This is my first blog post since the 2018-2019 school year started, and I am really excited to get going again. I wanted to wait until I had gotten a bit deeper into the school year before writing a post.
As many of you know, I teach 6th, 7th and 8th grade Spanish, and I have two sections of each grade. In this first post, I want to reflect a bit on my teaching from last year.
For the first time ever, I am SO confident in the work that my students and I did last year. We all worked so hard to maintain a 90% target language classroom on my part and on their part, and the benefits were outstanding--much better than I could have ever imagined. If you do not do 90% target language with your students, it really is time to start.
Instead of doing a review this year, I decided to give my final exam for 6th graders to the 7th graders and the final for 7th grade to the 8th graders. This way, I could see the output that they could produce from the previous year, and I would know where I needed to start. In this post, I am only going to focus on the students who had me in 6th grade so that I can reflect on my own growth as a teacher. As I began evaluating the proficiency of the students who had me last year, I had a huge smile on my face because what they were able to produce was significantly higher than what my students have produced in the past before I did 90% target language use.
I had seventh graders using "if" phrases and words like "cuando (when)". This, to me, is very impressive because these are students who only saw me four times a week last year for about 45 minutes. And they are the majority of my students, whereas, in years past, the students using transition words like that were in the minority. The other great thing that I saw was that they were able to talk a lot about Mexico City, which made me so happy because I worked hard on developing thematic units around things I learned when I visited Mexico. This year, I want to focus more on culture with the 6th graders and approach it from a different lense--especially after watching my students speak fearlessly with a woman from Mexico last year in our school's portal.
Aside from my students' language production, I am also proud of last year because I finally felt like I wasn't teaching a textbook (most of the time). Each year, I include more and more thematic units to make my classroom more interesting and relevant. If we are not teaching culture (which is hard), then we are missing a huge part of our standards. I still struggle with how I do this, but the more I do it and the more research I do, the better it gets. My hope is to focus more on the "perspectives" of culture this year because I think I focus too much on "products" and "practices." One step at a time!
Developing these thematic units takes so much work, but it is soooooo worth it. I have found ways of connecting the curriculum that we already have with authentic resources through my development of Integrated Performance Assessments, and I am proud of it. Since we do not have a curriculum apart from the textbook, I view it as my responsibility to make my classroom as relevant as possible to the world around my students and me. Plus, life is boring if we keep teaching the same stuff the same way every year. YUCK.
My goals: I decided I wanted to write my goals here on my blog because I think that it is more likely to happen if I put it all in writing!
This year, I need to continue to work on thematic units and writing them down. I have developed so much stuff, and I am starting to lose track of it all!
I need to develop more listening assignments because it is a hugeeee weakness in our department and our STAMP tests from last year showed us that it was our students' weakest skill (another reason to use the target language as often as possible in the class!).
I want to dive deeper into cultural perspectives--the WHY of culture.
Rework the 6th grade curriculum. Since I am expecting the students to speak as much Spanish as possible, I cannot start with the alphabet. I need to teach them how to express themselves first.
Try to find ways to teach things more communicatively without having to explicitly teach them, especially numbers. I know there are plenty of teachers who never explicitly teach numbers, and I am working on joining that club!
Use the PACE model more so that my students talk more and discover new things about the language on their own.
Focus more on my success and the growth of my students without being concerned about what others think, do or say. As teachers we get a lot of criticism from people who are not in our classroom, and I need to be confident in what I do; I am seeing how well it works, and I cannot wait to keep getting better!
BOOYAH.
Love you all for reading,
Timothy
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