Some of this is taken from an old post called Feel the Burn. Some of it is new. It talks about about the importance of going slowly in our comprehension based classrooms. It addresses both the hostile silence we sometimes are met with, and also the brain dead kind of responses we see all too often:
We must realize that, with the rare exception of kids with sociopathic tendencies, if a student refuses to try, it is not because they are lazy but because they don’t understand. We must change our instruction so that they understand.
When we lose them, we must switch the discussion right to them and bring with us a big canister of SLOW. Slow circling will take care of 99% of the problems in the comprehension based classroom.
Use the Annoying Orange technique as well on kids that must be brought back in. Don’t let them go. Go get them. The Annoying Orange is great for bringing in kids that try to check out:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/10/29/lame-students/
When they check out our first reaction is to bail, but we must not. When we allow them to check out, it is the same as giving them control of the class. Just hand it over now and start thinking about other careers.
Enforce the rules on every kid. Don’t let a single kid check out. Our second reaction is to get pissed at the kid, but we must hide that. Here is a plan: Stay with the question. Nothing else. Painstakingly write everything you say on the board in both languages. Point to, pause at, and then circle. Be ready to stay on that one sentence until the end of the period.
In one class I’m embarrassed to say that the sentence that most of them looked at me blankly on was, “What page are you on?” (In SSR they were all on different pages.) But I didn’t bail to a dication. I stayed in the moment. I felt the burn. I made myself understood. I spent a long time on that question.
Why? Because it involved each one of them. They couldn’t hide from that question. I didn’t care about personalizing the discussion in an imaginary (much more fun) way. Instead, I just asked each kid what page they were on at the end of the SSR period.
The fourth kid was the space cadet. I pinned him down with the same circled question the first three kids had answered successfully. I fought with him in the invisible world. Every single kid in the room saw the wrestling match and wanted to know who was going to win. They expected me to bail and I didn’t. I went so painstakingly slowly that it was really uncomfortable for everyone. Finally, the kid communicated that he understood. I had won.
This kid did me a favor. He forced me to go really slowly. During this period of CI*, we got a good review of numbers and a nice bunch of reps on “sont/are” because two girls were both on page 41. There were periods where, if a kid wasn’t with me, fiddling with the desk or something and looking down, I just walked over to the board and wrote down, “I will wait” in French, with the English right next to it, and then I sat down on a table and just waited.
The thing about that battle with that space cadet is that most of us just cut and run when faced with kids like that. We allow them to win. We can’t do that. we can’t do that because that is real passive aggressive behavior and it can absolutely ruin our classes.
Those moments when we try to engage them in a pleasant way in the TL and they just stare at us are real and we must respond in the moment and not bail by going to another students with the question. Our mistake is that we don’t see the situation as critical and we don’t stop and cover ourselves with SLOW. We just think that the kid somehow can’t understand what we are doing and we usually just skip away to some other kid. No siree Bob. We must stand our ground with such kids and make them understand.
There are three benefits to doing this: 1. We reach the kid from a position of strength. 2. We switch the feeling of being weak and exposed back to the kid. 3. We send a loud message to all in the class that we are the authority and if they don’t want to be exposed like that they better pay attention. And if they don’t they know they’ll get annoying oranged.
And it is simple to do. We write the same question on the board, in my case above “What page are you on?” and we just start doing yeoman Volga Boat Song circling from the beginning of the sentence. In this case, I had said “You are on what page?” and so I started in with this kid (I was ready to go the full 30 min. to the end of the period if necessary with him) and pointed and paused to “You are…” on the board and just went into a massive slow motion thing until the veneer of not understanding was gone.
That took about five minutes. When he finally got that I wasn’t going away, he caved. Yeoman circling – try it, you won’t like it but it can save your classes. Our kids always understand and grasp less of the CI than we think, and we need to do this kind of siege warfare more often anyway to make sure that the inmates aren’t passively running the prison.
This stuff is so hard. I admire my colleagues who try to teach this way. My colleagues who try to teach this way are warriors.
Related: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tw3g88JtWA
*please stop stop stop trying to teach content. See what content happens. Dance with that and the kids. Grab a target structure and saunter on down to the river, the Lazy River, and just float down where the water goes naturally and quit trying to push the water upriver in the direction you want. Follow the flow of the conversation. For more on this topic, search FLOW on this site.