October 6, 2015

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In preparation for an upcoming workshop in her district in Washington, DC, Amy Wopat asked teachers on the IFLT/NTPRS/CI facebook group to give a quote about what CI means to them.  This got me thinking.  In my journey to teach using Comprehensible Input (CI)-based methods, what DOES this mean to me?  While many think of CI teaching as another name for TPRS, I think of it as much, much more.

So what does CI mean to me?

• It means getting to know my students.  We have real conversations.  We talk about who they are.  The class follows their interests.  We talk about things that relate to their lives and their opinions. I love that students tell me about their tests in other classes.  I know about their prom dates.  We all know about each other.  They know I’m afraid of bees.  I know that W loves to swim.  I know that N is goofy and will go along with anything to get a laugh.  I know that C is a living example of “still waters run deep”.  He hates speaking in class but his writings show a lot of thought.
• It means flooding the students with Spanish.  As much immersion as they possibly can handle.  And along the way, pointing out ways that cognates are formed, how words relate between languages, and pushing them to understand more complex Spanish.  Everything is comprehensible and written on the board.  Everything we do supports student comprehension of target language use.
• It means being tired.  Being “on stage” a lot, with a mind constantly racing can be physically tiring.  Yeah.  I’ll admit it.  By the end of the class, I’m a little pooped.  I put a lot of energy into my enthusiasm as I tell the story, after all, if I don’t find it compelling (or at least make them think I do) then they will probably not be compelled either.  If you want them to be spirited, you have to be spirited.  Sure, they still may be half comatose no matter how into it you appear, but if YOU are lethargic, they won’t be engaged.
• It is a 3-ring circus living all inside my head.  As I teach, I am conscious of what structures I’m using, what vocabulary they’re likely to understand, who I’m asking to respond, the higher and lower level questions I ask.  I’ve heard teaching described as a web browser with 4, 187 tabs all open at once.  That is me.  On a slow day.
• It means proficiency.  Students are expected to produce as much language as they can, as soon as they are ready and comfortable doing so.  I warn observers when they walk into my room that it may look teacher-centered because I’m doing most of the talking.  But taking into account everything going on in the questioning and the conversations, it really is a student-centered classroom.  As the student proficiency improves and they become comfortable with the class and the Spanish, student production increases naturally.
• It means differentiation.  While there are standards in my classroom that I expect students to shoot for, all students can feel successful at their own level.  Students are set up for success.  Questions are asked slowly and dramatically with pausing and pointing at the board.  Sure, the fast processors probably knew the answer half-way through the question, but by asking this way, slower processors have time to think about what is being asked, and can also answer the questions.  When individuals are called on in class, the faster/more advanced students are asked harder questions requiring more language to answer.  The students with lower skills are asked simpler questions, in terms of language.  NOTE:  I’m not saying this means only questions of what or who.  They can be higher-order thinking questions, but they will be questions that students have the information and language to answer, possibly reading right off the board, and not necessarily in complete sentences.
• It means more energy and rest for me.  I know, I mentioned being tired above.  But it doesn’t mean exhaustion.  There is a difference.  Blaine Ray once said that the sort of tired that comes from being active and enthusiastic and in the TPRS zone goes away after a good night’s sleep.  The kind of tired that comes from student push-back, frustration because you just taught something last week and students aren’t using it this week, the desperation of finding another vocabulary or grammar review game…that goes away in June.  And while Teach for June is a mantra in the CI crowd, it is about students having until June to develop proficiency in skills. It is NOT about us clinging to the glimmer of hope that June will arrive someday.
• It means easier lesson planning, eventually.  When I started using TPRS many years ago, I worked really hard on lesson plans.  I would script my story.  And every question I was going to ask.  It was a lot of work.  But as I practiced more, I got to the point that I can do circling on the fly…and you will too!  My start-of-the year class interviews require absolutely ZERO prep.  I can’t prep–it is 100% about what students give as information.  We talk about them.  I ask lots of questions for information and they provide the material.  Since I don’t know what they will say, it is impossible to prep that part of the class.  What a great way to get rolling in the school year.  Now, after using TPRS/CI in some form or another for about 14 years,  I’m confident that I could walk into class, pull a couple of structures out of a hat, and run with them.  I won’t guarantee a home run, lessons that are truly amazing are also truly rare.  But I am confident I could make a successful lesson on the fly.  So walking into class with 2-3 structures in mind that I’ve had time to think about how they could relate to each other–no problem.  It just takes a lot of training and practice and refining to get to this point.
• It is liberating.  I don’t have to spend a lot of time and effort talking around certain tenses or forms, or hope kids don’t notice that I just used a totally different ending than we’ve practiced (which they never do anyhow).  Our story  yesterday in Spanish 3 had Elvis wanting a rich girlfriend in Las Vegas.  So of course he went to Toad Suck, Arkansas.  Wouldn’t you know, we accidentally came up with a perfect use for imperfect subjunctive.  Not a structure I planned to teach, but yeah, we learned “It would be logical if he went to Vegas, but he didn’t go to Vegas”.  We didn’t drill the whole tense.  But “If he went” and “he went” offer a lot of compare/contrast opportunity.  And I can just roll with it.  It isn’t too hard for these kids, and they don’t even need to know that it is called “imperfect subjunctive”.  It is just a vocabulary phrase.  I love Donna Tatum-Johns’s way of describing pop-up grammar. Treat it like you kid just asked you a sex ed question–just answer the question that was asked and move on.  Don’t give them any more information than what they asked.  “Do babies grow in mommies’ bellies?”  “Yes they do.”  The kid didn’t ask about the birds and the bees.  In a recent workshop, Scott Benedict mentioned that level 1 students in most languages learn some imperfect subjunctive forms without realizing it.  “Je voudrais…” in French or “Quisiera…” in Spanish.  Kids learn these easily, because they are taught them as vocabulary with meaning, not part of a language pattern.

Using CI as the basis of my courses, even when it isn’t an actual TPRS story, has been life-changing.  I connect with my students more, spend less time writing daily plans (although probably equal time assembling “units”), differentiate almost unconsciously, and can go with the flow as my students’ abilities and interests dictate.  They have more engagement, so I enjoy myself more.  And in the environment of public education these days, that is a big deal.

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