Many of us think that if we just master the set of skills that we need to get through a story, then our kids will show the proficiency gains that we want and so test well and everything will be fine with our jobs.
But in order to find real professional satisfaction in our jobs, we need to go beyond mastering just the CI skills. Why? It is because when we only master the CI skills, we end up with stories that get through to only about five or six of our students in each class. I said that in my previous post and I am saying it again here to bring the point home.
We’re not reaching the other kids (sometimes up to 75-80% of the kids in the classroom) and we can’t continue to ignore them, hoping they will go away so that we could just focus on the “kids who try”. In terms of the article I posted here earlier today, that’s no longer an option.
Too many of our kids are experiencing a deep kind of mental suffering as a result of our traditional instruction that we think we have a right to do even though it conflicts with the research. Has a kid ever committed suicide as a result of being in a class where they don’t feel important? I doubt it. But did we contribute to a child’s lack of faith in life by failing to give the kid a good experience? Probably.
What if a depressed kid had just one class to go to each day that they really cared about? You know that the answer to that question is that we would save lives.
WE, the language teachers of America, must do our part to help save those kids who are on the edge, the ones hurting too much from COVID or whatever to show any interest in our classes. These are the kids with parents either out of the house for whatever reasons, the absent parents, the parents who exert too much pressure on their children, etc.
Many of our students are growing up in a dystopian setting in some kind of dysfunctional home and we can either add to that dysfunction or help fix it. As I said above, if our kids had just one class that they enjoyed going to, we could make a difference!
There was a recent study that showed that teachers play in some cases a more important role than parents when parents are unable for whatever reason (no blame!) to be decent parents, especially those brown and black parents against whom the system is so viciously set up.
We need to wake up to the fact that there is just too much stress on many of our kids for them to be able to enjoy our CI classes no matter how good we are at CI. We also need to stop taking their lack of attention personally. The educational system is falling apart.
How to reach all of our students? We must consciously focus on adding the following three other instructional pieces to the CI piece. Those three pieces, that function like the three legs of a stool, are:
1) the community building piece.
2) the inclusion/equity piece.
3) the mental health piece.
I do not know of any other approaches to CI that include a conscious and aggressive and intentional focus on those three things and I think that that is one reason the CI movement is floundering. We have to ask ourselves if language gains really are our highest priority in this work of language teaching. Is that what we really went into teaching for?
Many of us went into teaching for that reason – to teach the language – and that’s fine, but I think that many of us will not experience any real job satisfaction until we focus on teaching using CI in a way that addresses the mental health of our students as our primary goal.
When we bring good mental health to our students, we learn wonderful things about the profession that are hard to put into writing. Things of the heart. Things that are human. Things that we read about in books like Le Petit Prince.
It is not good for our students when we collect points and rank them in the same way that the businessman in Le Petit Prince counts stars in order to own them. It is not good to present ourselves to our students like the conceited man who is in desperate need of applause and admiration. Collecting points and judging students is not the way of the future in our field. It’s the way we used to do things, but it’s not the way we will do them going forward.
I may start making a series of podcasts that focus on the three things above so that we can include everyone – all our kids – and thereby realize the true potential of CI in our classrooms. I have too much to say. Maybe podcasts will help.