I used to teach Gifted/Talented classes using Socratic dialogue. I continue to try to apply what I did in those classes to my language classes.
From those classes, I learned that the words that I say are less important to my kids than I had formerly thought, but that the way I say those words is most important. This is an insight of great importance to me, something I wish had come to my attention many years ago.
A second new, connected, awareness I have gained in teaching those classes is the need to demonstrate to my students my intent to hear what they are saying back to me more and more and, since they can’t speak the language yet, I have to learn to listen more to the words they don’t say.
So I have learned in teaching anything that when I focus less on what I am saying and more on how I am saying it, and if I show my intent to listen more than my intent to be heard, things go better.
Pontificating to kids never works, of course. It’s just that it is not an easy thing to stop doing, perhaps because it is a teaching model that is lodged in the collective unconscious teaching mind of every one of us, from before, those dark days when we thought we could teach a language without reaching the kids through our hearts.
Being aware of what the kids are hearing and experiencing in the class is undoubtedly up there on the marquee of all the coming new shows in education. Clearly, the shift is that I must now learn to show my loving intent to attend fully to what my students say and what they don’t say in class.
Teachers who focus on the use of technology in their work of teaching languages miss this part. It’s a disaster to think that language education occurs only in the conscious mind after what we know from Krashen and Vygotsky and the other few great researchers who know about the unconscious affective juggernaut that REALLY results in fluency and authentic acquisition.
In the future educational world, I must learn to listen and listen well to the words my students don’t speak, and to become more and more aware of what they are experiencing as I teach. I think that they call it empathy. Teaching sprinkled with big doses of empathy. Developing empathy in our teaching will most certainly open up new pathways of communication between us and our kids, and increase our learning.
On my list of Classroom Rules I ask my kids to be visible for each other, to be present as a listener, and to not talk over each other. I never reflected until now, however, on how important it is that I myself model those behaviors myself first.
If I ask my kids to listen with the intent to understand, why indeed should I then not teach them by clearly demonstrating to them my own intention to understand what they are experiencing as they listen to my words? But how to do this?
Teaching while at the same time demonstrating my clear intention to understand what they are experiencing as they listen to my words requires more, much more, than merely a physical/mental voice. It requires an inner/heart voice. The outer voice delivers the information, the inner voice starts the dance.
We think that the outer voice is the most important. The inner one, however, counts so much more in reaching our kids!
It is the inner voice that prevents the words I am speaking, whether in a G/T class in English or in language classes in French, from slamming around the room, and thus failing to land in the kids’ awareness authentically. It is the inner voice of my being aware of what my kids are actually getting that conveys meaning, beyond just mere information. The inner voice is calming; the outer voice can get out of control.
The outer physical voice functions at the lower levels of the taxonomy, conveying knowledge, and when the kids hear it and understand it, they convey knowledge and they can pass tests. We call that going to school to learn.
But all that is really very boring, and not connected to real acquisition – to the good stuff. When I use the inner voice of loving kindness, higher levels of meaning are reached. We dance, not just learn. We see each other as actual people, reflecting Paul Klee’s description of creating art: “One eye sees..the other feels”.
This inner voice is very kind. The physical voice, run by our minds, is always less kind. It is the voice of people who deliver instructional services. The inner voice, because it is run by our inner awareness of what the kids are getting, is the voice of real teaching.
The key to the puzzle is simple kindness. Kindness finds its expression in empathy. All we have to do is to be conscious of, to be aware of, to be present for, to be visible to, and to not talk over our kids. Blaine says, we must listen to their cute answers. The key word in his message is “listen”.
How do we get in touch with our inner voice? Is there an even deeper voice that guides our inner voice? Surely there is, but it can’t be talked about. It is a very personal voice, the one that guides the story along, giving intuitive insights, guiding everything, that voice that makes comprehension based instruction work in the first place.
Our kids will learn much more if we express to them our intent to guide our words with loving kindness and to listen to their words with loving kindness and our willingness at each moment in class to wait and monitor and attend to and be aware of what they are getting. How shocking for them! A three dimensional teacher! Somone to whom they must react!