’t fret if I didn’t teach a certain verb, because I know that, if I just keep doing the CI, the verb will occur somewhere at some point.
When focusing on the verb, I remove the focus of the class on what is unfolding naturally and spontaneously in the discussion. All I have to do in this work is keep the CI flowing. It’s a guaranteed process in the natural order of things. It is part of something bigger.
It’s not about me being in control. I like that and need that now in my career, in my life. We need to trust and know that our classes will unfold beautifully, like our lives, if we just turn them over and trust that there is a process wanting to happen and we just need to let it happen and get out of the way and quit being so snappy all the time. Letting go of control is the secret to CI.
Krashen has laid it all out so well, that it is precisely in the natural order, the net, and the unconscious flow of language that my students will make the greatest gains – by far. There is no order that can be imposed on language acquisition that will work anywhere as well as just letting the water flow down the hill.
Recently in comments here, both Chris and Grant mentioned that they were going through books to find verbs to teach that align with district curricula. But if Krashen is right, the verbs that they found are the same ones that I use when I use my Matava story scripts. They might occur in a different order, but they would be the same verbs. I don’t get the lack of trust in Krashen’s theories by we who have accepted them. Have we? Do we really get them?
The only difference between painstakingly identifying verbs and stuffing them into a lesson plan, and my free form way of teaching them, is that one is unnatural and one is natural. One is not fun to do, because there is fear in there somewhere (I have to teach these verbs! ), but there is no fear in the natural way.