This is a very important phase we are in. We are doing breakaway stuff with the new YouTube awareness, of just how truly powerful YouTube is in bringing high quality comprehensible input to our students.
Is there anything better, anything more compelling, than the YouTube clips for our kids? Stories – except those rare home run stories – are the only thing better (because our students are the actors and not Donald Duck.) But both video clips and stories are off the chart for engagement.
We are starting to have a tremendous year. I mean that in the Winston Churchill definition of success way – to paraphrase him – success is going from failure to failure with enthusiasm and hope, or something like that. Embrace those bad classes as well as the good ones. This is no game for cowards.
My first year class today had nothing but wall to wall laughter, almost constant laughing. The only way I pulled that off was just to totally forget trying to teach anything and roll with what came up. I still express concern that we target way too much stuff in our work with CI. Why so much laughter in that class? We trust each other.
We just have to keep everything SLOW, use more MT, switch out of CWB to stories when we feel it is time (sooner than later!) and keep on trying to be badass with this stuff. Reading Bradley’s report from the field a little while back has made me fired up, like before a Broncos game. Thank you for that report Bradley and to Deena and the others who are so honest in sharing here what they are experiencing as they launch this work in their own careers.
I would say to anyone new to the group not to be too bewildered. Just click on the following categories to stay sane – they are the best and most important practical classroom ideas we have had in the past few years and they are very very heavy hitters in the classroom:
- jGR
- Weekly Schedule – new Two Week Schedule 2013 (if you can’t think of how to organize your instruction, read this schedule. I have Carol’s support on it.)
- L & D – working with pictures (French painting right now – it’s so awesome!)
- Y & D (new) – enjoying the wonderful new worlds opening up thanks to Sabrina leading the way with the French YouTube clips. (Y’all need someone like Sabrina who is willing to transcribe YouTube clips and share how she uses each one – this work is much better than stories, far more compelling, and just really great stuff.)
- R & D – always keeping contact with a simple novel (crucial)
- Stories and PQA
- Class Competitions – Naomi and jen and Judy and Sabrina kept this instructional strategy alive and we think that those competitions are going to be huge for the “keeping things compelling” aspect of our work, for keeping variety in our CI instruction. We just have to think about finding time for this sometime this year and thank you to those four for keeping it alive last spring.
