Question

3 thoughts on “Question”

1. Ben Slavic

   September 14, 2019 at 8:48 pm

   1. It’s teacher-centered. Some kids have their hands up. They want approval and they want a good grade. Playing field is uneven. Whenever you see a classroom where some hands are up and some are not, you are looking at a classroom from the last century, where survival of the fittest was the rule.
   2. The teacher is not making contact w kids who remain quiet. This excludes kids. The very point of CI is about full inclusion.
   3. The class seems to be more about the material being taught than the kids in the picture. With CI we don’t focus on the material (structure of the language) but on the message. We focus on the message and not on the vehicle bing used to communicate it. That’s the research.
   4. The teacher seems to want the right answer. But there is no right answer in a language class based fully on the research. We want something completely different. We want a classroom where the kids aren’t trying to get the right answer (not needed bc it’s not about right answers in CI; it’s about just listening to and understanding the comprehensible input, which has nothing to do w “getting the right answer”).
   4. Why? It is because in the “just listening to the CI” model we are doing all we can do and what we should be doing acc. to the research which is just talking to them in interesting ways that they can understand. In the model seen in this photo, the kids are thinking and competing and trying to achieve a certain ranking or status in the room. So this pic is far from what we ever want to see in a CI classroom.

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   1. Jeremy

      September 15, 2019 at 8:23 am

      I really like what you’ve written here. I find that in my classrooms it is hard for me to not tacitly favor the kids who are more outspoken since I often feed on positive reinforcement. I suppose changing what we view as positive reinforcement as a teacher is important. I definitely struggle with making contact with the kids who are naturally more quiet in a room of 33 kids.

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2. Ben Slavic

   September 15, 2019 at 1:17 pm

   Jeremy you said:

   …I definitely struggle with making contact with the kids who are naturally more quiet …

   There are two kinds of quiet – 1. withdrawal bc of fear and past struggles w the more dominant kids in class, and 2. the naturally quiet ones that you are talking about. In the second case, I have found that the only thing that can draw out these naturally quiet kids into the classroom process is producing drawings of individually created characters.

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