Long time PLC members know that over the ten years many of us have been together here, the gradual shift to non-targeted CI and its spiking since 2016 – and its manifestation in terms of the three books now published as featured items by Teacher’s Discovery (Natural Approach to Stories, Natural Approach to the Year/Year One, and the Square Peg, Round Hole Book) – has been liberating. What does this mean?
It means simply that we no longer have to deal with the limiting thinking/rules that shackled a lot of our creativity from about 1998 to 2015. This comment is not at all meant in a disparaging way, but rather simply to state that many of us no longer subscribe to targets, circling, the reading of class novels, and the many other shackles that are described in a post from 2016 here:
*https://benslavic.com/blog/hit-list-of-8/er
Our Greg Schwab recently put it this way in a Twitter conversation:
“To me the biggest development in CI lately has been Ben Slavic’s Invisibles system. This system is the Net Hypothesis applied. It also only takes the cost of a box of markers and crayons to implement and the students love it!”
I agree with Greg. The Natural Approach books are in my mind and in the minds of many the best direction for CI to be going in these days and so that is where we will be going from here on this PLC as the new academic year gets ready to wind up. Many PLC members are already on board as members also of the CI Liftoff FB site, others are studying non-targeted CI with great interest right now, getting ready to implement it in their classrooms to some degree this coming year.
We’ve had a more restful summer than usual here, but group members can now expect more posts on the Natural Approach here as the new year cranks up.
I always knew that this work could be easy. When a person can say that after 41 years in the profession, something must be unfolding in a good way! It just took a really long time to figure it out. A REALLY long time.