Food for Thought – or Food and Thought?

Yesterday I had pizza and sayings for lunch.

The pizza shop where I ate has quotes on their wall, and I always read them when I am waiting in line to order. Not that I go out for pizza all that often.

Usually I take something in with me to read while I’m waiting for the pizza, but yesterday I didn’t have anything. So, I sat where I could read the sayings on the wall.

Some of them were pretty inspiring, and since I have been thinking about the four elements of the Pike Place Fish Market Philosophy, I related several of them with that.

Most directly related is this quote from Jim Elliot, missionary and martyr in Ecuador to the Quechua and Huaorani:

“Wherever you are, be all there!”

Be there. That is significant advice. Of course, it means more than physical presence. It means mental, emotional, spiritual, etc. It means going all in and experiencing the moment to the fullest. Elliot’s quote goes on: “Wherever you are, be all there! Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God”.

This week in my classes I worked on just being there with my students.

It’s more difficult in the first-year class than in classes that have acquired more German just to “hang out” in the language. But it is both possible and worthwhile.

In their book “Enacting the Work of Language Acquisition: High Leverage Teaching Practices”, Eileen W. Glisan and Robert Donato discuss Building a Classroom Discourse Community. As they deconstruct or “unpack” this High Leverage Teaching Practice (HLTP), Glisan and Donato note that Engaging Students in Oral Classroom Communication “permeates everything that teachers do in their classroom” and can be viewed as “a way of doing business”. (p. 48)

The elements that lead to establishing a classroom discourse community include 1) Familiarity with and among students, 2) Contexts for interaction (e.g. the class, school, and community), 3) Spontaneous Interaction / Chit-Chat, 4) Humor, and 5) IRF and Interactional Space.

Spontaneous Interaction is one of the things that happens often in my classes. It is one of the means I use to help students become familiar with one another, and I emphasize the common context of school and community in the discussions.

Importantly, I do not simply do superficial “surveys” with students. Sure, I may ask for a show of hands on who went to the football game on Friday, but I don’t leave it there. We talk about the score, who was there, and I encourage students to talk about their perception and experience using German as much as they can.

We also talk about plans for the weekend and what students did on the weekend. I also try to go more in depth on these items and not just skim the surface and move on. For example, on Friday, one of my students mentioned going to a “haunted house” on the weekend. I took the time to find out which haunted house it was, why she was going, did she like the adrenalin rush from being scared, what was the haunted house like, who was she going with, etc.? Other students also helped explain what the haunted house was like, and we compared it to the most widely known “haunted house” in the area, “Knott’s Scary Farm” (put on by Knott’s Berry Farm, a local amusement park).

This was Chit-Chat that focused on items of interest to the students, and was part of the community context in which my students live.

In another class, the subject of a poetry slam was mentioned. This prompted one of the students to challenge another student to a poetry slam. We abandoned the prepared lesson to make time for a poetry slam in German. Not just the two original students took part but others as well. This continued for about 20 minutes before it began to lose steam, and I ended it before it could become a “drag” on enthusiasm or boring. That way students would remember it as a highlight moment from class. This was, btw, a second-year German class, and even some of my “less stellar” students enjoyed contributing what they could. Everyone in the class took part, even if it was not performing but listening and encouraging their classmates. Engagement was so high that I later had to apologize to the teacher next door for getting so loud. However, the noise was appropriate to the activity and level of engagement, so I was willing to have to ask for forgiveness rather than trying to shut it down.

Oh, and I wrote on the board to ask my student on Monday how the haunted house was. Follow-up is extremely important in establishing a relationship that shows my interest in my students.

Thursday evening was the schools’s Fall Festival, and several of my students in the period that did the poetry slam had performed in the festival the previous night. You might think they would be too tired to be enthusiastic, but that was far from the case. Yes, at the beginning of class, everyone said that they were tired when I asked “Wie geht’s?” (How’s it going?) But when I gave the 8-10 students an opportunity to present one of their numbers to the class, they seized it with enthusiasm. While the song was not in German, the encouragement was, and this was an opportunity to gain greater familiarity with several students, their talents, and their interests. I was willing to sacrifice the 3-4 minutes of using German for benefits derived from the musical production. It was a judgment call that I made.

A Classroom Discourse Community develops over time

These sorts of experiences do not happen right away. The classroom community must be developed and nurtured. Students must feel safe talking about themselves and their interests and even taking chances with the language. Students must have a baseline of proficiency in the language. As Glisan and Donato note, a Classroom Discourse Community “develops over time as the teacher and learners get to know one another, as their bank of shared understandings and experiences grow, and as learners’ language abilities develop.” (p. 49)

In future posts I will explore other elements and practices in building a Classroom Discourse Community.

For those of you who are interested, here – in  no particular order – are some other quotes for the pizza shop that I thought enough worth remembering to copy down on a napkin. I hope you get some inspiration from them.

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where quality is expected” -Steve Jobs

“When it’s hard and you are doubtful, give more” -Francis Chan

“The miracle is this – the more we share, the more we have” -Leonard Nimoy

“Fear is the parent of cruelty” -James Anthony Froude.

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong” – Mahatma Gandhi

A great deal could be said about each of these, but I will simply leave them with you as stimuli for thought.