The Importance of Getting Feedback FROM Students

Hola hola:

We give our students feedback on a daily basis in our classrooms with our opening activities, assessments, quizzes, classroom conversations, etc. They are so used to getting feedback from us, but how often do we elicit feedback from them? And I mean TRUE feedback.

At my last school, it was a requirement for teachers to give a course evaluation every year at the end of the year. However, it was basically a fill in the bubble thing for most of us with very little to no opportunities for students to write open-ended feedback.

I think that a lot of people do some type of feedback at the end of the year, but I think that the end of the year is too late. 

When I was doing an evaluation at the end of the year, school was already over! If we can improve on something, don't we want to know about it before the year has come to an end?

Feedback from students about teacher surveys:

At the end of every term (there are 3 at my school), I give my students a mostly open-ended feedback form for them to fill out about me on Google Forms. This way, it can be anonymous, and I can get real feedback. 

I worked with some of my 8th graders this year to help me perfect this form. Here were some of the things the students said about surveys they've taken about teachers in the past:

1. If it is not open ended, then we are not giving the feedback that we want. If the question is something like "Do you feel like your teachers respect you? 4     3     2    1," the students said it makes it really hard for them to answer. One student said, "one of my teachers doesn't respect us, but the rest do, so what do I put? A 4? A 3?" I think that this is a valid point. 

2. The other reason for having open-ended questions is so that students can bring up topics that we might not even be considering. They said that there are specific things a teacher might do like mumble but most questions aren't "Do I mumble too much?" so how are they going to give that feedback if there's nowhere for them to write it? 

My teacher evaluation form:

Here are some important elements that I think make a good feedback form for a teacher:

1. It has to be anonymous. If it is not, students will not be honest. They will be afraid to criticize their teacher knowing that they have months left in the class. 

2. It has to have a lot of open-ended questions (as mentioned above). 

3. It has to have a way for students to reflect on their own effort in the course as well. Students agreed with me that sometimes they don't learn a lot in a course but don't always blame the teacher because they don't always do what they are supposed to. 

4. You have to remind the students over and over that they need to be honest. Otherwise, the feedback is useless. 

5. The questions cannot all be about academics. Social emotional learning is just as important. 

Here is the feedback form for me as a teacher that I developed this year with the help of some 8th graders: 

Sample Teacher Feedback Form

Here is a quick overview of the questions:

1. How do you feel this year is going for you in Spanish class? 

2. What are your strengths in this class?

3. What are you struggling with in class (if anything)?

4. Is the pace of the class too slow, too fast, or just right?

5. Do you feel you are learning in this class?

6. Do you feel like I am clear of my expectations, assignments, and grading? 

7. Do you feel like we talk about real things in this class or do you feel like it's a lot of grammar practice?

8. Do you feel like I care about your education and want you to acquire as much Spanish as possible? 

9. Do you feel like I care about my students, their lives, and their progress? 

10. Do the proficiency levels (Novice High, Intermediate Low, etc.) help you know how to improve?

11. Is there anything that I should do more of? Less of? Why?

12. What can I do to be a better teacher? Please be honest. This truly is helpful and anonymous.

13. Do you feel comfortable expressing when you do not understand what something means? 

14. Then students rate themselves on effort, classroom behavior, organization, quality of work, and checking the online gradebook for assignments. 

15. Lastly, they make a goal for improvement. 

DISCLAIMER: These evaluations can be hard to read:

It is NEVER easy to read negative feedback about yourself, and it is hard to focus on the good--even if it wayyyyy outweighs the bad. However, this is way more important than our egos. If we are not trying to improve our teaching, then we are not doing the best job we can. 

Take the negative comments with a grain of salt; we all have students who don't love us or don't love the way/things we teach. That is SO normal. However, we have to look for patterns. If more than one student is saying the same thing, then it is a problem. There's a difference between, "I hate you. You suck" and "I think that you should work on getting grades back quicker." 

What I learned this year:

After reading my course evaluations, I learned a lot of great stuff about myself as a teacher! Here were some of the amazing comments: 

"i feel like you have a good mind set to help the class grow"

"I feel that I have learned a lot thus far in the year. I have also been able to use some of the Spanish used in class to communicate at home."

"I think you are a great teacher and that the way you teach the class has improved my Spanish speaking a lot."

"NOTHING I TOLD YOU, YOU WERE A PERFECT TEACHER!"

"I feel that I improved a lot from last year and learn a lot quicker in this class"

"I feel really good, I came into Spanish this year and I did not feel confident and was really scared since I was really bad but even in the last 2-3 months I feel like I have learned more than I have last year and feel like in have really grown as a Spanish speaker."

"We talk about lots of real things, and really never work on just grammar sheets. We have pages of cierto falso which help us repeat things we are learning in class by writing them and when someone has a grammar question you can answer it. Otherwise it is not too much grammar practice."

And here were some of the negative ones: 

"Be a bit more patient."

"I think you should be more patient with some kids."

"I feel that you could perhaps be more patient as you seem to get frustrated easily."

"I think you could be less strict when students do or get something wrong. Although you are usually not strict just when you are in a bad mood."

Final Thoughts: 

These are never easy to read, but I had to remind myself just how amazing the positive comments were, and 90% of them were all positive. But, I noticed a pattern. Clearly, a lot of my students were feeling that I was not being patient enough. THIS IS A PROBLEM, and if I did not learn this when I did, the whole year probably would have remained the same. So, I did research on how to keep my patience and have been working hard to make sure that I don't sweat the small stuff anymore.  I told my students that this was a pattern and I promised them to be better about it. Students have said that things have gotten so much better since first term, and that makes me feel a lot better. I cannot wait to see what they say when I give them a feedback form for the end of the second term. 

My main point is: don't be afraid to get feedback from students. It's not always constructive because they're kids, and they don't always know how to be constructive with their criticism, but that doesn't make their opinions any less valid. This is too important to not do. Just re-read all the positive comments as much as you have to in order to help you remember how amazing of a teacher you are, and find patterns of criticism in the not-so-happy comments to help you be even more amazing. 

Keep being amazing,

Timothy

Why I think it's a mistake to start Spanish 1 with dates and the alphabet

Hola hola:

How many of you start out year one talking about dates, numbers, the alphabet, colors, etc.? This blog post is about why I think that this practice should not continue in language classrooms.

I know that this post may ruffle up some feathers, so I want to start by saying these three things:

1. You are not a bad teacher if you do this.
2. Up until this year, I had done this.
3. This is my opinion.

My experience in the past: 

In my few years as a language teacher, I have always started out the year with the concepts that I have mentioned above. But what does this mean? To me, it means that we are not really communicating much information about ourselves for at least the first month (maybe more) of school. It just seems like a loss to me because we are hoping to get our students to really start communicating as soon as possible, but how much can they really do with the date, numbers, and the alphabet?

Last year, I noticed that I wasn't really learning about my students in the target language until about two months into school because we start with those concepts mentioned above and then go to weather (which is communication but not communication about themselves).

Why is this a problem? 

Well, for those of us who see the power in target language use by the students AND the teacher in the classroom, this is a huge issue because we are not giving our students tools to express much right off the bat. This makes it nearly impossible for the first few weeks of the language to be "full immersion."

The other problem is that we are spending a lot of time on a "unit" that really could just be an everyday routine. Why do we need to even do a unit on the date? Can't we just talk about the date every day and give students input that way?

In the past, I have always told myself that my classroom is like a kindergarten class, and that's what they start with in kindergarten, so it makes sense to start with that in a language classroom. But my class is NOT a kindergarten class (and even if yours is, I still don't think that this is what we should be starting with). Here's my thinking behind that: kindergarteners have already had years of exposure to the language. Kindergarteners go to kindergarten with some ability to communicate in their native languages. They know how to express their wants and needs, likes and dislikes, etc. So, starting with the date in kindergarten does make more sense.

Our students in Spanish 1 (in my case, 6th grade), do not usually have that language, so I think that that's where we should begin our Spanish 1 curricula.

What I did this year: 

If you read my last blog post, then you know that I have been developing a lot of thematic units this year. My goal was to do it just for 8th grade, but it's just too good to only do with one grade.

Before beginning use of the target language in my 6th grade classroom, I spent the first few days talking about the various proficiency levels with regard to presentational skills. I wanted the students to understand the various levels; otherwise, my feedback on assignments is useless to the students.

It is important to start out with essential vocabulary for the classroom. This includes stating your name, answering how you are, etc. I don't think we can leave this out because we need to get to know our students, and knowing their names is essential.

After that, I started with useful classroom phrases to help the students express their needs. These phrases include things like: can I go to the bathroom? Can I go to the water fountain? I don't know. Can I have a pencil/paper/a pen? Can I go to my locker? I forgot. My computer is dead. How do you say...? Never mind. How do you spell...? Etc. 

I think a lot of us do that, which is great. But I think there should be more. I have a circumlocution wall, and I want the students to know how to use it as soon as possible. As a result, this becomes the next part of our language acquisition process. We learn to describe things: It's an animal. It's a person. It's *insert color*, etc. Now, these things are on the wall all year, so as long as students can recognize what they mean, then that's the most important thing. They do not have to produce every single one of these yet by any means.

Now, this is where I used to go into teaching dates, numbers, the alphabet, etc. This year, however, I brushed that stuff aside, and taught the students how to express their likes and dislikes. For the first time ever, I had the students really talking to me about themselves in the first few weeks of school, and I was able to implement a Spanish only classroom MUCH sooner than in the past. And this does not just include "I like" and "I don't like." I just don't think that's enough. What about "I love," "I hate," "I kind of like," "I don't care about," etc.? Seeing where my sixth graders are at this year compared to last year is a HUGE difference--and I mean huge. I also learned A LOT about them, and they learned a lot about me from my input. My sixth graders actually call me "Señor Pepinillos" (Mister Pickles) this year because they learned early on how much I despise pickles. (I threw in the alphabet at the end of this unit, but I only spent a day or two using the letters because they picked up on them so quickly. And I did NOT teach them the alphabet by teaching the alphabet song this year, which is another thing I highly suggest.)

I had read in many blogs/heard at many conferences that people do not explicitly teach numbers. I never understood how that worked until I pushed this stuff to a later time. Finally, my students have acquired numbers in a much more authentic way. I give out group points, so they were exposed to them that way. We play quizlet live, so they were exposed to them upon entering the game code. There were so many times that I was using numbers in class without having to explicitly teach them.

Now come the thematic units. I won't get into the details of this thematic unit because that's not the point of this post, but I started a unit on the weather (but in much more detail than in the past). This has allowed me to teach about other countries and has given me the chance to use numbers again in a more realistic way. I had the students learn how to convert Celsius and Fahrenheit for the first time this year. This has required students to use numbers (obviously). Each day, they were assigned a Spanish-speaking country, and they had to state the date in that country (aha! I found a way to include the date later on in the year!), guess the weather in that country, look up the weather and temperature, guess the season based on the weather/location of the country, and state the time in that country to see the time difference. This unit requires A LOT of input (as does any unit).

There's a lot here, but it works out. I was able to teach dates, time, numbers and weather expressions in a meaningful way. This will mean that, later down the line, I won't have to spend much time teaching "time" because they have already used it. This will give me more time for more thematic units! We have kept a running list of the countries/territories and have marked the seasons for each after each lesson. At the end of the unit, students are to discover the different seasons for Central America, South America, etc. based on the information they have gathered throughout the unit.

Conclusion: 

I think it's important to reiterate that I really do not think that you are a bad teacher if you do this, and you are welcome to disagree with me! I just think we have spent so many years following textbooks as if they were the curriculum that we haven't stopped to think about what's truly essential to our students' communication skills. It's important to be willing to make changes and try new things. I was nervous to not teach numbers explicitly this year, but I went for it, and I am really happy with the results.

On my end-of-term-one evaluations, all my sixth graders wrote that they felt that we talked about real things/people in class. This is the first year that I have ever gotten that response from sixth graders on this feedback form at the end of term one. They always used to write that they felt like we were not really communicating in class, so I think the students see the value in the language more if we teach them to talk about themselves sooner rather than later.

My amazing roommate, Megan Waring, reminded me today: "Don't ever feel the need to apologize for trying to be the best." I love this quote. On your road of curriculum development, there will be some rough patches with administrators, colleagues, students, etc. Just keep doing what YOU believe is best.

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

Studying and Homework

Hola hola:

I have been thinking a lot about homework and studying in the past few weeks. It's amazing and cool to see how many different philosophies there are on this. I, like many other teachers, have strong opinions about studying and homework, but it's important to note that these opinions are based on my style and what I teach. Language is not subject matter, so my opinions on this matter do not necessarily apply to other disciplines, and they are just that: opinions.

However, I think that we teachers are hard on each other when we have different homework philosophies. Those who give a lot of homework think that those of use who don't aren't being rigorous enough, and those who don't give a lot of homework think that the other teachers are being too "traditional." I thought it would be a cool idea for me to share my opinions as to why I am a minimalist when it comes to homework and studying to show that there is a reason behind my choices. This is what works best for me as a teacher of Spanish.

Homework: 

I really do not like giving homework, but it's definitely not something I NEVER do, either. I consider myself a minimalist when it comes to homework, but I am way closer to giving no homework than I am to giving homework and here's why:

Acquiring a language is based on input (exposure to the language) through communicative interaction. It is really hard to give communicative homework, so homework ends up being grammar practice and fill in the blank with the correct verb form, which you know is against my personal teaching philosophy. That's not to say that it is impossible to give communicative homework, but it's definitely not as easy as giving explicit grammar activities. 

On the Homework Panel episode of the Inspired Proficiency Podcast , six teachers talked about how they approach homework as language teachers. I like what the people who do give homework have to say, and I don't disagree with their methods. These include things like watching videos, TV, etc. However, I saw myself more in the last three teachers who give little to no homework. 

If we are going to give homework, I, personally, believe that it should still be as communicative as possible and should be used for input. A lot of teachers say that homework is extra practice, but I find that it is frustrating for the students who already know how to do the material and are bored doing the assignment, and it is frustrating for the students who are trying and not succeeding at the homework. It creates unnecessary tension at home between students and guardians/parents, and I just don't want to contribute to that. 

I also feel that homework tends to inflate students' grades a bit. Most teachers assess homework based on effort, so kids are getting good grades for being compliant. When I do give homework, it rarely goes in the gradebook, but I have other ways of rewarding the students who did it. 

When I give homework, I want them to still have to somehow interact with the input. So, the other day, I asked my students to pick someone at home and guess how often that person did a list of things. For example, You play the piano often. This was done in class, and then they had to go home and interview the person they chose to see if they guessed correctly or not. I told the students that, if they conducted the interview in Spanish, they could video it and send it to me to earn group points. It's definitely not my favorite assignment, but here's what it looked like:

It would've taken them no longer than 5-10 minutes, which is another belief of mine. Homework should be short. Due to the fact that my homework assignments do not usually take up much time, I rarely find that I have a student who does not do it.

All this being said, I have learned recently to value different teaching styles and opinions. I have said before that I view myself first and foremost as a Spanish teacher (aside from my students' mental health and safety, of course). I do not view myself as a life skills teacher above facilitating their language acquisition. I do teach my students life skills but in less explicit ways.

Other teachers, especially at the middle school level, disagree with me. They feel that teaching the kids good study habits, organization skills, etc. is more important than their content. This is GREAT. We need people with these different views because then they are getting a lot of different lessons from different teachers with various styles and beliefs. And I am not saying that organization skills and study habits, etc. are not important to me; of course they are. It's just not my number one priority. I will not be giving my students binder checks and things like that because I want their grades to reflect their skills as language learners.

Studying:

As mentioned above, there are a lot of teachers who believe that teaching students good study habits is important, and I love that. It is important for the students to learn how to prepare for assessments--especially in areas like math that are subject matter. Since language is not subject matter, I believe that, if I am doing my job, the students should not have to study. And this is my belief about language teaching. I am not sure that my philosophy would work for other subject areas, but who knows?!

However, I think a lot of teachers are teaching students study habits that are not what's actually best. I love what the two guest speakers on this episode of The Cult of Pedagogy had to say about the best ways to study.  I do not think that these are the skills that most teachers are teaching the students when it comes to study habits, so give it a listen/read and see if there's something you can get out of it as a teacher or as a student.

So, back to my classroom. I am a firm believer in communicative language teaching and proficiency based assessments. This means that all of my tests and quizzes are open ended. I want students to show me their performance proficiency at ALL levels. With this, come spontaneous assessments. Almost all of my assessments are unannounced. Therefore, I do not talk with my students much about study skills because, like I said, if I am giving them spontaneous assessments, then I have to believe that, if I have done my job, they should not have to study. I do not want to know what students can go home and memorize. I want to know what students can do off the top of their heads.

Anyway, I think that it is important for teachers to stay as up-to-date as possible. I know that we are so busy, but doing a little research here and there is so important. We are teaching the people of the future; we should do it well. If we are going to teach students study skills, then we should do our best to make sure that we are teaching them the best ways to go about that. If we are going to give homework, we should make sure that it aligns with our pedagogical beliefs and research. Homework should be purposeful.

As always, I love and welcome comments and questions!

Thanks for reading!

Timothy

Reflection and Goals for the Upcoming School Year

Hola a todxs:

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

Kahoot, Fortnite, and Interpretive Tasks

Hola Hola:

I am in a much happier place than I was in my last post! Most of my additional responsibilities have ended, which is B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L.

As a result, this post is a wee bit long. It is going to be a bit teacher-y because I want to share what I have been doing with interpretive tasks, and the new rubric that I developed. However, before that, if you cannot stand the teacher talk, I am going to talk a bit about how I relate my life and the lives of my students to my teaching.

This past weekend, I went to Lake Winnipesaukee with some of my greatest friends from college. I am currently working on providing input for my students in 8th grade on past tense, so I thought these two events would be perfect. So, I decided to make a Kahoot.

Here's how I have made Kahoot communicative:

It's rare for me to use Kahoot because it's hard for me to use it without it simply being grammar practice. However, every once in a while, I come up with something like what I did today. For those of you who don't know what Kahoot is, I pose a question/statement on the projector, and the students have to click on the right answer on their devices.

So, I created a Kahoot about my trip to Lake Winnipesaukee with my friends. The students would see four statements such as: "Alyssa swam in the lake. Alyssa went kayaking. Alyssa made breakfast. Alyssa slept in a tent." The students have to click on the statement that is true. The reason I consider this to be communicative is because they are all grammatically correct sentences, but the students have to make a logical guess and focus on the meaning. It really is just a matter of guessing which statement makes the most sense the first time around, and the second time around, it's more of a matter of remembering what they learned about my friends and me from the previous round. It's not always my favorite site to use, but the students love it.

Fortnite:

If you are not living under a rock, I am sure you have heard mention of this videogame Fortnite. It is taking over my students' lives, and, to be honest, I am so sick of hearing about it. Howeverrrrrrr, I was listening to The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, and someone was talking about the importance of relating what we teach to our students' lives. I know we hear this a lot, but it is always nice for me to be reminded of just how important this is. The first thing that popped into my head was Fortnite when I was listening to the podcast. I thought, "okay. I need to see if I can find a way to incorporate this into my teaching." I got home, and I did a quick Google search in Spanish.

I learned wayyyyy more about Fortnite than I wanted, but it ended up being one of my favorite decisions this year to incorporate it. I learned about these "skins" or "trajes" as they called them in Spanish. Basically; these are costumes (my students would kill me for calling them that) that you can earn/purchase in the game. I am currently in the clothing unit with my students, so I thought this was perfect! I decided to create an interpretive reading for my seventh graders using this publication about the top ten best skins of Fortnite (according to the author's opinion).

Let me tell you, this is one of my favorite assessments that I have ever given. The Spanish in this reading is NOT easy because it is very colloquial, but the students were SO engaged that they did not even notice. Students who are a bit more difficult to keep engaged in class were asking for permission to continue their answers on the back because they ran out of room. I am smiling just thinking about it!

The criticism I have gotten/given myself about this reading and Kahoot game is that I may not be able to use it again next year. This is so valid, and so true. However, if I want to keep my teaching relevant, I need to be adjusting my practice/assessment methods every year anyway. Isn't that what keeps teaching interesting? I really do not want to become one of those teachers who is so burnt out from teaching the same thing the same way year after year.

Interpretive Assessments:

The development of this interpretive reading on Fortnite also made me sharpen up my interpretive rubric. In my last post, I shared a rubric that I developed, and I said it was a work in progress. It was a work in progress, indeed, and it has changed SOOOO much and so many times since then. I have been meeting with the AMAZING reading specialist at my school over and over again to learn about the different skills and ways one can demonstrate comprehension of a text.

Here is the link to the rubric that I developed.

If you have taken the time to look at this rubric, you will see that there is a lot in there. This has required me to totally reevaluate the way that I give interpretive tasks. Today, I am going to focus on how I've done it with reading.

I give them two parts to the test.  The first test has the reading without the titles/headlines and pictures. The reading specialist told me that this would give me a better understanding of what the higher level students can do. On this assessment without all the visual support, the students are asked to:

·       Create a new title

·       Identify the main idea and support it with information from the text

·       Summarize what they have read

·       Identify the author’s purpose for writing the text (not quite the author’s perspective) 

Then, I give the students the second part of the text. It’s the same text, but now they have the title and the pictures if there are any. On this test, the students are asked to:

·       Identify the main idea if they now believe it’s different from what they wrote on the first part of the assessment.

·       Identify supporting details 

·       Guess meaning from context (I don’t calculate this in with the rubric, but I think it’s an awesome skill that I want them to develop)

·       Make inferences and cultural perspectives

It’s not always easy to associate a grade with this rubric, but I have found a way to do it.

My biggest question is with the supporting details. I know that a good rubric should not refer to quantity, and for the most part, I don’t really look at quantity as much as I do their ability to identify the supporting details and support with information from the text.

However, my question for other world language teachers is: are there different types of supporting details questions that show higher skills? Like, open ended questions versus true and false questions? I’m wondering if I could adjust the rubric with reference to that? I’m just not knowledgeable enough about that to add it to the rubric at this point.

Conclusion:

Although this rubric is not perfect, it is so much better than what I was using before. I am proud of the feedback that it has helped me provide for the students, and I finally feel that I can see the students at all different levels in proficiency on the same assessment. This newer way of assessing reading attached to a topic that the students love has been so inspiring. Try it and let me know how it goes!

Muchas gracias por leer,

Timothy

Burning Out and Assessing Interpretive Tasks

It has been way too long since my last post! I fell into a major burnout in the past month, and I want to talk briefly about my experience in dealing with that. In general, I tend to overwork myself, which I usually don't mind because I love being dedicated to my job, and I don't have kids at home, so I usually have the time to be crazy about giving feedback, etc.

However, in the past few months, I started a Saturday teaching job at Milton Academy, I accepted gigs as the accompanist for three musicals, and it all kind of fell onto me at once. This always happens to me around this time of year, but this year felt WORSE. However, this week has been a wonderful reminder that I always get through it.

The sad thing is that I really let it get the best of me this year, and my students suffered a bit. I took a really long time to get one of my classes their speakings back, and I am still full of guilt because of that. But here's what I learned:

I go out of my way to give really strong feedback on every assessment--especially on speaking assessments. I always type out what they say and then give them feedback on what to do to move to the next level in proficiency. The reason why I was taking so long to give them their speaking assessments back was because I wanted desperately to still be able to do that. Eventually, I realized that, sometimes, I just can't go that in depth, and that is ABSOLUTELY OKAY. I always have the students do self assessments anyway, so it really wasn't necessary for me to be doing all the work. What I ended up doing was just assessing them on the rubric and jotting down notes. I got it done fairly quickly, and then we spent a class period for them to evaluate their own proficiency. I did not feel like it was much less meaningful, and it got the job done. I wish I had given myself a break sooner.


On to the next topic! Despite my busy schedule, I was taking the time to work on developing more interpretive tasks and assessing them. This year, I feel really great about giving the students feedback on their proficiency on performance assessments and interpersonal assessments, but I was totally guessing when it came to reading and listening. I tried to look at the ACTFL descriptors, but it just wasn't enough for me. I started to hate giving interpretive assessments because my feedback was just not strong enough.

I realized I am writing about this in the past tense, but my struggles with interpretive feedback are definitely not over. What I have been doing is meeting with the wonderful Sarah Marsden in my district because she is a reading specialist and I mean it when I describe her as savant; she has such a brilliant mind and is so dedicated to her students and her teaching.

Anyway, I have learned a lot from Sarah on the different skill levels with regard to reading, and I have tried to tailor that to my teaching/assessing in my classroom. I showed her the ACTFL template for interpretive assessments, and we were basically able to pull out the most important skills and how they relate to students' proficiency. So, as of now, I am focusing on these four areas:

Main idea
Supporting details
Inferences
Interculturality

Sarah taught me that recognizing the main idea and making inferences (I tie interculturality into this) are higher-level skills and supporting detail detection is a lower-level skill. This makes sense, but it raised the question for me: why are my first-year students able to always recognize the main idea, then?

The problem was the template that ACTFL uses for interpretive assessments (which is an amazing template, and I am not bashing it!). This template is fantastic for helping students work through texts; it truly is. I was just trying to use it in the wrong way. I spoke with my department head and he said that the template is just that: a way to help students work through a text, but is not necessarily showing us their proficiency. This makes sense to me because my students were doing supporting detail questions and then moving on to the main idea. In other words, my supporting detail questions were giving them the answer to what the main idea is.

So, I will still be using the template, but I am going to give the students two assessments: one will give them the reading/listening and then just ask them to identify the main idea. If they are able to do so, that shows me a higher level of proficiency. Once they finish that part, then the second part of the assessment will include the supporting detail detection. I think this is going to help me give the students better feedback on their proficiency.

I recently did this with a listening assessment that I developed on www.edpuzzle.com. I gave the students three assessments all with the same video: one with just the audio and no visuals, one with the audio and the visuals, and one that stopped and asked questions in the middle of the video (supporting details). At the end of the first audio, I asked for them to identify the main idea. At the end of the second video, I asked them to identify the main idea to see if it was a bit easier for them once they had the visuals in the video as an aid. And the last one was supporting details and inferences at the end. I feel like I was finally able to give the students some meaningful feedback on their proficiency in the interpretive mode.

The other problem, however, was the rubric that I was using. Like all rubrics, there were aspects of it that I loved and others that I hated. However, I was finding that I hated more than I loved about this rubric. I set off on developing my own.

I am putting myself out on a limb here by sharing it with you all. It took me about two days to develop this week, so it is brand new. I have only used it once and made many adjustments to it in the past few days, but, although it is not perfect, I think it is more helpful for me than the rubric that I was using.

Here is the link to the rubric I developed this week.

I would really appreciate any feedback on how to improve this, and any feedback if you like it too! A huge thank you to Kim Talbot, Carlos Brown, Ronie Webster, Tim Eagan, and Jorge Allen for being the first people to take a look at it!

Thanks for reading!

Timothy

Input Activities

We world language teachers always hear about the power of input and how it is the backbone of language acquisition. What this means is that the students need to see/hear the language enough before they can be asked to produce it.

I have to confess now that I totally stunk at this in the past. This is the first year that I am finally realizing the importance of CONSTANT input. Last year, I would do one input day--maybe two--and then move on to output. Totally not enough.

Part of the problem for me was that I was not taking the time to think of new, creative ways to provide my students with input. This year, I have tried my best to come up with creative input activities that are still communicative. It's not easy, so I figured I would share some of my ideas and hopefully get some ideas back! 

I usually start by talking about myself. My eighth graders are discussing things that they recently did, so here is the link to an input activity I did with them to get them seeing the language and focusing on meaning without having to produce any language. I made this activity early in the morning because it had to be things that I recently did. So, for example, the students saw the first statement "I just took the train this morning," and they have to decide if I did, indeed, take the train that morning or not. Once everyone is finished, I go through and tell them which statements are true and which are false. They get group points for every one that they guess correctly. This way, we are focusing on meaning.

Opening Activities:

A HUGE mistake that I used to make last year was doing input days, but always having an output based opening activity. That makes no sense. If my lesson is designed based on the fact that they have not seen the language enough to be able to produce it, then I need to design my opening activity that way, too! 

Google Classroom has been amazing for me for opening activities. I ask a quick question or two to get the class going before the bell rings, and then we jump right into things after that. With my opening activities, I have discovered a few things that seem to work as input pretty well. 

One is, as you saw above, the true or false statements. I will write something about myself, and they have to guess if it is true or false. 

This is a screenshot of an opening activity of mine. This means "True or False: I am going to dance this weekend." So, all the students had to do was decide if they thought I was going to dance that weekend or not. If they guessed correctly, then they got group points. 

Here is another true or false one. This is a statement about a bioluminescent bay in Puerto Rico. The students had to state if it was true or false and rewrite the sentence. This is not language production because all they had to do was copy what I had written.

Another possibility is the "either/or" questions. This is especially useful with vocabulary. It can be as simple as "is this an apple or an orange?" Here is an example I used this year:

I did a lot of either/or questions when I was working with my sixth graders on weather. This means "Is it foggy or sunny out today?" The students would then have to write the correct one. This is still not considered output because the students are just copying "está neblinoso" or "hace sol" from the question.

In the past, I have been so against multiple choice. I still am when it comes to output assessments, but multiple choice is great for input. Here is an example from this year:

What this question is asking my students to do is decide which activity they think my mom likes. I gave them a few options, and they just had to click on the correct one. "She likes to play the guitar/play the tuba/play sports/watch Netflix." Once everyone has submitted a response, I tell them the correct answer, and they receive points if they guessed correctly. It's all about the points for them! Haha!

Another possibility is make this statement true. What this entails is some type of statement about the student, and they have to make the statement true. I don't do this one very often because it's hard for me to explain to the students in the target language. One thing I did this year, though, that was very helpful was teaching the students the phrases "sobre mí" "about me" and "sobre ti" "about you."

This phrase means "I just took the bus to school this morning." If that statement were true for a student, all the student had to do was copy it as is. If it were false, the student had to make it true by either adding a "no" or changing "el autobús" to "un carro" or something of the sort.

Classroom/Homework Input Activities

Everything above is just a quick warm-up to get the class started. However, there are also MANY input activities that occur during the remainder of the class period. This might mean playing Simon Says, drawing pictures to show comprehension, etc. A great resource for me this year has been peardeck.com.  I've found some creative ways to use this site to have students draw things that I mention or survey them, etc. 

Here is the link to an activity that I did to provide my students with input on describing themselves and another person/other people. "We are..." So what they had to do was find a partner and then figure out all the things that they had in common and all the things that they did not have in common. On the last part, you will see 4      3     2      1. The students had to rate how similar they were. At the end, we calculate the class average to see if they are all similar or different. The last section is my biggest weakness. I know that, in order for something to be fully communicative, there has to be some type of goal at the end, but my goals tend to be things like "rate your partner as sedentary or active" or "rate how similar you two are." 

Here is the link to another task similar to the one above. I find it hard to get students to use the word "you all" in Spanish (ustedes/vosotros). So, I thought of this activity. At the bottom, there is a list of descriptions like "you guys are pianists" "you guys are short" etc. I asked the students to think of me and the music teacher at our school. They had to write what we had in common and what we did not have in common. Although there was no task at the end of this activity, it was funny for the students to describe us. 

In this weather activity, the students had to look out the window and check off the statements that were true about the weather outside. This ultimately led to students to pick a Spanish-speaking country and do reports on the weather. The thing that is great about activities like these is that they can be reused because the weather is different every day. It was funny because I am always cold, so the students and I were often arguing in Spanish about if it were cold or not! 

In this activity, I wanted the students to start to be able to recognize when someone says "we are going to...," so I developed this. What the students had to do was think of me and my best friend and guess what we were going to do over the weekend. At the end, they rated themselves on how well they knew me.

Target Language Use

Another extremely important aspect of input is using the target language as often as possible in the classroom. We need to give our students WAY more credit than we tend to; they CAN comprehend way more than we tend to think. 

The target language use by the students is imperative, as well. This year, if you check out my previous posts on target language use, you will see that I have developed some strategies for getting my students to use the target language as often as possible. 

I have noticed that we teachers tend to complain about certain things but then tend to shut down opportunities to possibly solve those problems. "Oh, that won't work in my classroom" or "my students are different." I urge you to just try it. With the right tools in place, the students find AMAZING ways to communicate in the target language. 

One concern with this is that we won't get to know our students if we expect them to speak the target language. In my experience, this is not true. If your classroom is communicative, you will be learning about your students all day every day. This is also just another example of not giving the students enough credit. I am shocked at the things that students are able to tell me using circumlocution, drawings and gestures. The idea behind 90% target language use is not to discourage students, and--at least for me--it does not mean that there is zero English in the classroom.  The idea is to create a culture where the target language comes first. If a student has tried explaining something to me in Spanish, has tried using gestures and has tried drawing, and I STILL don't understand, I will let them tell me in English. However, I can tell you that this has only happened a few times because they almost always find a way to communicate and tell me stories. Trust them and trust yourself to give them the tools they need! It is so worth it!!

Conclusion

I know that this post is long, but I struggled and still struggle with developing input activities, so I think it is important to share these things with each other. I am writing this blog post in the hope that others will share their input activities with me, too. I am ALWAYS looking for new ideas--especially if it is a task with a communicative goal at the end. I am still working on that. And just a reminder, one step at a time. Communicative language teaching does not tend to happen overnight. 

Thanks for reading,

Timothy

My Experience as a Second Language Learner

Hola:

Lately, I have been thinking and talking a lot about other teachers. We teachers can be so rough on each other, and I say "we" because I am including myself in this. It almost reminds me of middle school sometimes when we find backhanded ways of knocking each other down to bring ourselves up or make ourselves feel better. We ALL have insecurities with regard to our teaching, and we always will. We are not perfect. However, I think we need to spend less time thinking about what other teachers are going to think about our students and more about what's best for our students.

When discussing communicative language teaching, one of the biggest questions I always hear (and ask myself) is "but am I preparing them for so-and-so's class?" or "are we preparing them for college?" This question is very valid, but how can our profession move toward communicative language teaching if everyone says that they're not going to do it because many other teachers do not? How are we going to get colleges on board with a communicative approach to language teaching (with the lower levels) and stop giving grammar entrance exams if we keep teaching that way because "the colleges expect it"?

The truth of the matter is that we are preparing our students for college and for other courses. When we teach communicatively, we are using the language for a purpose, and the students acquire more. There is no doubt in my mind about that. When we teach using paradigms that have no meaning, maybe it's cool for the students to see it, but we have to attach meaning to what we do if we want the students to actually be able to do something with the language.

I can say with full confidence that we are preparing students for college because I, myself, am an example of it. I was not lucky enough to start learning Spanish in middle school, so I really started formally learning the language in 9th grade.

Throughout the majority of my high school career, I was taught communicatively. I say majority because I can think of a few things that I was taught explicitly, but for the most part, any grammar practice was either done at home, done as a warm-up for the class, or not done at all. And I can say with great confidence that I did not acquire those structures like double object pronouns, the subjunctive, etc. until I started needing to use them for a purpose. That's just how language acquisition goes! We can be taught something explicitly and pass a test, but I can almost guarantee that those structures will not show up in our speech until we have had enough input on them/interaction with them.

Anyway, when I was in high school, we were almost always using the language for a purpose. We studied art, music, films, different foods, legends, etc. I rarely felt like I was learning language, but rather learning content in the language. I can still talk a lot about legends like "El callejón del beso," art that we studied, animals like "el colibrí abeja," films we studied, etc. from high school. There was so much meaning in all that we were doing that I will never forget it--nor will I forget the vocabulary and grammar that I acquired during that time.

When it came time for me to start applying for college, I chose Worcester State University, and I had to take a placement exam. The exam was pretty standard: grammar questions and a writing assignment. Even though I did not have a lot of explicit teaching, I did very well on that exam. As a freshman in college, I started in a 300 level course "Advanced Spanish Composition II." I was in a class with only one other freshman; the rest were juniors and seniors. I know I am a special case because I became a language teacher, but many of my friends placed out of a language at their colleges/universities, too, and they did not decide to become language teachers. All of this happened after 4 years. I cannot even begin to imagine where students would be if they were taught communicatively in every course from middle school to high school--or better yet, elementary school to high school.

Once I started college, by no means did I always have perfect grammar, but what I did have was the confidence to speak the language, and I learned so much as a result. Many of my classmates were afraid to speak in our conversation courses because they were insecure in their grammar (there were other factors for some people, of course). I truly believe this to be a result of grammar-focused classrooms. I also had a lot of knowledge of products, practices, and perspectives. I remember briefly studying "Las Meninas" in college and feeling like an expert because I had already studied it in high school. Knowing that I came from an amazing, communicative language program gave me the confidence and skills to be the Spanish speaker that I am today.

When we teach communicatively and focus on proficiency, it does not mean that we are not teaching grammar. Of course our students are picking up on grammar all the time; it just means that our focus is communication, not grammar practice. I, personally, want my students to have memories like I do of their language classrooms. I don't want them to be like "oh, remember how boring it was learning grammar and now we can't speak at all?" I have so many friends who can recite "o, as, a, amos, áis, an" or recite a dialogue that they memorized from high school, but they have no idea what any of it means. Language just doesn't work that way. We can have explicit knowledge of grammar rules, but until we really start using them for real communication, those structures really will not become part of our mental representation of language. I know that when I speak Spanish and English, I do not see a conjugation chart in my head; that's what I want for my students too.

I am so grateful for my experience as a language learner; I got so lucky in having language teachers who were knowledgeable about language acquisition in high school and college. Those teachers/professors truly changed my life, and I am now able to see that change in my students.

Timothy

Communicative Language Teaching Has Made Me Love My Job

It is no secret that I love my job, but the amount of love I have for my job has increased significantly as I have started to use a communicative approach. My first semester teaching, I thought language was grammar, and I taught that way. Fortunately, language is much more than that.

Bill Van Patten always says, "what's on page 32 [of the textbook] is not what ends up in your head," and I am realizing more and more just how true that statement is. Language really is not subject matter. We can make "mistakes" in our grammar and still communicate our message perfectly. That is the beauty of language!

When I was teaching for grammar, I was often tired, impatient and VERY frustrated with my students. It is so exhausting to have students not get things after we have drilled it over and over again. But we have to ask ourselves, "if they're not getting it, is what I'm doing not working?" The answer, for me at least, was no. I was expecting students to be able to learn and apply grammar without communicating any messages, and I DEFINITELY was not giving them enough input before asking them to produce the language. They were practicing grammar, and it was meaningless to all except for the three students who like grammar. Are you going to remember something that is meaningless? I'm definitely not.

The other thing that Bill VanPatten has stated is that a communicative approach does not mean teaching the same old textbook material in a communicative way. Last year, I had trouble wrapping my head around that. I thought, "nahhhhh, I disagree. I can take our textbook and teach the same stuff communicatively." I was wrong. Wrongo. Totally wrong. Totes magotes wrong.

The easiest thing that I can bring this back to is stem-change verbs. For those of you who do not know what they are, all you have to know is that they are words that have one thing in common: a grammatical structure. Last year, I took a group of stem-change verbs, and thought "I am going to use this grammatical structure but teach it by asking the students real questions about themselves. That's communicative!" The problem was that the students were recognizing that it was grammar practice. I knew it, and they knew it. I found myself frustrated teaching this, and it felt like I was in my first semester of teaching again when I valued grammar over communication. Don't get me wrong, though, this was a step in the right direction, but it wasn't enough because it wasn't truly communicative; there was no purpose to what we were learning.

To try to combat that this year, before I teach a lesson or before I give an assessment, I always ask myself "what do I want students to be able to do with this?" If my answer is "I want to see if they can conjugate these verbs" or anything grammar based, I scrap it. Instead, my answer needs to be "I want to see if the students can tell me ______ about themselves" or "I want to see what I can learn about my students' lives from this" or "I want to see how well my students know me." I think you get the point. In other words, they need to communicate/comprehend a message--not a grammatical structure. Grammar is a tool for communicating a message; it is not the sole purpose for learning a language.

This year, the power of input has truly hit me. I knew input was great last year, but I was not doing enough of it. I was not spending enough class time checking to see what students could understand without producing the language; I was focused more on what they could produce. Production is great, but it really only works if they have been exposed to the language enough. It's amazing how much they can produce once they have had the opportunity to take in the language.

I am working very hard this year to develop thematic units, and this has made the world of difference for me. I had a professor, Doctora Guillermina Elissondo, in college who used to always say "learning a language is more than just learning to speak the language; it is learning to think in a different way and appreciate those who have had different experiences." With thematic units, I feel like the students are acquiring the language as we discuss a painting, an artist, a product, a practice, a different perspective, a similar perspective, a musician, etc as opposed to just learning grammar. The students and I are learning so much more, and class is fun! Another reason to be happy!  We just have so much to talk about! I look around my class, and I watch all my students speaking with each other in Spanish, and I can't even keep up with all of the conversations. How can I not love my job when I am surrounded by that?!

When grammar was my focus, we did the same activities over and over again; it was boring, monotonous, and it didn't work. As I learn more and more about communicative language teaching, the more I notice that my students are engaged and "getting it." It's easier for them, it's more interesting to them and to me, we learn so much about each other, art, etc. That's what language is about.

This year, although there are still many flaws in my teaching, I finally am starting to feel like I am not teaching the students a textbook. This makes me so happy, and this is a huge part of why I believe that I leave school with a goofy smile on my face every day. I am teaching content and the students are getting it and constantly exceeding my expectations. It feels AMAZING. They are happy, and I am happy. Communicative language teaching has saved me from becoming a cranky, annoyed teacher. I cannot say enough how much I truly love my job.

Thanks for reading and please comment!

Timothy

Ninety Percent Target Language Use

Hola a todxs:

90% Spanish:

In a previous post, I mentioned that I give out a flamingo (sometimes more than one) to students who are speaking a lot of Spanish in the classroom. This has been amazing and has gotten a lot of students to speak Spanish with me in class. The problem was that students were not speaking Spanish with each other, and I was still getting a lot of English like "¿Cómo se dice 'car' en español?" 

Recently, the principal of my school observed my class, and I asked her to look at how much Spanish I was speaking. She did an amazing job evaluating my target-language use. I realized, however, that me speaking Spanish is just not enough. 

A few weeks ago, I attended the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association's (MaFLA's) conference for language teachers, and I attended two sessions with regard to the use of the target language (in my case, Spanish) in the classroom. In both presentations, we discussed the language use of the teacher AND the students. This is where I was falling flat. My students were still not speaking enough Spanish. 

The flamingo is great for rewarding target language use above and beyond what is expected in the classroom, but how do I get the students to speak Spanish as often as possible? Well, a wonderful teacher in Arlington Public Schools, Na Lu-Hogan, mentioned something during Joshua Cabral's session on target language use that really got me thinking. I do not want to quote her exactly because I do not remember exactly what she said she does in the classroom, but she mentioned using hearts to get the students to speak more target language. I decided to do the same. 

I had each student make two hearts (this way, I have a lot of extras). I started a new routine in which the students come into the classroom and immediately grab a heart. If they speak English for any reason without permission, I take the heart away. It seems harsh; I know. However, it has really worked because I have given them the tools to not use English. They can earn the heart back by speaking a lot of Spanish. 

The Incentive:

With the hearts, I knew I needed an incentive to get the students on board. So, each group has a secretary who keeps track of the group points. Each heart is worth 1 point, so no matter what, the secretaries are adding points just for keeping the hearts. If, at the end of the class period, though, every student has a heart, the whole class gets a point (I keep track of this). I teach six classes, so it is a competition between all six classes. At the end of the term, the class with the most points will get some type of prize. So far, this has worked incredibly well. 

The Tools Needed:

The first step for me was developing a circumlocution poster. I based mine off of Joshua Cabral's circumlocution posters (thank you, Joshua!). I have one section for descriptions and one for questions the students can ask. This poster gives the students some tools to describe items instead of switching to English. Ex. it's an animal. It's a place. It's round. It's used for... is it ___ or ____? etc. 

I also told the students that they should rely on gestures if the circumlocution chart isn't sufficing. The reason I allow this is because it is communicating without using English, and this is so important for students who are interacting with a non-English-speaking person. If they go to Cuba and speak with someone who doesn't speak English, switching to English is useless, but movements can be very communicative. 

The other tool--by suggestion of a student--was to have a specific place on one of my whiteboards for students to draw. I am SO thankful to the student who thought of this because I teach 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, so their language skills can be very limited. Having a section for drawings is amazing. Today, I had a student who was looking for the word "ground," and he kept saying "the place underneath the house" by using the circumlocution chart, but I wasn't getting it because I thought he was looking for "basement." Eventually, after much negotiation of meeting (and me failing to understand), he drew a picture, and it clicked for me what he was looking for. 

If, even after all three options above, I am still not getting it, I ask the student "is it super important for me to understand this right now?" Most of the time, the student says "no," so I ask the student to tell me after class and we move on. 

The Concerns:

At first, I was skeptical of circumlocution charts and stuff because I thought it would take up too much class time. First of all, it usually doesn't. These interactions are very quick. However, even if it does, the students are using the language to communicate real messages in a meaningful way. Isn't that what we want? 

My other concern was for the younger students who can basically only tell me their names and where they are from. How are they going to be able to do this? Trust me. They do. They rely more on movements and pictures, but I had a sixth grader tell me that he spoke in Spanish with the waitress at Casa Blanca, and he told me this without having to use English. They find very creative ways to communicate their message. 

The other concern that my team has brought up, which is also a current concern of mine, is: are we getting to know our students still even though they are not speaking their native language with us? Are we building relationships with them? I still struggle with this concern, but as I think about my sixth graders and the students I did not have last year, I still feel like I am learning a lot about them. I suppose my argument is that, even though I am asking them to speak a language that is not native to them, I am asking them to do so in a communicative classroom. Communication is the expression, interpretation and negotiation of meaning in a given context. So, if I am giving the students communicative tasks, I am learning about them every day because we are using the language realistically. I am curious what other language teachers think about this. 

Below, I am sharing a picture of my make-shift circumlocution chart and the section of my whiteboard for drawings. 

Gracias por leer,

Timothy