We do hundreds of awesome new things every day in our classrooms but they are never recorded and never will be. That is the real work that CI offers. It just happens that in this work we are not overly caught up in our minds; we aren’t always trying to “do it right”. Happy communication with our kids becomes our goal, and for us to convey that happiness, we have to let go of all the things we learned in the past about teaching a language.
This work is not centered in the mind. If we try to remember to “do this or that new technique” we will lose our flow. Yes, we try out strategies and techniques – of course we do – but as time goes by we notice our CI instruction moving from intentionality of instruction that is based in our minds into our bodies, where we then have our success in the classroom, because we “feel” the work.
Yes, we may follow a sequence of instructions as written out in ROA or vPQA or Star of the Week and that is fine but in general we need to not think so much when we do this work. Instead, we pick up and respond to the most important thing of all – each of our students’ need to be recognized as a human being in the group, to count for something, to be noticed.
When we work with our students in this real way, we never even have to go past one sentence. The student is more important than making a bunch of points about the language. How freeing that is! We appreciate a student, and then feel the circling, the reps in context, as we talk about the student and when we feel that it isn’t time to move on we don’t. The students always benefit from the extra reps we keep throwing in, so we park on it – parking not because we THINK of parking but because we FEEL the need to park.
We make meaningful eye contact with the actor, and when we notice a kid not focused over there we walk over to the lost kid and whisper with kindness that we are going to repeat it all for them so that they understand and all of a sudden we see that this work is about making happy eye contact with kids in the joyful expression of language and not about “doing TPRS”.
Our instruction becomes a moving, living and breathing thing that contains happiness that is located in our bodies. Our minds learn to bow a bit and walk a little further away from center stage and it is in THOSE moments when the real teaching happens.
Nothing great can be written down and sold and captured in a bottle and made into a method. We succeed because we avoid trying to squeeze the life out of the circling by “doing it right”. We teach to the eyes and not the forehead and we get really good at wait time so that our students can do their 50%.
The moment this work becomes a method is the moment it no longer works. That is why so few linear-thinking teachers stay with it. But they will soon retire and an entirely new kind of teacher will take over. It’s happening now.
Then a million kids will breathe a big sigh of relief, because their language classes will then start to carry honest meaning in their lives, and they won’t hate their language teachers and they won’t feel stupid about their language learning abilities. Then we will have entered a new age in foreign language education, and nothing new age about it.