Authentic Language Use and Thematic Units

Hola, mi gente:

This year has been an exceptionally amazing year for me in both my personal and teaching life. This year, I have seen the power of developing thematic units to allow for more authentic use of language.

In the past (as early as last year), I have felt like my teaching has been pretty choppy. What I mean by this is that I wasn't connecting the material of my units enough. Right now, the textbook is our curriculum; however, we are lucky in Andover to have a lot of freedom.

What do I mean when I say my teaching was "choppy"? 

I think that we all have done it/still do it. We teach vocabulary, then grammar and then maybe something cultural (if even that). However, I wasn't very good at connecting those three things together; I may have tried, but it wasn't authentic use of language. I also wasn't keeping in mind whether or not the material I was teaching was going to move students forward in their proficiency. The whole point of a unit is that the lessons all connect to an overarching theme and essential question and a textbook just doesn't cut it. 

What am I working on now? 

As I said above, I am doing my best to work on developing thematic units, but we are moving through material so much faster than before now that our language use is more communicative and authentic, so I am finding that I cannot do it all alone anymore. Luckily, the goal of our curriculum advisory board this year is to develop thematic units! WOOOO! 

As I have mentioned before, our curriculum is the textbook, and we all just make our own adjustments as we see fit. This year, I have been making huge adjustments with these thematic units, but I have to make sure that I am being consistent with what the other teachers are teaching. Otherwise, our department will have no consistency, and it will make it very hard for students to move from teacher to teacher. 

As a result, I have been trying to take the topics that our textbook supplies and some of the grammar to make them into thematic units. It's not easy because a textbook shouldn't be a curriculum, but I have been making it work. As our advisory board works through the curriculum, we will definitely have to remove and add certain things to make it more authentic, but until then, I am sticking to what I have been doing. 

I've also learned that we do not have to teach all the forms of something--we only need to teach the things we need for the unit. For example, I do not need to teach the yo, tú, él, ella, nosotros, etc. forms of the past tense if the unit doesn't require all forms yet. Otherwise, the language use becomes less authentic. We use the ones we need and the rest will come when it becomes necessary.

Examples:

Technology use:

In 7th grade, I am supposed to teach them emotions, prepositions, and comparatives. I realized that I can take the AP theme of Science and Technology and the sub-theme/topic of "the effects of technology on oneself and society." In this unit, I had to do a lot of research, but it was SO worth it because we are now using language to talk about real things. 

I hadn't thought of this theme soon enough, so I did not tie in emotions, but next year I plan on talking about how technology affects our emotions. 

However, I was able to tie in prepositions and comparatives to make sure I am consistent with the grammar in our current textbook curriculum. Prepositions: How much time do adolescents spend in front of a screen? The average adolescent spends around _____ hours using.... Do you sleep next to your phone? Etc.
Comparatives: I spend more time using _____ than _____. Etc. Etc. 

The great thing about this unit is that we are learning about technology statistics and how it affects us while also using vocabulary that is authentic and WAY more useful than textbook vocabulary. For example, I had to teach my students the word for "should" in Spanish because we are making recommendations about how to limit screen time. "Should" is such a useful word and NO ONE TEACHES IT (I know I am being dramatic; some people do).

*Grammar rant. You can skip this part if you want!* This is also an awesome preview of the conditional tense because, in Spanish, "should" is "debería/deberías'/deberíamos, etc." which is the conditional tense of the verb "deber" which, when conjugated normally, means "to have to/must." Maybe this will be helpful to them when they get to the high school and learn the conditional tense! 

Architecture:

Another unit that I am sure we all have is the unit on the house. I used to hate this unit because I felt like I was teaching vocabulary and nothing useful with regard to true communication. We basically learned housing vocabulary, and the students talked about their homes and ideal homes and blah blah blah. But how often do we talk about our ideal home in our native language? Maybe sometimes, but I really do not think that the students see the benefit of this unit, and what is the essential question attached to that? 

*Side note* An essential question is a question that does not have one specific answer, NOT questions like ,"what key event caused the start of World War I?"

This year, I have decided to make the house unit about architecture instead. I did spend a little time on house vocabulary but mostly because it was going to be useful for the unit on architecture that I was previewing. 

Right now, the students and I are in the process of learning about the architect Antoni Gaudí's architecture--in particular, the elements of nature found in La Casa Batlló. I created a Google Slides presentation using Pear Deck and put in pictures I took from my trip to Barcelona. Pear Deck allows you to create interactive PowerPoints, so I would show the students the piece of architecture, then have them use pear deck to draw the element of nature that they thought the piece of architecture was modeled after, and then we would talk about the answers. This has been one of my favorite units I have ever developed, and the students were SO into it! 

Now that I developed this unit, I don't feel like I am teaching just vocabulary. They are learning so much vocabulary but also learning useful grammar at the same time; we have incorporated a lot of past tense and even the impersonal "se" in Spanish because they need to learn phrases like "it was built to look like..."

I have to give a huge shoutout to two people who have helped me a lot: Laura Terrill and Diana Zawil. Laura did a workshop on thematic unit development at the MaFLA conference, and I learned SO MUCH. Diana is one of the AP teachers in my district, and she provided me with lots of sheets containing the AP themes to help me with my unit development. She has also helped me a lot in the unit I am working on about the Vejigante in Puerto Rico. THANK YOU! 

Conclusion:

I am relatively new to thematic unit development, but it truly has been amazing for me so far. I have developed 4 new units this year and I have a lot more in the works. It has been a really productive year and has made me love teaching even more. Sometimes, I can be a creature of habit, but being a creature of habit as a teacher can be dangerous. We HAVE to constantly be updating our curriculum, materials, and teaching styles. If not, we are doing our students an injustice. Fear of change has no place in education, in my opinion.

Teaching has to be relevant no matter what the subject area is. Teaching household items because they "might need to know the vocabulary someday" is not making the material relevant enough. It's a start, but it's not enough. Having an essential question, a theme, and topics for all of our units is so important and unbelievably useful. If you haven't tried thematic units, I urge you to try it this year--even if it's only one! We have to start somewhere. 

Thanks for reading!

Timothy