We also must lower the stress levels in our classrooms. How to do that? We can only do it in one way, by making our classrooms into places where stress is not allowed to enter in. This is not an easy thing in what may be, as Tina Hargaden recently observed, some of the “darkest places on the planet”.
How do we make our classrooms into places where stress is not allowed to enter in? We do this by doing our jobs as the language acquisition professionals in our buildings to insist that we place less emphasis on data collection and on the pre-planning of structures and in general on the more mechanical aspects of the language acquisition process in favor of doing those things that make children feel less judged.
What positive results does the reduction of the obsession to collect data bring to our CI classrooms? It brings a lower affective filter. It is the lowering of the affective filter that brings the kinds of gains we want because when the affective filter is low we find that the students enjoy learning more. This describes the very nature of human communication. How can one want to be in a language classroom when there is always somebody in the room judging us how we are doing when we are in there? That sucks.