silence is golden

Today I had a breakthrough of sorts. I’ve been wanting to try a “silent lesson” ever since Sophie (one of my CELTA tutors) told me about it. Because I teach a group of first graders, it was a debate whether or not to try it. I’m still learning to love the group of students and figure out how the heck I am supposed to teach them. There are moments that are shining and there are moments that are crappy. How would a group of 6-year-olds respond to a class when the teacher doesn’t talk? Would I just lose control of the class completely? How could I manage teaching English without speaking English?

Well, today I got my answer.

We follow a workbook (“LWB”) to teach English. Because I teach the high-level English class, they go through it pretty fast, which leaves (at times) a lot of extra space to fill in the 40 minutes. I have been trying to spice things up and get the students to learn how to learn. Some of the students want the information handed to them on a platter, while others breeze through because what we are doing is not a challenge. I want to create an autonomous learning atmosphere, I want the students to learn to be responsible for their own learning.

The last two days have been lessons about context clues: how to understand a word by looking at pictures of surrounding words. We already did come context clue week last week, so I didn’t want to do the same thing. I had an idea about doing Pictionary, but that seemed a bit blasé and dull on its own. About an hour before the class, I thought about a Stomp presentation that I saw when I was in middle school. In the presentation, my brother led a group of people in a variety of clapping and stomping patterns without speaking—it was absolute genius. I thought that would be interesting to try with my class, but how could I incorporate it into English?

Context clues. It was a moment of pure brilliance. What better way to teach context clues than having the students figure out what to do from my actions? What better way to show them that context clues don’t necessarily mean the obvious? Well, I admit that it was a work in progress when the class started, but I committed to the “silent lesson”.

The students know to start an exercise called the DOL each day when they come in. The best tables get “stars” (magnets I stick on the board next to the group names) and at the end of class, the group with the most gets an extra stamp in their LWB. For every ten stamps they receive, they get a jewel. For every three jewels, they get to look into my prize bag and choose a prize. (At this moment, all I have is the bag….haha!) I know it sounds a bit much, but the students love it and they want those stamps!

So as class began today, I watched and waited as they did the DOL. The only words I spoke at the beginning were to instruct them to put the DOL away and “sit nicely”. When everyone was ready, the silent lesson began. I started by going to one group of students and clapping twice. The whole class did it, so I motioned again for the single group to do it. After a few tries, they got it. I went around the room and assigned (without speaking, motions only) different clapping patterns. When all of the patterns were assigned, I stood at the front and pointed to each group individually. It took a minute and some of the students didn’t really get it, but it was an overall success.

Then I had the students stand up and get into a line in the back of the room. Again, I did different motions to show clapping and stomping patterns. When I motioned for the students to sit down, Mary—one of the students—asked me why I wasn’t talking. I merely smiled and had the class sit down. I pulled out my bag of chopsticks (each chopstick has a name of a student on it) and pulled one at random. It was a sweet boy named Ray that was chosen, what a cutie. He came up and I whispered in his ear to draw a cat on the iPad (which is projected onto the screen). I motioned for the class to look at the screen and call out when they knew what it was. When he was done drawing, I had a few more students come up and draw. Man, they were doing so well! Even though I was randomly picking the names from the bag, they would sit nicely each time in hopes that I would pick them.

After a successful round of silent Pictionary, I showed the students the page to turn to in the LWB. They opened their workbooks and began working furiously. In order to make sure that everyone was on the same page and doing the work correctly, I selected students that were already done to come up and answer a question. Once the LWB material was done, I did another small round of clapping patterns.

Finally, with a few minutes left in class, I spoke. The students were a bit shocked, I think. I asked them if they knew what to do today and how did they know. They told me that I gave them instructions and showed them what to do, that way they could do it on their own. It was a very satisfying response! For that, each student took home a fruit snack.

What a lesson today! I was nervous and unsure of how a silent lesson would play out, but it worked. Hey, it could have failed and that would have been a lesson learned as well. It has shown me that it is okay to experiment in the classroom with different methods. These students have long days in this school and honestly, it can get boring for them. I think mixing it up and doing unique things in class will not only help the students enjoy their learning, but help me improve my teaching skills.

For being one heck of a talker, silence was the best teacher today.