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

Interpersonal Assessments

Interpersonal Assessments:

I think that most world language teachers will agree with me that interpersonal assessments (assessments on which two or more students interact with each other) are very hard to get right, but they are arguably the most important. Most of us have learned that there has to be some type of problem for the students to solve; otherwise, the students spit information at each other without actually having to interact. However, they also need to be prompts that allow/require both (or more) students to communicate. 

Twice in my very short career (and I am sure this number will increase), I have had to have the students redo an interpersonal assessment because my prompt just did not fit the bill. This week, I gave the students an interpersonal assessment that I thought was going to be amazing, and it totally flopped...and it was totally my fault. We all make mistakes, right? 

What went wrong:

So, the students did an interpretive reading on tapas in Spain, and we have been working with that material for a while. On the original interpersonal assessment that I developed, the students were given a hotel name and a tapas bar, and they were leaving from the same place; they had to discuss how long it would take, how they would get there, what metro line they would take, what tapas they wanted to eat, and they only had a certain amount of euros, so they had to make sure that they did not overspend. The problem was that one student was pretty much saying everything because my prompt wasn't interpersonal enough. One person could easily just agree, state the tapa he/she/they wanted and be done with it. 

How did I remedy this? 

Unfortunately, I did not realize how bad my prompt was until after one of my classes had already taken the assessment. But I was not willing to assess students who only said two sentences because the teacher (that's me!) gave them a terrible prompt. Surprisingly, the students were not mad at me when I made them redo it with the new prompt. They were actually happy about it. Weirdos (just kidding. I love them).

To fix the prompt, each student had a different hotel. This made the world of difference because they had to listen to each other, and they each had different information to share. If they decided that they were going to go "tapa-ing" at 8 PM, then they had to make sure that they arrived there at the same time. They pulled up Google Maps and were able to figure out the fastest route from their individual hotels to the restaurant. Once they did that, they needed to decide what time they, personally, were going to leave to get there on time. For example, if the metro said it would take 18 minutes, then they had to leave at 7:42 to get there for 8:00. Here is the link to the assessment if you want to take a gander at the prompt. 

The results:

The results have been amazing so far. Students are asking each other clarifying questions and negotiating meaning in their videos. In the first prompt, there was really no reason for them to clarify anything. However, once they were leaving from different places, they had to make sure they would get there on time at the same time. At first, I worried that the prompt would be too hard, but it wasn't. They did such a great job communicating with each other. If we are really focusing on our students' ability to communicate as opposed to their ability to speak perfectly, then our students can accomplish tasks like these without being discouraged by a bad grade because of their language accuracy. 

I am very happy with this assessment, but I would love to improve it, so feedback would be awesome!

Thanks for reading,

Timothy

The Flamingo, Listening, and Culture

Hola hola:

The Spanish Flamingo:

This year has been absolutely incredible so far. As I stated in my last blog post, I started a new thing where I pass a flamingo around the room to students who are going above and beyond to speak Spanish in the class. This has been such a great motivator for students to speak the target language in the class.  I was worried about implementing this with the sixth graders because they have such limited language skills at the beginning of the year, but they are finding amazing ways to communicate in Spanish. A lot of them have been saying things like "Señor Chávez, ¿computadoras? ¿Sí o no?" "Mr. Chávez, computers? Yes or no?" I have never had students speaking this much Spanish in my classes, and it is causing them to pick up on more. I highly recommend this.

Interpretive Listening Assessments: 

As I may have mentioned in this blog before, I always have the students keep portfolios that help them see their progress throughout the year and from year to year. As I was looking at student portfolios, I realized that interpretive listening was a huge gap in my teaching. I was using some videos and songs and doing tiny activities, but I was never really giving students feedback on their listening skills. So, I decided to make that my goal this year; I want to develop more listening assessments.

Having written down this goal was very inspiring for me, so I already developed one using the song "Puerto Rico" by Jerry Rivera. I used the ACTFL template for interpretive assessments (which I had already used many times for reading assignments) and I made some tiny adjustments to gear it more towards listening. I used the assessment with my 7th graders, and I was so happy with the results. The students did very well, and they picked up on much more than I expected! I still have some concerns about how I did the Key Word Recognition and Supporting Details, so I am very open to ideas. Any world language teachers willing to share some listening assessments that you have developed? I love having the students make inferences, cultural comparisons, etc. but I am not completely convinced that my Supporting Details and Key Word Recognition sections are the best that they can be.

Culture in the Classroom:

I am also trying very hard to focus more on culture in my classroom with regard to products, practices and perspectives this year. It is clear to me that we have not done enough of this with our students.  I am going more in depth with my students about Tapas this year, and I am already so happy. It feels like it gives my teaching a purpose when we can make cultural comparisons, and I find that this is the stuff the students get the most out of. When I ask my students from last year about Puerto Rico, it seems like they haven't forgotten anything! I think it gives them more context to what they are learning. Whatever it is, it works, and it is great for me to do more research about other cultures!

I am still falling more and more in love with my job every day. <3

Gracias por leer,

Timothy

The Start of a New Year

Hola a todxs:

I am off to a great start of the year this year. It's nice to be at the same school for a second year because I already know a decent amount of the students, so it made learning names much easier this year! Phew!

Anyway, last year, at the beginning of the year, I was working with a new curriculum, new students, new colleagues, etc. and it was very overwhelming (but great!). I was not fully invested in teaching for proficiency at the beginning of the year, so I am still developing a lot of new materials because I do not want to use what I used at the beginning of the year last year.

I decided to give 7th and 8th grade a performance assessment at the beginning of the year to see where they were at, and I was very impressed by the students' work.  It showed me that the students were really ready for new material, which is great. On the feedback form (rubric) that I use, there is a section for cultural knowledge. I noticed a HUGE lack of cultural knowledge from our students, which means there is a gap in our curriculum in both sixth and seventh grade. I am going to try very hard this year to look more at products, practices and perspectives, because I think that this is extremely important. We are not just teaching students to speak another language; we are teaching them to think in different ways. If we are not discussing cultural topics in the target language, then I think that we are missing a huge chunk of world language teaching.

The sixth graders are eating the language up, and it is making me so happy. We are working on the alphabet right now, and this year, I thought to have them look up Spanish words instead of spelling English words to me and the rest of the class. This has been a really nice advantage because the students do not know the words that the other students are spelling, so they HAVE to rely on the Spanish alphabet. For example, I used to have the students choose any word, so they might choose something like "football." When they spell that to the rest of the class, I used to notice that the other students would often have the word "football" already spelled out on their mini-white boards before the student finished because they figured out the word. This year, if they want to spell "football," they have to look up the Spanish word, and spell "fútbol americano" to the class. This is great because the students have to actually listen to the person spelling until he/she/they finish. Phew! I am happy to have solved that problem.

With the 7th and 8th graders, I have been able to get to know them using the target language. We did a language pledge in our department this year, and it basically states that the students' first attempt at speaking will always be in the target language. If this means they have to use baby talk like "me want pen," then so be it! It's much better than having them rely on English all the time. This has been great for getting the students to express themselves, but has also been a great reminder for me to stay in the target language as well.

I have heard of many language teachers using some type of item that the students have to keep on their desks for using English too much. Then, they have to get rid of it by catching someone else speaking English. I am sure that this works great, but I was worried that it would become a distraction and would get the students to focus more on who's speaking English and less on the lesson (but I could be wrong!). My colleague, Kate McGonagle, had a great idea, however. She is planning on doing it the opposite way. She is going to give her mini-Eiffel Tower to the student who speaks the most French. In other words, it's more of a reward. I think I am going to try to do the same, so I will let you know how it goes!

We are talking about food in 8th grade, and it is so interesting to see what their likes and dislikes are. We also discovered that a lot of the students in the class have very different eating habits, which really really really surprised me! It's nice to use the language to really discover things about each other.

I did a check for understanding that I really liked this year. So, basically, they had just learned some food items, but I did not believe they were ready to produce the language yet. I wanted to know if they were recognizing the words for certain items without having to produce them, so I played this game "what color do you associate with..." It was really interesting to see some of the responses, and it actually sparked some good conversation. For example, when I said (in Spanish) "what color do you associate with steak," most kids said "brown," but some added "pink" or both. It was an awesome way for me to see that they understood the word for "steak" without making them produce the word themselves.

All in all, I feel much more prepared this year, and I am SO happy. I really really love my job.

Thanks for reading,

Timothy

The End of the Year

This year has certainly had its ups and downs. The good thing is that a lot of things clicked for me this year. As a new teacher, there are so many experts around you throwing out all these buzz words, and you're just trying to stay afloat to understand it all.

At the end of the Proficiency Academy last summer, one of the speakers said to me "you know what the second year means, don't you? It means you throw out everything you did last year and start over." I thought he was a netball for saying that. It turns out he was right. I only used maybe one or two things that I developed last year. It wasn't because those things were bad, but rather because I had ways of making them better.  

This year, as you can tell if you have kept up with my blog, I have tried to dive head first into teaching for proficiency. I am so proud of all that I have learned and done this year, but it is amazing that I am still sitting here thinking of how I want to improve next year.  Despite all the research that I have done this year, I certainly had some failures, and I can't wait to fix those failures and fail some more. That is how we learn, right? 

One thing that has been stressed to me is that, if it is not open ended and not spontaneous, then we really cannot assess someone's language proficiency. On my course evaluations, that was one of the biggest complaints I received from my students. "Stop giving surprise tests." I think that I need to explain my reasoning behind this better next year. I want them to understand that, if it's not spontaneous, then it doesn't really show me or them what they can do in the language; or rather, it doesn't show them what is in their head and can come out naturally.

I did an open-ended final with all six of my Spanish classes, and boy did that stress me out. However, I would not change it for the world because it is so beautiful to see what my students could do at the end of the year. My only complaint is that, because I was assessing all six classes at a time, the feedback I gave the students was not as in-depth as I would have liked. 

Each assessment had a prompt that involved a lot of what each grade had learned that year. In other words, they were cumulative assessments. It was really good for me to see where the students were the strongest and where they were the weakest, but I take pride in the fact that each student was able to communicate in the language. I was so proud to see my students focusing more on meaning and less on grammar. This type of assessment is so much more meaningful than a non-communicative grammar quiz. 

I have learned that teaching for proficiency takes a lot of time and creativity, but it is not as scary as I had imagined. I was so worried about "doing it wrong" at the beginning of this year and last year that I held back a bit. Once I committed, I learned more and more, and I have really grown as an educator. All that they have taught us at the proficiency academy is true; the students really do learn a lot faster and can communicate a lot when they are taught using a communicative approach. This all has made me love my job even more, and I am so unbelievably proud of my students. I cannot wait to see what next year brings. 

Con cariño,

Timothy

Verbs Verbs Verbs

Hola a todos:

In my last post, I mentioned the issue of separating language such as AR verbs from IR and ER verbs. I ended up not doing that with my sixth graders this year to see how it went. If they wanted to use an "ir verb" when stating something they do, then I gave them the tools to do that. It feels nice to not restrict them by saying "oh, you'll learn how to conjugate ir and er verbs in 7th grade."

It has been really fun watching them progress in their language over this school year. We played "Two Truths and a Lie" last week, and it was so cool to see how well they were using their Spanish to guess each other's lies. They have really impressed me, and I am not so sure that my lessons would have been as communicative if I had only taught them how to use AR verbs. Also, I have noticed fewer "errors" in their grammar when they are communicating. Over the years, I have noticed that language learners always want to make everything into an AR verb. Perhaps the reason for that is because we often teach it all separately. They learn AR verbs first and so they think that that is the way all verbs work. At first, I was worried about not teaching that way this year, but then I thought about it and realized that Spanish-speaking parents do not raise their kids only using AR verbs until their child has mastered those and then moved on to ER verbs. So far, it seems to have been successful.

One thing that is driving me crazy is stem-change verbs. For those of you who do not know, these are verbs that change a letter to another letter(s). For example, the "e" in "pensar" becomes "ie," so it looks like this: "pienso" instead of "penso." Honestly, you don't really need to understand what I just said to understand why I am struggling teaching this. All of the stem-change verbs have one thing in common: the grammatical structure. It is SO HARD to teach these in a meaningful way because it is so clear to the students that they are learning them to learn that the E changes to IE. They don't view it as learning to communicate, which, once again, is the sole purpose for speaking a language. When we focus on meaning and communication, the language gets into their heads. When we don't, the language stays as explicit knowledge in their heads for a bit, but they do not use it naturally. I firmly believe that. If I ask my current eighth graders to use the stem changers that my 7th graders are using right now, I have a feeling most of them will not be able to do it, and the same goes for the stem changers that they learned this year. It has never really been meaningful to them, so it mostly ends up being memorization.

My sixth graders, however, have inspired me this week, and I think that I have come up with a solution thanks to them. Two of the verbs that my sixth graders know are stem changers. Now that they have begun to state what they and others do, they have tried to use those stem changers. In the past, I might have said, "oh that verb is confusing; try to write something else." This year, I simply told them quickly how to do it. Now, they know that "I play" is "juego" and I sleep is "duermo," and a lot of them have been using it correctly ever since. I think the huge difference here is that, with my sixth graders, we have always been focusing on meaning. They learned that it was "juego" instead of "jugo" because they wanted to use it for a purpose. I have tried to make a purpose for it with my seventh graders, but it has been a lot harder since we are trying to ONLY use stem-change verbs that have nothing to do with one another. So, this summer, I am going to look at the curriculum and try to find ways of incorporating these stem-changers in a meaningful way throughout the year instead of all at once. This way, they will still be learning the grammatical structure that our curriculum demands, but they will be doing it in a more meaningful way.

Thanks for reading,
Timothy

What I Did When I Really Missed the Mark

These past few weeks have been hard ones. I gave my seventh grade students a writing assignment, and one class absolutely soared. I was in absolute shock at their writing ability. Some of these students already started to reach the intermediate level. For those of you who are not world language teachers, my mom recommended that I do a better explanation of what a novice learner looks like versus an intermediate learner. To help, here is a link to an infographic that I give my students to help them understand it.

I was so happy after reading these assessments; there was so much cultural knowledge tied in with their own opinions of Puerto Rico. I felt like super teacher.

Then, I read the same assignment that I gave to my other seventh grade class. I have never ever seen such a gap between students who are supposed to be at a similar level. Now, we know that there are individual differences for language learners in all languages. However, these differences were way too big for me to ignore. A colleague reminded me that these students are very different and are in a very different environment. I certainly understand that, but I was still feeling very very discouraged. I felt like crying, screaming, etc, and I did not know how to address this with the students.

I sat the students down, asked them to close their eyes and be honest. I asked them to raise their hands if they felt they put a lot of effort into the writing. No one raised a hand. When I asked if they put zero effort into it, the majority raised their hands. That actually made me feel better. Instead of getting angry with them, I decided to make them help each other. I did what I learned at the ACTFL conference this year, and I had the students form columns and write an opening line on their own. Then, they got into groups and picked things that they liked from each person's opening. Then, they got back into columns and write one tiny paragraph on their own with a focus on something they wanted to see in Puerto Rico, the definition of that place and then their personal opinion of that place. They returned to groups and had to give each person in their group feedback onto what they could add to make the paragraph better.

About a week later, I gave them the same writing assignment on their own unannounced. They did SOOOO much better. Mind you, they had practice with the prompt, but I believe that that's what this class needed. The issue wasn't so much the Spanish but rather basic writing skills. Once they knew how to set it up, they did much better. Fingers crossed that they do better on the next writing without any practice!

I also came across an issue with some of my sixth graders on a quiz in one of my classes. They recently learned how to express things that they have to do, which was very easy to teach communicatively. I realized, however, based on this quiz, that I did not give the students enough input with the "Ustedes (you all)" form of the verb. Since I do not give them paradigms, enough input is essential if I have any desire for them to acquire the language. To clarify, input basically means that they have to hear it and see it enough to be able to use it.

Quite often, I give all the students whiteboards and have them make guesses about me and other students, which ends up causing them to need to use the word "ustedes (you all)." I did not do that this much with this material because I feared that it was getting boring for them. It turns out that I was wrong. I sat the students down and asked them why that section of the quiz was so difficult, and they pretty much told me exactly what I thought. "We did not really use that very much." They also told me that they wished we had done the whiteboard activity because they said it really helps and is fun! Who knew?!

Now, we have moved on to stating what they can and cannot do. This has raised a question for me: we world language teachers often teach ar, er and ir verbs separately. If we are teaching communicatively, should we be separating language like that? I'm not so sure. If the students want to use an er verb to communicate a message, then they should be given the tools to do so. We, as teachers, should not always be saying "oh, you'll learn that next year." If our hope is for the students to be able to communicate, then we need to let them communicate what they actually want to communicate in that moment (within reason).