Updates, Thematic Units, and my Beliefs.

Hola hola:

I hope that all the teachers out there have had a great start to the year and that everyone else who is working is still having a great year.

It's so good to be back at work but also super exhausting. This year, we extended the school day by fifteen minutes, which doesn't sound like a lot, but I am totally feeling it. We used to be allowed to leave at 2:35, and now we aren't supposed to leave until 2:50. However, we rarely leave right on time, so I am finding that I am not getting home until after 4:15 or so, which means that I have a 10-hour work day. Yikes.

Normally, I like to have these blog posts be a bit more organized, but I have a lot of things that I want to say, so I think that I am just going to let my fingers do the talking.

This year, I have been working really hard (thanks to some really great friends and a really amazing boyfriend) on trying to fight for/ask for what I want more often. I often get too shy or too worried about bothering someone else, that I won't make even a simple request like asking the Dunkin' Donuts worker to add more sugar to my coffee.

I think that this is true for teachers too. It's not necessarily that we are afraid to ask for what we want, but simply that we don't do it. We complain SO MUCH but rarely actually do things about it. This got me thinking: what is the thing that I complain about most at my job? Once I thought of it, I thought of a solution. This was a solution that I was saying I wanted for a while, but I never asked for it. So, I AM GOING FOR IT! I am really proud of myself--whether the request is honored or not.

That's my advice to teachers and everyone else: instead of walking around the halls with bitter, angry faces on, do something about it! If your problems are not solved, then make a decision.  Every problem has a solution.


My wonderful students: 

As always, I have a great group of students this year who are eager to learn and laugh at my stupid antics! I kind of like being a weirdo in class.

Sadly, I did not get a lot of my students from last year back this year, which was a major bummer--especially when I had students for two years and now don't have them their last year in middle school.  However, as I look at the students that I did get back, I am SOOOO proud of them and their Spanish. I gave each class an open-ended assignment in 7th and 8th grade just to see what they can do with the language, and they remembered so much more than I expected.

As many of you may know, last year, I rewrote the curriculum to reflect a curriculum that I want to teach while still making sure that I still expose my students to the same grammar as everyone else in my district. I am so unbelievably happy that I did that because my students are writing more than ever in such brilliant Spanish; they truly are constantly exceeding the proficiency goal for the course, and I could not be happier. I LOVE THEMATIC UNITS.


Thematic Units and Myths About Communicative Language Teaching: 

The reason why I love thematic units is because my students are learning about something IN Spanish instead of just learning Spanish. This way, I can always help them focus on the MEANING of words instead of just doing grammar exercises. I can see how effective this was in my students this year, and I cannot wait to watch them continue to move up in proficiency.

Now, it seems that people are constantly under the impression that communicative language teachers do not teach grammar. This is simply not true. In order to give the students communicatively embedded input, we have to be using grammar. It just means that we don't explicitly teach grammar. In other words, the meaning is the most important thing. They could fill out a grammar chart with a verb they do not know, but if they do not know what it means, it's impossible to acquire language! That's what communicative language teaching avoids: students not needing to know what something means. They need to truly listen to understand, which is a beautiful thing.

In my class, I always tell my students that communication is the most important thing; that means that if I understand you, then you have met your communicative goal. This, however, does NOT mean that their Spanish will not get better and their accuracy will not improve. Of course it does because the more courses they take and the more MEANING that they pay attention to and express, the more they will acquire. My students cannot always give a grammatical explanation for something, but they very often can USE that structure--just like native speakers. How many of you who are not language teachers can give me an example of the pluperfect tense? I bet very few, and that is OKAY! Too often we focus on students' output and think "if I don't correct this, they won't get better," but they WILL! They will get it through more and more input.

My department head said something that really resonated with me the other day. If our hope is for our students to be as native-like as possible, then why are we beating them up for missing accent marks and misspellings when native speakers make those same mistakes??? I had never thought of it that way. Of course I want my students to use accent marks correctly (which they will acquire through reading--not from a spelling test), but in the grand scheme of the universe, how important is it?

Okay, but many people say to me: "Timothy, you love grammar, and you always want to know the grammar rules." This is wicked true. I do. I love syntax and morphology. So, if you have a Timothy in your class (I rarely do) who wants to know the grammar rule, obviously explain it! Our minds sometimes find grammar to be fascinating, but that doesn't mean that those grammar rules wind up in our heads. It just means we know a grammar rule.

Greg Duncan explained to me recently that he does believe that those Timothys can get their grammar explanations quickly along with their communicative input. It doesn't take long. He also said that you can have grammar walls for those kids to look at and the non-Timothys in the class can just never look at them and get all of their input communicatively.

However, I do believe that if there is no exchange of information--no need to TRULY listen or truly read the meaning--then there is little to no acquisition. If somebody asks me to conjugate the verb "mancar," I can totally do it:

Yo manco	Nosotros mancamos
Tú mancas	Vosotros mancáis
Él/ella/usted manca	Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes mancan

But if I do not know what that means, how can I use it? How can I acquire something without a context?

Anyway, I am really proud of the work that my students and I did last year, and I am looking forward to getting even better. All I ever want to say about my job is that I am proud of the work I do, and I really am. I'm so lucky to love what I do.

Thanks for reading,

Timothy

Discussing Heteronormativity in the Classroom

Hola hola hola:

A huge push in my district (and many other districts) is to develop lessons that incorporate social emotional learning (SEL) to help students of all types with their social and emotional growth. There is so much that goes into this--using students' names, greeting students at the door, etc. However, it's more than just interactions with students; we want to start incorporating it into our everyday lessons. This might mean using more brain breaks, doing mindfulness activities before an assessment, etc.

Given that I am a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, I have always wanted to make it a point to ensure that students in this community with me feel safe in my classroom/school. We have rainbow flags in our classrooms, etc. However, I hadn't really incorporated it into the curriculum yet.

The closest I used to get to talking about this in my classroom was when I would tell them things about my boyfriend. I try to normalize LGBTQ+ relationships as much as possible so that, even if it's not in the curriculum, it is present in my classroom. Since I believe in communicative language teaching, this does mean that I talk about myself with my students, so it does come up, but not as often as I would like.

HETERONORMATIVITY:

Heteronormativity is basically anything that promotes heterosexual relationships as being "the norm." At our last department meeting, my department head, Dr. Jorge Allen, had us all look at the United Nations website, and I came across the section about gender equality. It got me thinking, "if this is a goal for our department, how can I incorporate this in my classroom?" 

A few days later, IT HIT ME! 

Every year, I have to teach the "party unit." This unit drives me bonkers because it talks a lot about chores and planning for a party, which my students rarely do. Last year, I wanted to make this unit more thematic, so I decided to teach them about the quinceañera. For those of you who don't know, it's basically like a Sweet 16/Bat Mitzvah but at the age of 15. There are some really cool traditions in the quinceañera, so we would talk about those traditions and then move on. This year, however, I did the same thing, but I am now working on discussing how heteronormative quinceañeras can be. 

Here are some of the traditions (depending on the country/family):

1. The girl wears an elegant dress

2. There is a court of honor comprised of 15 pairs/couples - 15 "chambelanes" and 15 "damas"

3. They cut the cake

4. The girl changes from flats to high heels to represent becoming a woman

5. The father daughter dance (usually a waltz)

6. The grand entrance

7. The last doll (sometimes, she gives away her favorite doll. In other countries, she receives her very last doll. In other countries, this tradition doesn't exist).
etc. etc.

This got me thinking about a lot of WHAT IFs.

1. What if the girl is a lesbian? 
2. What if the girl doesn't have a dad? 
3. What if the girl doesn't want to wear high heels? Not all women wear high heels...
4. What if the girl doesn't feel comfortable wearing a dress? 
5. What if she never played with dolls? 
6. Why does the court have to be made up of fifteen boys and fifteen girls? 
7. What if they prefer gender neutral pronouns? 
8. etc. 

Now, I have to stress to my students and to you that all of these traditions are absolutely okay...IF they work for the person turning 15. However, what if these traditions do not work? Can we question these traditions? 

This year, I want my students to question these "what if" scenarios and offer other possible options. Last week, we got into the discussion of traditions. Should these traditions always apply because they are traditions? Some students said yes because otherwise traditions would never exist. I pushed back a bit and said that traditions can change without disappearing. For example, if the girl turning 15 has two mothers, she can dance with her mothers instead of a father. The tradition of having a dance doesn't disappear, it just changed a bit. The students seemed receptive to that idea. 

TPRS: 

As many of you know if you read my last blog post, I am working on thematic units and having my first few experiences with storytelling in my classroom. I watch this show called "One Day at a Time" on Netflix, and there is an episode in the first season called "Quinces." It's about a Cuban-American family, and the daughter recently comes out of the closet and is about to have her quinceañera. I decided to use this episode as the basis for the story I was going to tell. I am telling the students the story about Elena and how she struggled with some of the traditions of a quinceañera. She ends up wearing a stunning, white suit, and her father isn't okay with her being gay, so she dances with her mother, grandmother, brother, and some family friends. It's beautiful. 

The idea here is not to say that these traditions are bad, but rather to offer the possibility of other options for people who do not feel comfortable with them. I want them to recognize the possible negative effects of heteronormativity and start to understand the struggles of those of us in the LGBTQ+ community. So far, the students have been so receptive. 

Conclusion: 

As teachers, when discussing matters like this, we have to be mindful that these conversations can be difficult for some people. I made my principal and other building administrators aware of this unit before I began it and got the okay from them. The conversations can be uncomfortable, but they are so important. 

After discussing this unit with a friend of mine, she shared this New York Times article with me about "stretching the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony to accommodate gender fluidity." It's a really great read!

Thanks for reading!

Timothy

My First Experience With Storytelling

Hola hola hola:

I know that it's been a while since I wrote a blog post. This time of year is crazy for all of us, but I am feeling especially overwhelmed this year as I balance all the musicals that I'm doing, my Saturday teaching job, and my regular teaching job. 

I have heard so much in the past about the power of Teaching Proficiency Through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS), but I never really knew how to implement it. All the books I had read on TPRS seemed to require too much translation, which I'm not a huge fan of in my classroom. 

HOWEVER, I finally tried it, and I am sooooo happy that I did. I have to give a huge shoutout to Kara Jacobs because her resource was the one that really gave me the courage to start it. I used her story and just made some adjustments to make it my own, etc. 

As you may know, I have been working on thematic units this year, so I wanted to turn the "descriptions" unit into a unit on self-esteem and stereotypes instead of just teaching them to describe things and moving on. I used Kara Jacobs's resource on the music video "Soy yo" by Bomba Estéreo as the starting point for my unit. For those of you who haven't seen it, take a look at it. You do not need to speak Spanish to understand the message behind it. 

So, basically I told the students the story of the girl in the video before actually showing them the video. I pre-taught the essential vocabulary, and then we went right into it. I HIGHLY recommend using Pear Deck for this. It makes the presentation way more interactive and fun for the students when telling the story. 

So, I spent a few weeks working with them on this story and identifying stereotypes, retelling the story, etc. There was soooo much vocabulary and grammar in this unit that I thought I was never going to finish it. However, we did, and the results made me so happy. 

The Final Assessment:

I always end my units with a performance assessment--either a speaking or a writing assignment. This one was a writing assignment. The scenario was that my friend in Mexico has a little sister who's being made fun of for her weight at school, and the students had to write to her and tell her all about the girl in the video and remind her that she is beautiful just the way she is. 

This assessment was done a few days ago with my 6th graders. I haven't gotten through all of them, but I have been shocked and surprised by all of the ones that I have read so far. 

This is their first year studying Spanish, and I went back into one of my student's portfolios who had me in 6th grade two years ago and found a writing assignment that I did at this exact point in the year. This student's writing was really great and s/he included a lot of questions, which is something I need to remember to add to my prompt for the Soy yo writing next time. However, there is still a HUGE difference in the amount of writing included. 

March 7th, 2017 -- one of my top students wrote this: 

"Hola Ricardo! Me llamo _____. Mi familia y yo somos de Estados Unidos. Soy rubia. Soy doce años, ¿y tú? Me gusta dibujar y jugar al lacrosse. ¿Tú eres atlético? Me gusta matematica pero no me gusta escribir. Mi mejor amiga se llama _____. Ella es simpática. A _____ le gusta jugar al fútbol y esquiar. Nosotros somos altas. ¿Te gusta jugar al fútbol? Hace frío afuera. ¿Qué tiempo hace en Puerto Rico? ¿Te gusta nadar? 

Hasta luego!"

March 12th, 2019 -- my current students wrote this: 

“Querida Laura:

Hola. Mi nombre es ____. Soy de Massachusetts, USA. Soy flaco, alto, castaño, y muy extraño. Tengo pelo largo. Me gusta jugar a los videojuegos y mirar la televisión. No me gusta practicar deportes ni tomar exámines.

    Yo odio estereotipos. Gordo no es feo, flaco no es linda.

    En una video, hay una chica en una peluquería. (El nombre de el video es “Soy yo.”) A ella le encanta su nuevo pelo. La chica sale de la peluquería y dice, “Soy yo! Hasta luego.”

    Ella monta en bici por la ciudad. La bicicleta de la chica es muy especial y bonita. La chica ve a dos chicas. A ellas no les gusta la bici ni la chica. La chica toca la flauta. A ellas no les gusta la música de la chica. La chica dice, “Soy yo.” Las dos chicas salen de la esquina.

    La chica ve a unos chicos juegan al básquetbol. A ella le gusta básquetbol. Ella entra la cancha de básquetbol y roba la bola. La chica no juega bien. Ellos no aprueban. La chica dice, “Soy yo. Hasta luego, chicos.” Ella sale de la cancha de básquetbol.

    Ella baila por la ciudad y ve a unos chicos que bailan muy bien. A la chica le gusta bailar y mira ellos. Ellos dejan de bailar y mira la chica. Ella baila, pero ellos no aprueban. La chica dice, “Soy yo.”

    La chica ve a su papá y corre a él.

    No te preocupes si no aprueban. Cuando te critican, tu solo di, “Soy yo.”

De,”

" Querida Laura, 

Hola Laura. Me llamo ____. Yo soy feliz, moreno, y paciente. Me gusta nadar y dormir. En la classe de espan'ol, yo mira un “ Soy yo” video. En el video, hay una chica. La chica es en la peluqueria. La chica es muy bueno. Ella le gusta su nuevo pelo. La chica sale de peluqueria y dice “ Soy yo.” Entonces, la chica monta en bicicleta por la ciudad. La bicicleta es bonita y especial. Cuando la chica monta en bicicleta, ella ve a dos chicas. La dos chicas no les gusta bicicleta de la chica. La chica basta montar en bicicleta y toca la flauta. Las dos chicas no les gusta la musica de la chica. Asi que, la dos chicas salen de la esquina. La chica camina por la ciudad cuando la chica ve a chicos ellos juegan al basquetbol. Ella entra la cancha de basquetbol y roba la bola de ellos. La chica no es atletica. Cuando la chicos critican la chica porque ella no es atletica, la chica dice “ Soy yo.” La chica camina por la ciudad cuando ella ve ellos bailan. Ella baila y ellos bastan. Ellos ven la chica baila. La chicos no es importa de baila de la chica. Cuando ellos critican, ella dice “ Soy yo”. Entonces, la chica corre cuando ve su padre. Ella es muy feliz. Un verso en la video es, “ Que no te preocupes, si no aprueban. Cuando te critican, tu solo di. Soy yo.” Un verso dice differente es bien. Estererotipos son generalizaciones sobre de grupo de personas. Totales estereotipos es falsos. Un ejemplo es “gorda es fea.” Gorda no es fea. Totales estereotipos es falso. 

Sinceramente,..."

Even if you don't speak Spanish, you can tell that this is a lot more in depth. This is the same grade from the same time of year, and I attribute this improvement to four things: I didn't start this year off with the alphabet, dates, etc.; I used this story (TPRS); The students AND I strive for 90% target language use in the class; and I have been developing thematic units. 

Conclusions:

Every year, we should get better at something, and it's hard for me to not feel like I failed in the past. That student who had me two years ago was certainly capable of writing what my student this year wrote, but I wasn't at the level of teaching to help get her/him there. I sometimes feel like I failed my former students -- especially my first year when I taught grammar super explicitly. However, it's a learning process just like the path to proficiency. Every year, we improve (hopefully). This is a constant reminder for me of the importance of trying new things! I do not want to be one of those teachers who does the same old things every year. A new curriculum can be frustrating with a lot of work, but the results are worth it. As my department head, Dr. Jorge Allen, reminded us recently as we begin moving toward thematic units: we have to be willing to fail. It's hard to learn if we aren't taking risks. We tell our students that all the time, but are we doing it ourselves? 

Thanks for reading! 

Timothy

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