I’m currently rewriting Stepping Stones to Stories, adding a lot of the ideas we have dicussed/developed this year to it. Here is a text that is still in draft form that I wrote over break about the Ten Minute Deal. If those in the group use the Ten Minute Deal, please read this over and offer suggestions or corrections or additions. Thanks in advance to those who may do that.
Classroom Management Tool #8 – The Ten Minute Deal:
In my view we are responsible for classroom focus and discipline in two ways, one obvious and one not so obvious:
1. We must enforce our rules without exception.
Side talking, blurting in L1, etc. simply cannot occur in our comprehension based classroom because of the complete interference with the unconscious acquisition process that occurs when side talking or blurting occurs. It sounds perhaps odd to say that few CI teachers grasp that fact, but it is true. Most CI teachers don’t fully appreciate that when they are talking to their children in the target language, they must direct that speech directly into the unconscious minds of the students. When they don’t get that, they tend to let the rules slide, and when they do that, they completely compromise their instruction.
The point cannot be repeated enough – the flow of CI instruction in the form of a story or PQA or MovieTalk should be directed straight into the part of the students’ brains where language actually is acquired – the unconscious mind.
When we mess with that process by speaking English far more than we should in class it amounts to throwing a stick into the spokes of a moving bicycle; the process is interrupted and nothing really gets accomplished because of this break in instruction into the part of the brain that it should be going to. (This is the single most misunderstood concept in comprehensible input based instruction.(
2. We must severely limit our own use of English.
The second point above invites serious discussion. It is true that in a CI classroom we must use the target language about 95% to 99% of available instructional minutes. In my opinion, the 90% – 95% range is too little and 100% is too much. In my view, the 95% to 99% range is optimal.
But their reality for most CI teachers is that during class things present themselves to our minds that may take us off topic and we end up using English for short bursts lasting from ten to thirty seconds (most common) to up to five minutes or more talking about things that have nothing to do with teaching the language.
We also react to distractions like tardies, etc. in English. What this does is send the message to the students that the second language isn’t that important and when something really needs to be communicated, English will be used for that.
Now this brings up a very subtle point. There is nothing wrong with our sharing personal anecdotes and building trust and relationship with our students. However, we have to pick the right times for doing that. I find no harm in building community in English once or twice a week for five minutes or so, but not three or four times a day.
Here is a solution – Classroom Discipline Tool #8 – that has been tested and reported to work very well by hundreds of teachers. Here is what to do to keep ourselves around the optimal 95%-99% level:
We find a responsible and focused student to be our Classroom Timer. His or her job is to use an iPhone or iPad timer to time the class, including me, on how long both the class and I stay in L2 before an L1 fail. As per the 95% – 99% idea, I would be allowed a few clarifying words of English, but the students would get none. That is the ideal in a comprehensible input class. Unfortunately, there are very, very few classes where this actually happens, even when the teacher staunchly claims to be doing TPRS/CI.
Whether you use ten minutes or a different amount of minutes depends on the school, the class, the nature of the kids, and the nature of the teacher. This kind of almost exclusive comprehensible input (the only kind that reaches and activates and WORKS in the language acquisition process) can and has been done for up to entire class period for the course of an entire year, but such classes are very rare.
I myself have found that after ten minutes, my students were wiped out and needed a break after ten minutes. Each class will be different. My suspicion is that the vast majority of classes could go only twenty minutes at the most, with a brain break much needed at that point. The kids are really serious and accurate about this idea but would never be if it were the entire period. I think that twenty minutes would be a normal limit, but it would have to be a special class because 20 minutes is much more difficult to accomplish than ten.
The timer – whom I laud as one of the most important employees in the classroom (because it really is) – silently signals me at the 5, 9 and 10 minute marks. He does so with fingers in the air and sometimes indicates minute splits at 7, 8 or 9 minutes as well. When the 10 minutes is up, I speak English to congratulate them and we all take a short break, from 1 to 3 to even 5 minutes.
I do allow myself translation on the board in the unlikely event that I would need to use Point and Pause, along with the all-important “What did I just say?” question and any random pop-up grammar (again defined as when you simply write and/or say, “This (word in L2) means that (word in L1)”.
When we begin to experience some really strong ten minute L2 sessions in the TL with only periods of a few seconds of L1 use for clarification, and that use of L1 by me only, we begin to see each lesson get stronger. The class pulls together for a common goal, if not for forty minutes, then at least for ten.
The class begins to feel as if it can do this work of staying in the target language. I would much rather get three really high quality ten minute periods in a fifty minute period than do what I used to do, always lying to myself about how much I was staying in the TL, droning on in a bad mix of English and French.
A benefit of the Ten Minute Deal is that the teacher-student bond I have with my timer is off the chart. So who should be chosen for this job? It would ideally be a student who commands a lot of respect in the class, but not necessarily a superstar. It might be an athlete who may want his or her grade to move up a grade for doing this job. This person would have to have the respect of the class so that a look from him or her during the ten minutes would prevent any blurting, etc.
In fact, very often, the timer is a low achieving student with a good heart whose intelligence is largely missed in his other classes. Low achieving students often find themselves having great success in CI classroom. Concern has been raised that the timer kid may zone out and end up paying more attention to the clock than the lesson. That kid would need to be fired, and somebody who can do both hired. (The student jobs all must be treated in that way. The main job of the teacher is to keep everyone focused on the comprehensible input.)
Once I saw a class taken over by a bunch of kids with tattoos and leather jackets who had started the year off in the back of the room but who, after experiencing personalized comprehensible input for awhile, showed that they had more heart for the work than a group of four or five superstar memorizers who had started the year off forming a kind of barrier between me and the group in the back of the room. The kids in the front were moved by me in a seating chart move after the six weeks of the year. It took the memorizers all year to figure out how to do the class, and one of them never did figure it out and had to be put on her own textbook-based program, which suited her and her parents because she thought she was learning because she memorized lists of words. All the laughter coming from the front of the classroom confused her, but she stayed by her grammar guns all year, which was fine by me. Used to controlling her classes in middle school, she was outclassed in that particular class by fun-loving kids whose intelligence at times that year was astounding and fun.
If we don’t make it to the end of the ten minutes, we simply restart. This really brings the focus. When we achieve the ten minutes, we let the air out of the balloon for a few moments before starting another ten minute period, as discussed, after a brain break.