What a long and fascinating journey! Teaching using comprehensible input is a Long and Winding Road that leads me home, finally, from all that shitty teaching that is now, thankfully, years behind me.
New idea du jour: what we have to do is insist on responses! Our mistake – a big one – is to think that we are armed and ready with only:
- Slow
- Staying in Bounds
- Checking for understanding by asking millions of yes/no questions
Let’s turn a focused eye on the third of those three things. It’s the one that needs the attention. I first addressed it after NTPRS when Von really helped me see something about what I was doing in this article:
The third one. Checking for understanding. The culprit. What does that mean, the culprit?
It means that we need to check for understanding COMPLETELY. What does that mean? It means what Blaine has said all along and we never listened to him – get a good choral response. Ahah! That is where we fall down.
Admit it. You don’t get a strong choral “YES!” or “NO!” from your classes on every question. Come on. Admit it and feel the truth flow in: “It’s true! I don’t get a good choral response on my questions!”
Good, you said it, and I totally admit suck at it too. But let us go deeper into this. Why don’t we get a good choral response on our questions? Here is an answer.
We don’t get a good choral response on our y/n questions because we lack spine. We are afraid to make a group of surly kids who are used to being allowed to not show up for class answer us loudly and with enthusiasm. Well, at least that is why I suck at it.
But yesterday I had just had it with the weak responses. I just wasn’t going to let them get away with being cardboard cutouts of students anymore. I was in one of those moods, and I was armed with the rigor posters, which sit on one of those triangular rolling whiteboards, like an easel, right next to the kids and which I am starting to refer to more and more. Thank you Clarice and everyone who worked on those posters! (available on the resources/posters link of this site.)
The best poster is the main rigor poster that talks about what it should feel like to them inside and outside. I really focused on the outside piece, what is looks like to ME when they are learning. I told them that unless I see those four behaviors FROM THEM IN CLASS ALL THE TIME, then we are not really acquiring the language. I told them that this observable behavior is exactly what the national standards (the Interpersonal Mode of the Three Modes of Communication) require me to do, to see in their eyes if they understand or not.
I told them again about the jGR and how WHAT THEY DO in class in OBSERVABLE TERMS and in terms of NEGOTIATING MEANING with me (I didn’ t use those terms) would determine a full 50% of their grades. In short, I gave them “the lecture”.
At the end of pointing to and using all four posters, all of this in English over a period of about twenty minutes, the second such lecture of the year, I told them that I was now going to return to the story and ask a bunch of easy y/n questions and I EXPECTED TO HEAR AND SEE THEM RESPOND TO ME IN THE WAY I REQUIRED.
It worked. They did it. I was so happy. These are children and unless we tell them what want from them in terms of behaviors, they won’t know what to do.
