The Silent Treatment
Part 1 - http://youtu.be/MDJVLAWx51A
Part 2 - http://youtu.be/XTclXVlPBzk
Part 3 - http://youtu.be/d0kzFt8oh2M
After Tom had talked last week about the notion that teachers are useless, I thought about in what ways we can fail at teaching and for me especially, how I have a tendency to talk students through problems too much, and don't allow them to work out things with my mouth shut. Well, as I was recovering from my sinus infection, nature took away my voice for the first couple days of last week so I decide to do a little activity with my students to review from the lessons before midterm week and holiday week. Basically I set up the class in this format. I couldn't speak, so I had the whiteboard and a few simple gestures I would do for things like "speak in full sentence" "think about" "say" "why' "how" and "more please". I was really surprised how well the student could understand what information I wanted from them and the quality of their responses. I filmed it for a couple of classes, but the first day, the camera got flipped somehow and recorded the window, and the second class, half of the video is blurry (first half to come on youtube after upload time). These classes made me realize how effective i can be while remaining silent. There are many occasions where I should keep my mouth shut, or at least simplify my speech in order to get the students thinking out language problems on their own. We read about error correction being fairly useless unless it gets the student actively thinking about how to construct the answer to their problem. Its definitely a concepts I need to try to use more often.
Let's see if you can get into some specifics from your lessons, Jason. This is a fruitful discovery, but still more generalized than it should be if you're to achieve real gains from it.
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