“AHA” Moment #3 from Mike Peto’s Guidebook: Write and Discuss Every Day

I am going back to how I started 10 years ago in my school. I always wanted students to have a notebook and pencil, and somewhere along the way this became a problem for students. So again, I will require all students to have a binder with paper or a notebook/folder. For the past few years, I have removed this expectation because “too many” or “some” students struggled to do it. But I do not think removing the requirement has benefited my students. Thinking about it, I do think that removing the requirement helped alleviate my stress as a teacher – but this should not have been the decision for a practice that helps students. Having pencils and paper is a whole different issue, and I think I will probably have to continue to relegate to having these resources available.

I will say that as the teacher, I must be sure to require students to use their notebook on a daily basis. One of the major components of Mike Peto’s approach (fully described in his guidebook The Two Conversations Classroom: A Complete, Student-Centered Approach to Teaching a Second Language) is to incorporate a Write and Discuss for each lesson/day. After completing a Write and Discuss summary with students, students then copy what was written; having students wait to copy the summary until I have finished will be a change in my current practice. So where will students write this? In their notebooks of course. Not only does this require them to keep a notebook but it also serves as a recollection of what happened in class each day and provides loads of Comprehensible Input at sentence and paragraph level that students are reading. This is also what students should use to study. It is the content from class. This is what is important, and this will be a change in how I present material, and subconsciously, let my students know what is crucial and the most important. 

Why is this a revelation and an “AHA” moment for me? It is because I think this change might help resolve another problem. I admittedly test my students often on high frequency verb lists. You can see this post that describes what I do, and as of now, I have decided that I will continue doing it for a number of reasons but I need students to know that this is only a small fraction of their learning. Many students feel this is all that is important and necessary for them to be successful in class and build their proficiency. In truth, mastery list verb quizzes are a very  small portion of their learning and overall competence.

When students feel comfortable relying on Quizlet at the word level, they prioritize the short-term process of learning over the long-term process of acquiring through loads of Comprehensible Input (which takes focus and much more attention than many of my students are accustomed to doing). Using these two key components every day, the Write and Discuss summary and a daily quiz that I will discuss next, will continue to build and foster the needed mindset for acquiring language.   

As I mentioned in my MITTEN CI post, every day Mike’s classes end with a graded exit quiz about content. Even this year, I ended many classes with exit quizzes but my approach was different. Mike’s quizzes are questions in target language about the day’s class Input/Content. My quizzes would often focus on what the meaning of the new vocabulary structure was that I had hoped students acquired. It was not about the Input/Content but rather the Vocabulary/Content. It is true that my desire for doing a comprehension-based quiz that follows the idea of providing the meaning of words is a formative assessment that informed me if students were acquiring the language at word level. When too many students missed a word, I knew I had not yet provided enough Input that was comprehended by students for them to really acquire it. That is a different problem and I will address it in the future when I discuss targeted vs. non targeted structures, but changing the format of my daily quiz might be a key to the former problem. I must require students to value the Input/Content and follow that in class. Early on in the year, Mike suggests to make quizzes very doable for students so they have success. Getting these quick quiz grades into the grade book everyday might be a challenge for me but it will be a critical piece in articulating to students the importance of the daily Input/Content. Only time will tell about this thought, but I look forward to seeing how Mike implements the daily quizzes as I take his Brazilian Portuguese classes this summer. 

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