Month: September 2019

Reflect Early, Reflect Often!

We’re ending week 3.5 here in Washington state (we started the Wednesday after Labor Day), and I figured it would a good time to plonk some reflection into my students’ laps to help them look back on what we’ve done so far, let me know what’s working and what’s not, and get an affective temperature check. My big goals for my students are for them to feel safe and cared for in my class, and for them to comprehend buckets of input in German or Spanish. (Sometimes both when my brain fails to shift gears during 7th period…oh mein Gott…)

I gave students this half-sheet form, and five minutes of quiet to fill it out before we transitioned to my personal favorite class game, Gimkit. (Edit: the fabulous Kate Smith on Facebook made it into a Google Form, which makes gathering the data EVEN EASIER! Go ahead and make a copy for yourself!) Feel free to modify as needed, as I forgot to do when I gave the version that said “German” to my Spanish class…d’oh. Anywho, I conveyed before we started that their honest and helpful feedback would make me a better teacher, and it would make class better for everyone. So it’s a win-win!

I’ve spent this morning reviewing the trends, and I’m feeling very, very thankful that I did this. I have solicited feedback from students before, and it can definitely be awkward and painful. But I’m going into next week feeling aware of what’s working for them, and overall how they’re feeling in class.

Here are the biggest trends I noticed, both across levels, as well as in individual classes:

Gestures

Classes at every level pointed to my use of hand gestures for verbs as something that really helped them. I lifted how I do them from Tina Hargaden, so it’s nice to see that it truly is a huge comprehension support, and that I’m not just doing the Macarena for myself up in front of the class. This has also really helped me use more natural language, as I can use the same gesture for a verb’s past, present, and future forms, and use context to otherwise make things clear for students. And I can stay in the Target Language so much easier! Which leads me to…

High Levels of Target Language Usage

All my classes told me they liked how much of the Target Language we used during class, for Small Talk, Stories, Calendar Talk, Card Talk…everything! One student told me while we were watching the Homecoming Football Game that their previous teacher usually would do “only the Target Language” like…every other day. Which meant that class was 50% English, 50% TL. They really need the input to grow their mental representation of the language, so I’m glad students are appreciating my efforts to keep things comprehensible and shift that percentage in the direction of the Target Language.

Write and Discuss into Choral Translation + Grammar

Write and Discuss by itself didn’t necessarily get the biggest shoutouts at each level, but many students pointed out that doing a Choral Translation of the class text into English, funky word order and all, helped them see how German and Spanish are constructed and made them appreciate how much they understood. This is the perfect time to slip in fun grammar noticings – German word order is always fun to see at any level, and Spanish can do some wild things, too. And it’s not TOO grammar-heavy for them – one student literally wrote under his positives: “He isn’t making us remember grammar. He’s just speaking to us.” #blessings

Classroom Management

A comment to the effect of “make my classmates shut it during our class conversations” appeared at least once at every level, but was especially prevalent in my level 3 German class. They have known each other for a good long time, and have so many in-jokes and crazy stories from their last German teacher (who was/is a wonderful angel), that we often all get distracted with the fun stories in English and forget to use the most German possible. I see this as a necessary growing pain – I would much prefer that they had positive experiences with each other in the past, but I’m also convincing them of the value of 90%+ TL, so this will be an area of growth for us all. (Being a slightly hyper and easily distracted sort of dude…I am sometimes a culprit. Oops!) I think I can leverage how much my students in each class enjoy hearing the Target Language (as evidenced by their comments) to turn this tide and get us going in a fantastic direction.

Double Checking the Forms I Give My Class

Because I gave out forms that said “German” instead of “Spanish” to my Spanish classes, I received many angry face emoji drawings on my surveys, and one “you could improve by loving Spanish more! (crying face emoji)” SORRY, Y’ALL! (They actually took it in stride, but I definitely don’t want them feeling like I only love my German students…I truly love them all because they’re so FUNNY.)

Sorry, chicos. 😛

Bonus Comments!

I have a couple of heritage Spanish speakers in my level 2 Spanish class, and I got some sweet comments from them, too. One wrote, “I already know the language, but it’s nice being in here.” I have another heritage speaker who sometimes speaks like a Novice – lots of errors, but comprehensible! – and he wrote, “I appreciate that Mr. Fisher tells us that being wrong is okay!” My heart!!!

I want to make sure I do this at intervals for the rest of the year. There are regular slumps in the natural cycle of the school year, and using reflective surveys like this can hopefully help me keep students engaged and contented in class. What’s more, I hope I am conveying to them how much I appreciate and care for them, and can build good will by not pretending to have all the answers all the time.

Go forth, and reflect! What have been your reflections from the beginning of this year? What have students told you? Let me know in the comments below!

What if I want a vocab list?

Generally, in CI World, we know that students acquire vocabulary most efficiently from comprehensible messages in the Target Language. That means that Ye Olde Vocabulary Lists of yore are not quite as helpful as we used to think. Trying to memorize them engages the brain’s explicit/conscious learning faculties, versus the implicit/unconscious learning that is capable (and more durable, in the case of language) when focusing on getting students as much comprehensible input as possible. For this reason, many CI World teachers have ditched vocab lists and just focus on providing rich, repetitive, compelling comprehensible input in class. And that’s all!

…but what if I want a vocabulary list? What if my students want one? There’s something satisfying about the neatness of a list. It implies and provides structure, and is something to refer to when feeling lost. And maybe your department/school/district requires that you provide and teach students thematic/semantic sets of vocabulary. This is the situation I’m currently in with my school’s Spanish department (I’m a singleton with German – I have more freedom there), so this is something I’m thinking about this year as well.

We have to be mindful that students sometimes struggle with classes that don’t “look” entirely “like school.” Especially in the early levels, we’re mostly asking students to just listen, read, and show that they understand. That is VERY different from any other class they have taken, where they may have to take and summarize notes, respond frequently with their own thoughts, elaborate on those thoughts, work out individual written responses to prompts, etc. Just understanding what you hear and read sounds like a murky goal – even if we as teachers know that it is what they need. But maybe having a vocabulary list gives students the comfort they want in “learning” the language when we secretly know that we are creating class such that they acquire the language.

This question actually opens up to two different contexts with distinct solution sets, so let’s explore each context and see how we can best support our students on their quest toward language proficiency.

Context 1: I have a mandated vocabulary list

This context is affecting my Spanish teaching this year. This year, I’m teaching second-year Spanish. I’ve come in to a new school whose Spanish department adheres pretty closely to the scope and sequence provided by a textbook, which is not how I teach. But! I was told that as long as I cover the vocabulary and structures present in the chapters my department uses over the course of the year, I can teach however I want. My district seems big on teacher autonomy, which is truly a blessing.

So, what am I going to do? Here have been my plans for “covering” the vocabulary lists I’m expected to cover this year:

  • Calendar Talk: Calendar Talk is great for introducing all sorts of new vocab, because it necessarily includes compelling events from students’ lives. In addition to reviewing the Spanish 1 calendar basics (days, months, etc.), we’ll be able to review future plans, and start talking about what students did over the weekend. A seamless and natural introduction to the past tense forms!
  • Card Talk: Card Talk can be angled to introduce any subject – check the linked post for ideas how to use Card Talk prompts to push conversation towards thematic vocab. School unit? Have kids draw what goes on in their favorite class. Talking about places in town? Have kids draw their favorite spots, and go in on what is around them, where they are located, etc.
  • OWI: Specify that the One Word has to fit some sort of theme – it has to be an article of clothing, it has to be a toy of some sort, it has to be a food, etc. This will likely draw in other related vocab – pieces of clothing are often friends with other pieces of clothing, for instance. #BillylaBufanda
  • Storytelling: As with OWIs, unscripted stories can be angled towards problems that mirror the language introduced in a thematic chapter. An OWI that is a pencil can be at school and have some sort of problem with its history teacher. Or, you can go the route of purposefully building in vocab list vocabulary into stories. Or let someone else do it for you! I am a huge fan of Anne Matava’s Story Scripts, just because they’re so wacky and fun, and I’ll definitely be using “You, In the Corner!” and “An Important Test” early on during the school unit because those have always inspired much hilarity.
  • Picture Talk: Picture Talk can be used to kill 2 birds with 1 stone – I can pull up an image from the Target Culture, and discuss both what is going on in the picture, and if it is different from an analogous context here in the US!
  • Story Listening: Now, I don’t do Story Listening exactly as Dr. Mason describes, but I love using it to include cultural tales in my classes. I think it will be a fabulous way for students to hear lots of natural language, and because I’m teaching Level 2, it will be good for them to hear the different Spanish past tenses in natural contexts.

There are so many ways to weave in “required” vocab – we just have to be a little creative in sequencing our classes and providing specific communicative contexts so that the vocabulary just happens to come up. (Or, it just seems that way to our students! *wink*)

I think you can also get your kids in on it a bit, too. I explicitly told my students that we have to do similar stuff to what the other classes have to do, but that we’ll try to make it as fun as possible. If we ever run into a situation where interest is waning, we can remind ourselves that we’re doing our best to have fun and “cover” all the stuff. Kids usually like a conspiracy…er…challenge. *wink again*

Context 2: I do not have a mandated vocabulary list

This is my situation with German this year! I am the best only German teacher at my school, and my district (again) provides teachers lots of autonomy, so I have a lot of freedom to teach whatever vocab seems best. For me, I am aiming for natural language usage. So, I’m creating contexts for communication, and we’ll use whatever language comes up!

This does lead to things being a bit unpredictable, and honestly, I’ve found it difficult in the past to keep track of what I’ve said to whom. Sometimes I find myself “introducing” a gesture for a verb, and the class is like “omg Herr Fisher get it together, we got this!” Other times, I have discovered that a fairly high frequency / useful word hasn’t come up in a long time, or at all, and I end up doing mental gymnastics trying to introduce it to the class.

Then, I stumbled upon this article by Justin Slocum Bailey, who is an outstanding Latin teacher and teacher trainer. He had an idea that was so simple, I went YEAH: just ask kids at the end of class what words/phrases were most central to the day’s interactions, and what seemed most useful. Boom! The students help you build out a vocabulary list, so there’s a feeling of mutual responsibility. You can then just make a spreadsheet (I keep mine in a Google Spreadsheet) with all the language you’ve used, so you know what each class has heard and used. Boom!

I also check back on my Write and Discuss from each day to see what has come up in class. I write mine by hand on the board to keep them shorter, and then type them up into a Google Doc during my prep. I do this in conjunction with asking the class, because sometimes certain language stuck out to them more, and that language doesn’t always necessarily show up in the Write and Discuss. (See: a super random vocab word a kid asked for during class, a fun interjection, you accidentally taught a swear word when you walked backwards into a chair and fell over and politely remind your students to never ever use ever, etc.)

Now what do I do with this word list, once I have it? The first thing is feel relieved, because if anyone ever asserts “we (they?) don’t even do anything in there!” I can whip the list out and be like “well then, what is all this language we’ve used?! (dramatic music)“

I also have thought out some other, non-affective uses for such a list, which could include:
– Building new readings that are recombinations of familiar vocab, either for days when I need to sit to refrain from dying, or for performance assessments (both throughout an instructional cycle, using AnneMarie Chase’s Quick Quizzes, or at the end).
– Spiraling the vocab that appears in my Bell Ringers, which are usually reading (input!)-based.
– Playing games! I could easily make these a Quizlet set for students to study, if they should so choose, which easily turns into either a Gimkit or a Quizlet Live. Same idea with a Kahoot!
– Printing the list for a parent or child. Sometimes they just want some sort of proof, something to study. This could be it!
– Reminding myself of other useful stuff that hasn’t come up yet – and then magically bringing it up!

Sometimes, you might want to target other useful vocab that could wow their next level teacher and make your classroom life more flowing. Slip a new word or phrase into the classroom convo when it makes sense, and boom! You have a more proficient user of the target language.

Overall:

If we communicate to our students via lists, they will produce…lists. I’m aiming to use class time to communicate in real questions, statements, stories, etc., so that hopefully one day, my students will be able to do the same. But for as long as we need to hold onto the idea of the vocab list for the world language classroom, then we can certainly provide – and make it useful to us, too!

What do you think? Do you have to follow a set list, or do you have more freedom? Do you have an argument for vocab lists that I’m not thinking about? Let me know your thoughts and ideas below!

Heute ist Donnerstag, nicht Freitag.

I am at a new-to-me school this year, finally teaching German while also still getting to teach some Spanish. (And model how cool multilingualism is, boing!)

The prospect of teaching German was so exciting to me when I applied for and got the job – I know WAY more about German stuff, having lived in Germany for a year, and I just love the language dearly. But I didn’t realize how difficult last year was on me emotionally and mentally until I woke up feeling nervous and physically sick this morning, my heart beating wildly as I imagined facing my classes for the first time.

I kept swirling around in thoughts like: “What if this year is just as hard as last year?” “What if you lose control?” “What if you can’t keep it in German the whole time because there’s so much side chatter?” “What if this is just what teaching is like?”

I’m (finally) seeing a counselor for anxiety, and part of my initial stages of treatment has just been identifying when I’m having negative thoughts at all. Sometimes, just identifying that it is happening is enough to help me dispel the tension. So, I identified that I was feeling scared, and set about repeating to myself the mantras I know to be true and helpful: Go slow. Look them all in the eyes. Maximize comprehension. Give your students love.

Now, I saw all the freshmen yesterday as part of their orientation day, and my German 1 freshmen were very…lively. I worried that they would never settle down, and that it would be the failure I had imagined. But I stuck to my mantras and did my best with them today.

All we got was this short text:

Two kids got jobs. And we got one sentence! “Today is Thursday, not Friday.” It was a hard-earned sentence, but we got it out, because I decided to stay slow, maintain my calm, and make sure that that one sentence was good with everyone before we moved on.

And you know what? I had students come up to me after class and tell me that they appreciated how I teach. And my students exhibiting the most distracting behaviors knew 100% what was going on when I checked in with them. And even my girls (there are like 6 of them and 29 boys, help) were able to laugh with me about the energy of the class, aka I don’t think they hate me.

After school today, I called some parents as part of my mission to establish positive contact with all my families before we get too far into the year. (Currently at 12o-odd kids amongst four class sections, so pray for me.) ALL the parents I called today told me that their kid already liked my class. Even with all this energy, all this containment and calm I was managing! They liked it, and they liked me.

Our students want to understand. They want teachers to take it slow, check in with them, make sure everyone is okay before moving on. So maybe this group will need some training about how to respond and interact in a CI classroom – but if I can stick to what I know to work…we could have a wonderful, wonderful year. I will take the time I need to reflect and grow, and give these students what they want and need – someone they understand, who seeks to understand them.

I am here at my desk, wishing you the best for the new school year. How is it going for you??? Tell me in the comments below!