I’m glad I made people pay for the PLC membership. It kept the group small. It kept the right people here. From 12,000 hits a day a year ago and a big, non-focused and argumentative community (people seemed to want to argue the merits of TPRS/CI more than learn it), we have become a group of about 90 focused people who want to simply learn the method better. So that goal was reached.
I am afraid that over the past year we focused too much on CI activities – what to do instead of how to do it. A certain amount of that is necessary, but we took our eyes off the real task – learning how to just be with our kids and follow the CI threads that develop naturally as class goes along, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/10/14/lart-de-la-conversation-and-tprs/
It is our teacher mindset that did that. Honestly, we can’t keep coming up with new and creative ways to use CI – it will become a Tower of Babel. There are simply too many ideas, and each one might work for one and not for another. They are trees, which vary individually, but the forest that is comprehensible input is the key thing. We have the three steps. That is plenty. They get distorted. That is not good.
My prayer is that we can go into next year more relaxed and more trusting in the overall process of CI, knowing that just about any form of it – reading, listening, dictée – will hold up our classes and keep our kids acquiring without our focusing too much on the details of what we are doing, but rather on how we are doing it.
When we focus too much on activities and details involving CI, we reflect the tendency of our wider American workaholic society to work too hard in planning, to work too hard in teaching, to work too hard in getting the method out, and, a critical mistake, to worry too much about what people think of us and our work.
After all these years, it is dawning on me that all I have to do is show up in my classroom and things will take care of themselves. This whole CI thing is truly about trust. If it is true, and it is, that, since languages are acquired unconsciously, all we have to do is relax and deliver the CI, then why are we worrying so much?
Why do we struggle so much with the method? We have to stop that next year. We are mentally aware, most of us at this point, of the slamarific power inherent in the method, but we don’t trust it to work, and we keep trying to control our classes, with the supreme irony that the pleasant flow of interchange with our kids, the Art of Conversation, which depends entirely on our relaxing and trusting the flow of the class to find its way, is blocked off.
So my prayer for next year for us is to stop focusing so much on the details of TPRS/CI in this PLC (go to the listserve or other sites for that) and focus more on the being in the moment part of comprehensible input. A second prayer is that we learn to accept our kids where they are and to stand up strong and capable to teach them how to be a person in our classes, and not a cardboard cutout of a person. That might actually be my first prayer.
For that, Robert’s jump on the three modes one year ago this month gets the top rating for threads on this site for the last year. And the entire metacognitive piece and self reflection by students which many of us are poised and ready to implement in the fall (jen is already doing it in her classes) is going to be huge.
We had a great year talking up CI and how great it is compared to the old stuff, but I would ask – myself mainly – to cool it on that topic, and to just work toward getting better at the method. What does that mean? To me, it means constantly returning the group’s attention to is the larger picture of HOW we allow the natural flow of human interaction via words to occur in our classroom. This requires trust.
Yes, there are as many wonderful input activities as there are teachers using it, and they are great and should be shared here in this training venue, but the main focus that I want to bring to the group over the next year is how to trust and relax what Krashen has proven works. Teaching is a burn out job, ranked lately on some Yahoo! poll as the worst burnout job of all. So we can’t burn out.
We can do this thing. We now have the method, with the tipping point, in my view, reached.