Category: Reflection

Notes from ’24-’25 Me for ’25-’26 Me

I took notes from student reflections at the end of last school year, but never made it to typing out a blog to process my thinking, as I had intended. So, better late than never, here are some thoughts I am carrying in to the coming school year!

Unexpected Ways to Make Students Feel Cared For

When I solicit feedback from students, I usually ask students to signal their level of agreement with the statement “My teacher cares about me.” I want their German class to be a place where they feel safe to explore their identities and the world, so I try to pay close attention to which students are marking just “agree” or disagree with the statement. I’m shooting for “strongly agree” for all students. I want to make sure that there’s no barriers in our classroom to feeling like they can come along for the joyful ride of acquiring another language.

Sometimes, students use the language of care when providing feedback about class activities and routines at the end of the year. I was surprised at what a couple students interpreted and highlighted as care, and it’s making me reflect on how to provide more of these things throughout the coming year.

The first thing that made students feel cared for was when I ensured comprehension. Taking the extra time to add a gesture, define words in the L1, check whole class comprehension, provide examples, show or draw images, circle back around to check in with students whose demeanors showed struggle: these actions communicated more than just language input to students.

It makes me consider the inverse statement: students feel like we don’t care when we just plow through, even if they are not understanding. This really makes clear to me that we must do everything in our power to support and check comprehension, and continuously work on our skills of providing comprehended input. Without this, students won’t acquire anything, and they will come away thinking, “That person just didn’t care about me.”

Another surprise was a student mentioning feedback on their writing was a way they knew I cared about them. Writing feedback?! Don’t all students fear The Red Pen of Death? Not necessarily. I think because I provided options for what kinds of feedback students could receive (credit to Meredith White for this idea), they always got just what they asked for.

I know from research and working on the podcast that feedback on writing doesn’t produce the greatest ROI for student acquisition and output, but we can’t always do everything for our students in a mode of “SLA Purity” or whatever. Students interpret this feedback as care, and are showing genuine curiosity that I, as a relative language expert, can speak to.

I will just need to find a way to streamline my feedback process, and really pace myself so I’m not giving feedback on 8,000 compositions at once. This will require very clear project guidelines, and walking students through our Presentational Communication rubrics so they know where I’m coming from with my feedback. I will also have to make sure that students have to do something with the feedback (probably a rewrite and resubmission) so that it is worth all our while.

Whole Class Novel Working Arrangements

I have been ending my school year in levels 2 and 3/4 with whole class novel reading, and it has been a great way to relax out of the school year when my brain has been turned into sauerkraut. I follow the teacher’s guides, every year adding some new cultural exploration and activity embellishments, and it’s been a great choice for me.

The books are usually about 10 chapters long, and I like to give students a variety of options for how we read the books. I usually start with me reading chapters 1 and 2 aloud, then do a couple chapters each of partner reading, individual reading, and group reading with reading roles. This year, I also used the audiobook recordings that came with the teacher’s guides, and the voice acting and sound effects were a huge hit. We always end the book with me reading the final chapters aloud so we can all share the experience of getting to the end!

My assumption going into this year was that students preferred working in the small groups most of all because who doesn’t like sitting around chatting? It sometimes would be in English, but it was the end of the year, I was exhausted, and students were making steady progress through the books, so I let it slide.

It turns out that students did NOT prefer the group setup! They preferred me reading to the class, or using the audiobook. I’ll have to try to learn more as to why that is, but my guess would be that when I read aloud, I provide clarification and paraphrasing that increases comprehension and feelings of success (see above). My guess for the audiobook is that they loved the voice acting, because it was hilarious. Good to know for this coming year, where I’m going to even try to end level 1 with a novel! (gulp)

Gamifying Class Target Language Usage

To help with student blurting and English use, I started using Annemarie Chase’s Timer Trick to incentivize staying in the Target Language for long stretches. Basically, I set a timer, and for every 7 minutes that students didn’t say anything out of turn in English, the class got a point. Once the class had 5 points, we played a quick game all together. Score!

Students really enjoyed it, and it helped reset some…energetic classes towards the end of the year and throughout Testing Season. Favorite reward games were Hachi Pachi and ¿Dónde está la araña?, which we played with my adorable plastic octopus. Many students were Pop Up! haters, but that won’t stop me!!

The Two Minute Drill

I implemented the Two Minute Drill by Ben Tinsley with my 3/4 class, and one student shouted out that it helped them feel like other students were really interested in their lives with the questions they asked. I, too, felt like I learned a lot about what made many students tick, either through the questions they asked, or the answers they gave. And it was a joy to hear them all speaking to each other, laughing, and learning about each other’s lives!

I kinda fell off doing the routine towards the middle of the year, but I think I’ll reserve a day every week for the Two Minute Drill because it was very cool. And if they want more (more students interviewed per day, or more days of the week), then we can add more!

I would also love to summarize what we learn through the Drill in a Write and Discuss text, either by taking quick notes during the Drill and then using them to review with students, or just by asking for the most interesting/surprising things the class learned. I want to get more mileage out of the language, and highlight how important each individual is by purposefully making them the subjects of our texts. Maybe I’ll even expand the routine down into my level 2 class!

My Level 1 Students Wanted…Homework?

Are these children okay? Just kidding, kind of. But some students were requesting homework for German class, and I was a little stumped at the time. I don’t generally give homework as a philosophical choice, but I also know that getting students to engage with the Target Language and Target Cultures outside of school hours fulfills the Communities Standard and helps them become independent learners of the language.

When I was a Spanish teacher, I made a homework choice board that I was pretty proud of, so I could try to make something similar for German. Notebook homework, where students read and translate a text from our class to a home adult, could be another option. Real World Homework, a more open-ended option that probably needs some scaffolding to get students pointed in the right direction, has been a hit with my high schoolers.

I am still on the fence about assigning regular homework in my classes, but if I do, I will try to lean on self-grading listening and reading work to avoid having to police student use of online tech tools to create their output, and to avoid me having a stack of paperwork to deal with every week. I may lean more on my subscriptions to TextActivities and EdPuzzle to provide more reading and listening input to students, while sprinkling in some of the assignments I named above for some healthy variety and cultural exploration.

I am feeling cautiously optimistic about this school year – how about you? What mood and lessons learned are you bringing into the new year?

PEARLL Summer Institute: Vocabulary

Last week, I attended the PEARLL Summer Institute lead by Rebecca Blouwolff. Rebecca is an absolute master teacher, so it was such a pleasure to learn from and with her.

I had originally planned on doing a post of takeaways for every day of the institute, but then I ended up taking a tumble during a morning run before Day 2 started and ended up in the emergency room. WOOPS. I’m totally fine – just scraped up – but I missed out on two days of learning, so here’s what I was thinking about coming out of day 1:

Setting goals for students = creating challenges for them, not to-do lists

This year, all three levels of German at my school will be offered as dual-enrollment classes for both high school and college credit. The college I have partnered with uses a textbook, which I have never done in my German teaching!

…and that textbook is quite, uh, traditional. I panicked a little bit when I saw the final exam, but then got my head on straight and am determined: I will teach any required vocabulary and grammar as contextualized as possible. This will require some thoughtful backwards planning, and some creativity when it comes to choosing contexts that bring all the isolated vocabulary lists from the book together into input and interactions that make sense.

Of course, the textbook has goals like “Ask and answer questions about someone’s hobbies” and “Describe the major geographical landmarks in a city” as facades to disguise the underlying strict grammar agenda, so my task this year will be to figure out: why? Why does a speaker of the language do these things? In what contexts?

A fellow participant framed the selection of Can Dos by saying that communicative goals “feel more like challenges to our students, versus just long to-do lists.” That is helping me engage my creativity: what problems are our students solving when we do these communicative acts? What will make them feel excited, creative, challenged?

I haven’t fully fleshed out my planning for each level with this lens yet – still hanging on to summer – but I love the idea of a creative “challenge.” As I get closer to the school year starting and have had time to meet with my first-ever student teacher (!), I’ll try to make a post outlining my planning mindset as I work through this challenge.

Dividing up vocab lists: prompt students to build their personalized vocabularies

Rebecca showed us some example unit vocabulary lists, and they were divided into three sections: 1) I need to know how to produce this in order to complete a task, 2) I need to be able to recognize this in order to complete a task, and 3) other language that might be interesting to know and use.

Section 1 (the MUSTs) contained mostly high-frequency vocabulary relating to a thematic unit, including some items referred to as “grammar-as-vocabulary”. That means providing not just an infinitive for verbs, but verbs conjugated to subjects, perhaps even including a common preposition that follows. Sometimes, it was entire phrases that just needed to be completed by an appropriate noun or adjective. Language learners acquire different conjugations more as vocabulary, rather than as “take-infinitive-chop-ending-add-new-ending” as traditionally taught, so this made good sense to me.

Section 2 (the recognition section) contained lower-frequency words and phrases that might help support interpretation of unit texts (including terms that would get students through authentic resources dense with unknown vocabulary). Interestingly, Rebecca also includes the “you-form” questions that undergird the unit theme: “What do you like to do in your free time?” “Which do you prefer?” “When do you…?” She’s not expecting students to produce these from their noggins spontaneously, but they will come to recognize them through scaffolded interactions throughout the unit.

Section 3 (interesting to know and use) is where students can really personalize their learning. I have tried variations on this before – including having a “My Dictionary” section on the back of any vocabulary sheets I give students in anticipation of texts we use in class – but nothing has really stuck. What made this click for me is the realization that students need strong lists of useful, high-frequency language about a topic (found mostly in section 1), but also training on how to expand and track their own personal vocabularies.

Students can learn personal vocabulary from their Free Choice Reading books, from texts explored in class that have words glossed or explained in/by context, by asking their teacher for a word, by looking words up themselves. I think having conversations about the ways we can pick up new vocabulary that’s meaningful to us, as well as compelling their need by asking good, interesting questions in class, will help students put booster rockets on their language acquisition AND their motivation. It feels good to know the words you want to know!

Match vocab list to unit Can-Do statements

This one hit me like OH! …woops. Rather than giving the long list of every possible term related to a topic, really narrow down vocabulary lists to mostly include high-frequency formulations, and make sure that each term is matched to one of the performance objectives of the unit. Ding!

Maybe if a term is only really related to an Interpretive Reading or Listening task, it can just go into the “recognition” section of the vocab list. High-frequency, adaptable terms (“I play…” “I live in (a)…” “I feel…”) can stay in the “MUST” section, and what follows can be sorted by how frequent it might be to your learning community. The 10,000 possible ingredients for a favorite meal? Ditch them, and pick higher-frequency terms to replace them. (So maybe not every possible type of meat, for instance, but just…”meat”!)

And if it doesn’t match a specific performance objective, but lives in the topical universe? DITCH IT. MAKE THE LISTS SHORTER. Long vocabulary lists do not make kids learn more words. Exposure to large amounts of comprehended input in different contexts makes kids learn more words! And this all needs to be contextualized within the framework of a given unit.

These are my developing thoughts for now. What do you think?

Teaching for Proficiency 102: Intercultural Communication

In writing my Teaching for Proficiency 101 post, I stated my goal is teaching for intercultural communicative competence, teaching so that students become proficient, thoughtful users of the language. That post ended up focusing mostly on aspects of instruction related to communicative competence and linguistic proficiency.

This post seeks to complement the last, and expand on what I find to be fundamental in language teaching with regards to guiding learners towards becoming thoughtful intercultural communicators.

What is Culture?

From the April 2012 edition of The Language Educator

If we want to explore interculturality and meet our national Cultures standard, we should have a working definition of what “culture” is. ACTFL uses the “3 Ps” model: Products, Practices, and Perspectives.

Products are tangible and intangible creations that emanate from the beliefs of a culture. These can include food, music, books, laws, homes, and so much more. Practices are how people in the culture interact with each other: how does one show respect, and to whom? What rites of passage exist in a culture? How do people show that they are listening in a conversation, or during a presentation?

Products and practices reveal underlying perspectives, how cultures make sense and meaning out of the world. Understanding perspectives, and being able to explore them empathetically, helps people become more thoughtful and respectful towards others they deem “different.”

What is Intercultural Communication?

Graphic by Ben Fisher-Rodriguez, with reference to the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements, Proficiency Benchmarks, and Performance Indicators

Again, I have turned to ACTFL for a definition of intercultural communication. Through exploring Products and Practices at a variety of skill levels, learners become increasingly able to interact in empathetic and culturally sophisticated ways, with the aim of being able to serve as a mediator between and among differences in cultural Perspectives. This ultimately helps the world interact more peacefully and productively.

In putting the skills of intercultural communicative competence into a similar framework as the linguistic skills, we have a helpful trajectory that show us how we might push students to grow. Students have to start by being able to just identify and list Products and Practices in the Target Cultures, while also reflecting on how they think these Products and Practices reflect underlying cultural Perspectives. Then, they can make comparisons between (and among) the Target Cultures and the Home Cultures. This builds towards understanding and explaining diversity in Products and Practices, and being able to suspend judgment in evaluating them and the underlying Perspectives. Note that I have put “objectively” in quotation marks on the graphic above, because I do not believe that objectivity exists in the strictest sense. Each person brings their own experiences and biases to every situation, and will have to be cognizant of those in mediating differences in cultural perspectives.

I think that this sequence is not a fixed, step-by-step sequence for learners that just aligns to their linguistic proficiency: students can list Products and Practices, and then make some comparisons. Through more in-depth exploration, they might be able to begin explaining some diversity, even if they were exploring the topics linguistically at the Novice level. They might even be able to help others avoid cultural misunderstandings by acting as a mediator with limited linguistic skill in the Target Language! But that is the key: culture is so many things, so students need practice in applying their skills of interculturality to a variety of cultural Products and Practices. With an increase in knowledge about and experiences with the Target Cultures, students will perform more consistently at the higher levels of skill.

So if these are the skills of intercultural communicative competence that we want to teach to, what principles can guide our planning? (Because these skills only grow via thoughtful planning from us as instructors – not by chance!) Here is where my thinking is right now:

Build an Understanding of the Home Cultures

I have found that many students, especially white, US-born students, think that only other places “have culture.” They can’t quite see that every thing we do is culture, and need practice in identifying the aspects of culture that are all around them. This is where activities like Card Talk and Special Person Interviews can help reveal the cultures of our school community by making discussions of students’ preferences, opinions, and experiences the topic of discussion. There is so much diversity even within our own classrooms, and building awareness of the cultures in the room helps prepare students for making more thoughtful, nuanced comparisons.

I try to think aloud with students about things that are familiar to them to point out that the way things are indicates a lot about culture. I use questions like the following to make our US-American culture a little weird to them:

  • What do our hobbies say about us as a culture? Why do you think that?
  • What do you think it says about our US-American cultural values that our schools schedules are the way they are, instead of like German schools?
  • Why do you think these foods are very popular here and not as popular in Germany? Why are their foods popular to them and not here?
  • Why do the downtowns of their cities look like that? Why does the downtown of OUR city look like that?
  • At what points in history has the US censored artworks in a way similar to this art exhibit in 1930s Germany? What do you think was the aim at that time?

Students need to build the reflex not to just think “oh, they’re so different/weird,” but rather to think “they might also see some things we see as normal as different/weird…I wonder why they might think that way?”

Push Students to Be Descriptive Rather Than Evaluative

Learners sometimes get stuck when exploring culture because of a gut reaction they have to what they’re learning. We cannot accept “that’s weird” or “that’s gross” and also “they’re so much better than us [US-Americans]” without interrogating the “why” behind those statements.

If we hear statements like these, we just need to pause and ask, “Why?” “Why are you laughing?” “Why do you say that?” The thinking that follows reveals even more of the underlying cultural Perspectives of our students, which we can reflect back to them to help them see their own cultures as objects for study and comparison in our classes.

Provide Frequent, Repeated Exposure to Cultures

Students need A LOT of exposure to cultures, in the same way that they need A LOT of exposure to comprehensible language in context. We have to plan for culture to be everywhere in our curricula for them to have a fighting chance at being able to be intercultural mediators. My students have commented that as much as they love growing more proficient in their use of the language, they love exploring cultures, so building more exploration of Products AND Practices into our learning increases student motivation and investment into learning the language, too.

This can also mean seeing the same text more than once. One thing I learned from Alicia Dallman Shoemaker‘s TOY presentation is that in order for students to have “aha!” moments about their learning, they sometimes need to revisit texts/photos/media multiple times to give their brains time to digest all the new information they are taking in. Students might need to read a text more than once, or watch a video again on a different day, after having time to process and live some more, in order to get the most out of their cultural explorations. We can then ask how students’ thinking has changed over time to build the self-awareness and empathy necessary to become intercultural mediators.

Cultural “Texts” Can Be Many Different Things

To give students access to cultures, we can use a variety of media in our classes. Here are some ideas of things we can “read” as texts in our classes:

Photos, videos, infographics, songs, their lyrics, their music videos, children’s rhymes, games, books, posters, websites, TV shows, movies, blogs, maps, guest speakers, physical objects from the Target Cultures, postcards…

The possibilities are really endless, and all offer opportunities for learners to explore Products and Practices with our guidance to increase their understanding of the underlying Perspectives.

Provide Many Perspectives on Cultural Products and Practices, Including from Historically Marginalized Groups

To develop the ability to see the variety of ways Perspectives express themselves in Products and Practices, students need many different takes on the same topics. If we hear from one German speaker about What German Schools Are Like, we might believe that that is the authoritative One Answer To The Question, when really schools in any country are quite varied for a variety of reasons, for example. We have to be careful to paint a more nuanced picture of the Target Cultures by letting there be multiple (sometimes contradictory) takes on cultural phenomena.

My finding is that centering voices that have been historically marginalized can also helps us better see the cores of the cultures on whose margins those people live. I have personally learned a lot about how Germans conceptualize their national identities from Black and Muslim Germans, about how accessible German culture is from disabled Germans, about how Germans feel they “live diversity” from LGBTQ+ Germans. Consider adding voices from historically marginalized groups to every topic and unit to build a fuller picture of the Target Cultures, and increase empathy and understanding of those who are considered “different.”

Plan for Language to Explore Cultures through Own Voices

Any exploration of another culture is always filtered through the identities of the students doing the explorations, as well as that of the teacher selecting the materials and topics. To access the most authentic picture of another culture, we need to let members of those cultures speak in their Own Voices.

This necessitates building the linguistic capabilities to be able to explore authentic media from the Target Cultures. When we are planning for specific language functions in our curricula, as mentioned in the previous post, we can plan for one of those functions being the interpretation of authentic texts. Having pedagogical tasks that front load vocabulary and perhaps some cultural understandings build the scaffolding towards those functions.

The Fourth P: People!

Many who teach for proficiency acknowledge that language is too abstract and complex to teach explicitly, but we are also working in a model of culture that focuses on three abstract nouns: Products, Practices, and Perspectives. The way culture emerges is with people, their actions, and their use of language, rather than by stepping outside of it. This is much like the acquisition of a language, which happens with communication and use, rather than by observing a languages features from outside of it.

Behind all these Ps are People! Through the experiences of individuals, we can see culture and the 3 Ps in action, and also develop empathy for others who are different from us. A “different” culture is easy to write off as “strange” to the Novice eye, but it’s possible to find commonalities with any individual human, learn from their experiences, and see cultures through their lives. Individual lived experiences are more memorable anyways, versus just learning “cultural tidbits” as they are strewn randomly through textbooks and class “Culture Days.” If “adding more of the 3 Ps” to your curricula feels abstract and unattainable, try thinking of “adding more People” to your curricula instead.

Read this blog post for examples of how we might use People as the “Fourth P” to explore Products, Practices, and Perspectives further. A huge thanks to Cécile Lainé for putting this idea out into the universe!

That’s all for now on a high-level overview of teaching for intercultural communicative competence. What’s missing? What’s resonating? Let me know in a comment below!

Teaching for Proficiency 101: Communicative Competence

I’ve been reflecting on what helps me feel focused and calm when it feels like the world is accelerating around me and my head is spinning. What I’ve found is that reminding myself of my fundamental beliefs helps me do the harder stuff better, and make more confident decisions for “what’s next” in my teaching life. (Typing this makes me realize that this also applies to my life outside of school, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)

So, I’ve figured out that my overall goal is teaching for intercultural communicative competence, teaching so that students become proficient, thoughtful users of the language. How do we go about that?

Input is indispensable

Learners need loads of communicatively-embedded comprehensible input in the language before they can be expected to produce the language themselves. This means multiple exposures to useful, relevant language, and that we, as instructors, have verified comprehension in some way regularly throughout each lesson. Constant formative assessment via talking with learners, rather than at them, is how we achieve this.

The sources of that input is where proficiency-oriented language teachers can diverge. Do we use exclusively authentic resources from the Target Cultures (or what we might think of as found media) to give the broadest possible view into other cultures during our classes, or do we use exclusively resources oriented towards language learners to ensure maximum comprehension of the input, and the best chances at acquisition (or what we might think of as created media)? I, personally lean towards texts created for and with language learners to try to most efficiently use the limited time I have with students over the course of our language program. Authentic resources provide access to cultural perspectives, so they are also very present, but explored with guidance and scaffolding to get the most out of the language.

Interaction, too!

Accessing the linguistic system built via comprehended input builds communicative skill and fluency, and interaction with learners about their lives and the world builds interest and attention to input, furthering acquisition. We can provide interact to students as a whole class, in pairs, and in teacher-student conversations.

We need to be prepared, as instructors, for students to interact at their own levels. Knowing that communication is not just achieved via language, this might mean that students begin by communicating using gestures, nods, or movements, graduate to using words and phrases, and move on to sentences and more complexly structured discourse over time. We can adjust our expectations and demands of students again through formative assessment, gently guiding our learners towards more extensive language use.

We are teaching communication, not “The Language.”

Using the language to express and interpret meaning in different contexts for different purposes is both our goal for learners, and the means to achieve that goal. Knowledge of abstract grammatical principles does not necessarily contribute to “accurate” language usage, and is a less useful investment of our limited time with students than just using the language in ways that students understand to accomplish nonlinguistic goals.

If we wanted to teach our students about linguistics, we could teach them that. But if our goal is to teach students how to communicate, then we are going to practice by actually communicating. One doesn’t learn to ride a bike by reading a description of how the legs work in conjunction with our balancing skills to propel the bike forward: one learns by simply riding, maybe first with training wheels, but actually riding.

Goals: Language Functions

What follows from the last point is that our goals for our programs, units, and lessons are oriented towards language functions. These include understanding audio and texts (often conspicuously absent from the goals of more traditional programs), asking and answering questions about topics (not “conjugating regular verbs”), expressing opinions, thoughts, and experiences (not using “gustar” and “gern” correctly), narrating stories (not using the preterite, imperfect, and perfect tenses), and so on. If we want our students to be able to use these functions about various topics, we need to show them the language being used for those purposes, and use these functions in our classrooms. You might draw student attention to how grammatical forms contain meaning, while also keeping in mind that this won’t mean that students will reproduce forms correctly, or soon. The focus should be on expression and interpretation of meaning in a given context for a given purpose (the definition of communication provided by Bill Van Patten).

Many who use a Comprehension-Based Communicative Language Teaching (CCLT) approach have found that stories, both fiction and nonfiction, model a lot of these functions very naturally in context. Added to the fact that narrative helps any learning be “stickier,” you might reflect on the role that stories play in your curriculum and choose to insert more narratives into your teaching. These can be novels, short stories, personal stories shared in class by either the students or the teacher, narratives the class co-creates with the teacher – there are lots of possibilities here.

Understand the Proficiency Levels: Realistic Expectations

If we are going to teach for proficiency (vs. for grammatical accuracy), then we need to have concrete look-fors when it comes to students’ developing proficiency. What are the differences between Novice and Intermediate language? What about in the low-, mid- and high- sub-levels? Any SLAyyy listener will know that Bill and I are huge fans of the Avant ADVANCE training offered by the creators of the STAMP test, which helped both of us develop a more granular understanding of the proficiency levels and sub-levels.

Once you have that foundational understanding, learning how long it typically takes for students to achieve specific proficiency levels will help you set realistic expectations for student production and comprehension. We can relax the grammar perfectionists living inside us, and live in the knowledge that language proficiency just takes time. Let’s celebrate when students exceed our more realistic standards, and celebrate when they meet those standards, too!

Understand the Proficiency Levels: Use Performance Assessments and Grade Accordingly

Once you’ve set realistic expectations for where students will get in their language proficiency throughout their time with you, you start creating performance assessments based on the topics you explore in class that ask students to use the language at the appropriate level. Your students won’t necessarily be set up for success on exams about specific grammatical phenomena because that is not what they are learning. They are learning to communicate – so assess their ability to communicate: to use the functions described above.

The grades we assign to these assessments should hopefully reflect holistic assessments of students’ language proficiency (vs. their work habits or classroom behavior). I work off the idea that students meeting the proficiency target for a course should be at a solid, low A, with A+s for students who exceed the target, B for a sub-level below the standard, etc. You might listen to our episode about Standards-Based Grading to hear more considerations about grades and proficiency.

Comprehension Is A Goal

It bears repeating that students need lots of comprehensible input to acquire and then use a language, so our goals for our programs, units, and lessons also need to include lots and lots of comprehension of Target Language input. These goals often get left out of discussions that are focused on only what students are producing, but it will be impossible for our students to go out into the Target Cultures and engage with others if they don’t comprehend what is being communicated to them.

We also need to take our students beyond just literal comprehension and into interpretation, which is to say that we want our students to be able to read texts deeply. This means making inferences and predictions about the text, making hypotheses about cultural perspectives, and using any text as a springboard to learn more (nuanced) information about a topic. We have the opportunity to reinforce the vital reading skills our students need across their lives, but only if we can let go of the feeling of control we feel when teaching the tiny elements of grammatical accuracy. Let’s embrace the big possibilities available to us when we embrace and teach to the humanity of our students, and the humanity living in our Target Cultures.

That’s all for now on a high-level overview of teaching language for proficiency. What’s missing? What’s resonating? Let me know in a comment below!

First Semester Reflections from the 2024-2025 School Year

Because we start school so late in Washington (typically after Labor Day), we ended our first semester in the second-to-last week of January. I’ve had some thoughts about the first semester simmering in the weeks since then, and I figured I’d finish typing them up here as part of my continuous reflection process.

More personalized questions!

There are many ways to provide communicatively-embedded comprehensible input to students, from storytelling to content-based instruction. I have adjusted my balance this year toward sharing even more pictures, videos, infographics, etc. from the German-speaking world and discussing them with students in comprehensible language. Somehow, I feel like I haven’t been using enough personalized questions to connect the content to my students.

Last year, I leaned heavily into Card Talk, which loans itself very well to learning more about the people in the room and building connections between them, and that helped me know so much about the people in my classes. I don’t feel that same level of connection this year, so I want to be more purposeful about connecting with my students and connecting them to the content, either by doing more Card Talk with students, or by planning more personalized questions related to the content I plan to teach about.

Move from just comprehension to language use

This somewhat relates to my previous reflection, which is that it seems a lot of my questioning has stayed lower-level (yes/no, this or that questions) or just comprehension checking (“What did I just say?” “Does _ mean this or that?”). I went to an excellent Garbanzo webinar last week about questioning, and was reaffirmed in my commitment to using questioning to advance language acquisition. It’s also making me consider more how I use questioning to advance discourse in my classes.

It is helpful to remember how new language feels SO new to our students – it’s all brand new combinations of sometimes unfamiliar sounds! Lingering on new language until it feels very confident, and then adding one detail at a time helps build out communication more solidly. Just using one question word, using processing questions to get repetitions on the new information, and only adding additional info after eliciting confident reactions to questions about all the previous info will be key to building more extended discourse, instead of just series of isolated simple sentences.

Chat Mats, the Reawakening

I see the value in having Chat Mats for students. They feel that the language is at their fingertips, and the supports help them get input because they are more or less just reading the language off the mat. But I’ve struggled with feeling like I’m using them like giant vocabulary lists, expecting students to acquire all the rich language after what feels like a “reasonable” amount of time, rather than acknowledging that they are supports for tasks and the language will take its time to get acquired.

My colleague Missy told our PLC that she gives each class a single chat mat, and lets them use them for an extended period, like a week or two at a time. She lets them chat with each other about the chat mat’s topic, and challenges them to see how long they can keep in the Target Language, how many juicy follow up questions they can ask in the language, and how much they can learn about their partners. Students naturally rise to those challenges, and increase in their ability to stay in the TL and build their confidence.

What’s even better – she gives the same mats to every level! Even upper level students need time to revisit “old” language, and feel the growth they’ve experienced since they first “learned” those linguistic skills. The conversations are more confident, richer, more exciting for them. I can see trying this more as a great way to recycle older language, and give students a marker on their path of language acquisition that helps make clear how much they have grown.

Gestures work great!

If we have told any class stories with targeted vocabulary, I have been very consistent this year with teaching gestures as part of establishing the meaning of the new phrases, as well as reviewing older gestures for other targeted vocab. Kids every year write about how much they appreciate gestures, and they are eating it up this year. The other day, a student forgot the next word in our class password, and I did the gesture, which helped unblock their brains and get the entire (correct) password out. Getting stuff into the body works so well!

Research backs this up, and ever since I have leaned more into TPR in my classes, I have seen lots of easy growth in my students’ vocabulary. For a video I’m teaching after we get back from our midwinter break, I have already planned to TPR some of the vocabulary before we even watch the video, and I know that students are going to feel so comfortable with that vocab by the time it comes up in the story of the video. More gestures! Across levels! More!

WTF is my curriculum

This…is a yearly reflection. I am not tied to a curriculum at my school, which is a blessing and a curse. I get to decide everything my students learn, and I also have to decide everything my students learn. As a result, after I “cover” the “expected stuff” in my first two levels (hobbies, family and friends, school, food, cities, travel, houses, etc.), it’s kind of the Wild West as to what we’re going to learn next.

I decided over the summer that my goal is for every themed unit to center a marginalized group in German-speaking society, and got excited about making this happen. There are so many possibilities for me to learn more, and to open my students’ eyes to the world as it truly is outside of our little suburban bubble. Our unit about housing can center accessibility, the “hobbies” unit can center Black and LGBTQ+ German speakers, “foods” can explore the diversity of food cultures across the German-speaking world and the influences of immigrant food cultures on the German-language food scenes, etc etc. The possibilities are endless and so interesting to me from a curriculum design standpoint. But! These units are still in the “wouldn’t that be nice?” phase of design. I just haven’t had the time to solidly plan them out, and that’s okay.

This year, I have been teaching a unit to my upper level class about art in the German-speaking world that builds up to learning about the “Ausstellung Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art Exhibit”) that the Nazis put on in the 30s to ridicule Expressionists, Impressionists, Jewish artists, and others. It feels like a really powerful way to learn about censorship, othering, and the variety of -isms that are brewing to the surface in our society right now. I have had the idea to teach this unit for a long time, but it was only seeing Carrie Toth’s “Bajo la mesa” unit that finally gave me a structure and ideas of how to incorporate lots of rich language into our studies of visual art, which admittedly is not my personal forte. But having someone else’s work to bounce my ideas against has been very powerful, and I’m grateful for the inspiration it has provided.

The conclusion that I’m coming to is that it will all just take time. I can only make and find new resources for a couple units each year before my brain gets overloaded with building the plane while flying it, so I am trying to be content with the new that I create, as well as the less-than-perfect old that I sometimes have to rely on. That’s okay! I also do well when I have a model to look at and build off of. Carrie’s unit is necessarily different than mine – hers is based on a music video that I don’t have for German, and my ultimate end goal is some informational texts about a Nazi art exhibit – but accessing someone else’s thinking is great way to see what works for me, what doesn’t, and where I need to go to plan the next improvement. If I can only revamp a unit or two every year, that is fine, because it just has to be. Everything will be okay.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are the point

The new government has been launching an all-out attack on marginalized groups across our country, and it has been horrifying to witness. It affirms to me that although ideally, every student would come away from my program with Intermediate-level proficiency or better in German, what I really want is for them to understand the joys and benefits of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to fight for them in their own ways in their own lives.

They will work and live in a world of diverse backgrounds and experiences, and need to be able to meet diversity with warmth and curiosity in order to thrive.

They will discover unjust systems through their lives, and need tools of critical thought to push towards equity for all.

There are forces in the world that seek to dehumanize and eradicate historically marginalized identities in grabs for power, and the use of inclusive practices is not only most likely to achieve the goals that we set for our students, but also model for students how to live in a democracy where all are truly equal and free.

I wish for teachers to not self-censor, to show the world exactly as it is to our students, and prepare them to make a better future for all. It will not be easy, but it will be the right thing to do.

What are your reflections as we are moving through second semester? Let me know in a comment!

Program Growth – Some Reflections

As world language programs suffer budget cuts and yearly uncertainty as to how employed each teacher will be, we teachers often ask ourselves:

How do I get students to join my program and stay with it?

This is the beginning of my sixth year at my current school, and since I began as the only German teacher at my school, student enrollments have grown 70%, from 87 students to 148 students. I am very proud of and excited about this, of course, but I wanted to know more about why I was able to get this sort of growth in enrollments. So, I asked students in my upper level (3rd and 4th year) German class about why they were still in German, and had many informal conversations with students and their families to determine what had worked so far. This blog post was born of those reflections.

Below are factors that have been attractive and motivational for my community, and helped grow the German program in my specific context. I would say that some of these factors are out of my control, but some are within my control. Perhaps something I write here will resonate with you, or challenge you.

Orientation Toward College

My student population is very oriented toward college studies, and are very aware that they need about 3 years of language study in order to get into the colleges they are interested in. German is not offered at the local community college that many Running Start students attend, so I get a bump of students in my third year class who are taking college classes, but need my class to stay in German.

College credit is also very enticing to students, as they know it looks good on college applications. Using AP German for that credit was tough because it seems like every university treats AP credit for languages differently (one student needed a 5 in order to get ANY credit at all, for example, while others took 3s and up), and I never had a standalone AP class on my campus. This made it hard to teach toward the AP exam when I also had (significantly more) level 3 students in the same class. I think a stacked class like that is doable, but I struggled with it. So, I sought an alternate arrangement for college credit!

Forming a partnership with a local community college helped secure college credit for my students, and gave me more flexibility in delivery of content. The professor I have been working with loves seeing what is happening at the secondary level in German teaching, and helped me make my upper level classes more college-y.

Extracurricular Activities

My school has a German Club that is very active, and I believe it plays a role in attracting students to my program. Students have said how much they love having a community of friends, and that they have even more opportunities to learn about German cultural products and practices that are hard to cover during normal class times.

The German Club Bundestag (parliament, our group of officers) makes extensive use of the German Club Idea List, a list of potential ideas for club activities that is divided between “anytime” ideas and month/day-specific ideas. This makes planning easier for everyone (me included) and makes sure that we are always doing something together. As much as the students like German Club as a social group, the activities give a unifying purpose that makes them feel like they learned something special by choosing to come to German Club that day. Our Club Time is incorporated once monthly into our school day schedule on a Friday, and we try to host a couple after-school events per quarter.

I have also created a chapter of the National German Honors Society that helps add some prestige to students’ study of German, as members of the Honors Society get special recognition at graduation. I’m trying to plan some more Honors Society-only events that add more fun and privilege to that group.

Proficiency-Based Instruction

Research indicates that moving towards proficiency-oriented language instruction increases student motivation and feelings of confidence, while also helping students attain better oral proficiency than traditional, grammar-and-vocabulary language instruction. We’re talking students that are more likely to stick with programs because they’re learning more. It can feel terrifying to shift away from the safe refuge of a textbook curriculum, but you don’t have to do it alone. Working with colleagues to change your instruction – identifying Can Dos to center your planning, using more of the Target Language in class, having more spontaneous, supported interaction in class, and so on – can help take away the fear and uncertainty. Many hands make light work.

Ultimately, proficiency-oriented language instruction chooses an asset mindset, versus a deficit mindset, in regards to students’ language development. We are focusing on cultivating what students can do with the language, versus what they know about the language, or what “errors” they make in their first attempts at communicating in a new language. That mindset is refreshing and inspiring, and helps learners focus on how they are being successful in their language classes instead of “failing” at this or that verb ending or sentence structure. Success motivates – and students want to stick around where they have been successful!

Choosing activities that increase student joy also increases student attachment to the course, and makes it more likely that they will keep it in their schedule as a bright spot in their day. My students have described German as “a break from my other classes” in the way that it makes them feel.

I suspect that some of this comes from spontaneous, co-created content. This includes creating stories with TPRS, creating characters with OWIs, Special Person Interviews, small talk and chit chat in the language, and any activities where you don’t know how students are going to creatively respond. It is terrifying to jump into a class and not know what content is going to be “covered” in the period based on student responses, but giving yourself as the instructor bail-out moves and skeleton structures to support you while leading these activities can help you still get students lots of language, no matter what. And students find the spontaneity exciting, memorable, and motivating.

Motivation and Inclusion

The through-line of a lot of the ideas mentioned above is an orientation toward that which motivates as many different students as possible, based on their basic psychological needs. I view motivation through the lens of Self-Determination Theory, which I learned about from Dr. Liam Printer. According to SDT, people are motivated by their basic human psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Being flexible and responsive to student curiosity and creativity gives choice, fulfilling student needs for autonomy. They help co-create our stories, share their interests with me and their peers regularly, and are provided differentiated activities to show their growth in a way that most speaks to them.

By choosing Comprehension-Based Communicative Language Teaching, I am giving my students a greater chance at developing competence in the Target Language by teaching in a way that is acquisition-supportive and aligned with how their brains actually process language. Partnered with realistic expectations for how acquisition works (and the time that it takes) and regular formative assessment, students get to notch consistent victories in their language classes (which can turn into college credit, more opportunities to create community with others, etc.).

Building relatedness does not stop after the first weeks of the school year. Every activity is an opportunity for personalization and connection to others, building a sense of community. A student once left the feedback, “I feel like I could say something interesting about each person in our class,” and that felt like the greatest indicator that we had taken time as a class to get to know each other well in the Target Language.

This only works if every student builds the belief that they can learn another language, and we treat every student as if they will become a very proficient user of the language. Our vision, our curricular choices, and our practices must all be viewed through a lens of inclusion. How can I make as many students as possible successful in this class?

I can do that by reading IEPs and 504 plans. I can do that by auditing my curriculum to increase student access to windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors in their learning, and challenging them to grow as thinkers and people. I can do that by challenging myself in the ways I think about “difficult” students, and seeking ways to make certain that they are successful.

An inclusive and motivating classroom is a place where youth will want to be.

What factors in and out of your control affect your program growth? Every context is different – let us know about your obstacles and successes in the comments below!

Reflections from the 2023-2024 School Year

I feel like I get a little bit better at teaching every year, and part of that has been through the process of reflection. I did a reflection at semester, so here are my end-of-year reflections!

Anchor Everything to a Text

I came to a realization this year that sometimes, my class conversations were just floating in the air as sound. We would talk about something for a little while, and move on. I trained with teachers who did non-targeted CI, so I’m used to “discovering” new language as its need comes up, and writing it on the board, or conveying it using all my other skills. But that language sometimes would get that one use, and then it was gone. In reading the blog of Lance Piantaggini, I really had an “oh!” moment when he wrote to “always anchor to a text.”

Students need to be exposed to all that same language that came up in the conversation in a written text. This way, they can see spellings, writing conventions, grammar in context, everything – and get double the input. The texts can come from Write and Discuss (which I always tell myself to do more of), Embedded Readings, class novels, whatever – but I need to be writing more text on the board and getting more texts into student hands. Because reading is what? Fundamental!

Work the Language Even More – Gestures, New Readings, Parallel Texts

This reflection kind of comes from the previous one, which is that I could tell that sometimes, students just needed more meaningful reps on new language. I can work it more by incorporating more gestures (which I used to do more of and students would list as something they loved!), creating parallel texts of readings we’re doing, and trying to generate more cultural readings using the language we’ve been using in class recently. I’m really inspired by how SOMOS does this throughout its curriculum, and hope to create similar readings for my German classes as I continue to tinker with my homemade curriculum.

Changing IPA-Like Tasks to Be More Input-Heavy/Contextualized

I’ve been trying to find a good balance between teacher-created materials and unadapted materials to build students’ reading skills. The couple “IPA-style” tasks I did this year had mixed results, with some students totally shutting down. I think they need lots and lots of guidance and modeling, especially at the Novice level, to perform the tasks without my support. This means using more “authres” as Picture Talks, the final levels of Embedded Readings, etc. instead of being like “I know you can do it, here’s a thing!” (Sometimes, this happened this year because I was unexpectedly way more absent than anticipated and just had to throw something in front of my kids.)

Homework…?

I gave homework for the first time in my career this year (audience gasps). Results were mixed. I only gave it to my third/fourth year College in the High School class because It’s College and We Love Rigor, etc etc. As expected, some kids struggled to complete it and needed to stay in during our remediation period to do so. It was never worth tons of points relative to our in-class assessments, but it could still affect a student’s grade.

I’m toying with the idea of assigning homework in a zero-point category, and telling students that completed homework will help you get points back on assessments. (While secretly not actually giving extra points, but the students just earning them because the homework would hopefully help them just do better on assessments anyways?) Not sure how I want to handle this yet. Kids appreciated being pushed to engage with German outside of class times, but I need to do more reflection with them about what they actually find motivating and helpful to do.

For what it’s worth, they LOVED this Real World Homework assignment. They learned a ton from it, and I got linked up to some cool stuff I may not have found on my own!

Energizing Brain Breaks vs. Centering Brain Breaks

I managed to do more Brain Breaks this year, which was nice! It’s important to keep an eye on students’ energy and focus, and use Brain Breaks to get them back in the game, as necessary. And like…hopefully do it as a preventative measure instead of as a bail-out.

There is a big difference, I’ve found, between Energizing Brain Breaks and Centering Brain Breaks. My first period needed Energizing Brain Breaks to break out of the soporific morning doldrums. These are things like giving a certain number of high fives to other classmates, Rock Paper Scissors variations, spelling German words with their bodies, Peluche – anything that required quicker movement.

My after-lunch classes required Centering Brain Breaks. These could include mindful breathing, body percussion, TPR with body parts, trying to count as high as possible without two people saying the same number at the same time, etc. They had a LOT of energy that needed reining in, or a recommitment to focus at the end of the day. I’m going to continue to experiment with how different groups at different times of day respond to various Brain Breaks to see what works best for the mood!

More Knowledge of the World!

I just read an interesting book called The Knowledge Deficit, which was about how a focus on reading strategies has left students without many of the resources they actually need to read successfully: broad knowledge of the world! I want German class to contribute to my students knowing tons more about how the world works, so I’m recommitting to teaching my students more about geography, history, art, music, important people, politics in other countries, etc. through the language so that they can be more successful in all their other classes. (And in life, as well!)

…Less Spreading Myself Paper-Thin

This year kicked me in the butt. I missed more days of school this year than any other year in my career (including the year I got married and had a week of jury duty!). Part of the problem is my tendency to Do Everything. I want to continue to say yes to exciting opportunities, but also…say no to more.

I have dropped a couple things from my plate after this school year, and my current plan is to not attend any state, regional, or national conferences this school year. (Something that will help is that due to budget constraints, my district has paused our PD fund for one year, so there will be no money to go anywhere, anyways.) This is going to be a huge change for me, but I’m hoping to use the time to reflect more, have a more balanced life outside of school, and get healthier. Again, this year was a lot.

ATTENTION.

I saw a great video by Elicia Cárdenas recently where she threw a stuffed animal to a student and said, “Look! Because you were paying attention to me and the things I was saying, you could catch the stuffed animal. The stuffed animal is the new language. Now, if you’re not paying attention, you’re not going to be able to catch the stuffed animal, or the new language.” (And then she had a student pretend to not pay attention, and the stuffed animal bounced off of them as she threw it, and the class [and I] giggled.)

You only learn what you pay attention to. I have gotten better with time at channeling my students’ focus towards new language, and want to keep focusing on that as a goal for the coming year. This will mean better follow-through on my cell phone policy (one warning, then it goes into the German Cowboy Hat for safekeeping), more Brain Breaks as described above, and more discussion of how people learn languages successfully. All this, plus a healthy dose of modeling, should hopefully get us up to lots of attention in German class. (I also tell my students, hey, we don’t have homework because I want your complete attention here, so let’s make the most of it!)

Also important is What We Put Our Attention On. This is going to be learning things about our classmates, about the German-speaking world, and about the world in general. I, as the teacher, am going to try to limit how much attention I put into grading (because I hate it and it doesn’t help my students acquire anything), and comparing myself to other teachers. No time for that! Only time to be with my awesome teenagers and bask together in the beauty of the German language.

And you? What are your reflections from this school year?

Look Back, and Rest – A Reflection on Going Slowly

I was watching a video reflection by another teacher recently, and the teacher remarked that they had recently made changes in their instruction to go even slower than they had been going. The payoff had been that all his students were showing incredible gains, just from the single change of going so much slower.

Going slower required the teacher to provide even more repetition of the language and content to be learned, and to check in with each individual student and have them describe what was happening in the Target Language. The contention of the teacher was that before, by just developing strong responses to whole-class questions, he had been going too fast, and leaving students behind. That even though he had been implementing a Comprehension-Based Communicative Approach, he had been achieving the same level of student frustration and skill stratification within his classes as he had seen with a traditional approach. I shuddered.

For some reason, I flashed to a German class I had taught to other teachers as part of a conference. The class was fun, upbeat, and developed its own in-jokes (in German!) pretty quickly. They were all language teachers, so they just seemed to understand how things “should” work.

And there was one participant who wasn’t quite on the same ride as the rest of the class. She indicated that she didn’t understand as much of the language as she would like, and that some things were going over her head. She was more reserved than her classmates, and didn’t seem quite convinced that what we were doing was the right way for language teaching and acquisition.

I found myself overlooking her, even somewhat consciously, and just enjoying the laughter and creativity of her classmates. The class moved right along, and we generated tons of content from all the various activities I know how to do that made some great memories for us all. I convinced myself that the choral responses of her classmates would help surround her with the information she needed to be successful, that it would all click into place, eventually. She was trying – surely she would get it!

I look back now and feel sad that in a way, I gave up on her feeling successful in my German class. I had tried to repeat that “just getting the gist” was okay and totally where we all should be, but how much can one enjoy always just grasping at getting the gist? Especially while everyone else seems to “get it”? I can’t imagine how defeating, maybe embarrassing that felt. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t turn around and start a Comprehension-Based Communicative Approach in her own classes, if she wasn’t already. I hadn’t really sold it to her. Success breeds confidence, and I had, in some part, withheld success from someone who was really trying.

I flashed forward, then, to my own classes now. I was embarrassed to realize that I could quickly name students in each class that I give a similar “overlook” treatment. Their classes are moving along, we are “covering content,” some of their peers are outputting in alignment with my goals for them. But what about their goals? What about truly everyone being along for the ride so there are not clear “strugglers” in each class, ones that come to mind quickly?

The video I watched was a reminder to go slow, slower, even slower. I want to:

  • check comprehension even more to ensure that everyone is along for the ride.
  • look into the faces of all my students as we engage in whole-class discussion.
  • ask more processing questions to make the language deeply part of each student, so they can enjoy it the same way that I do, that their peers do.

“Just holding on by the skin of their teeth” for some of my students just doesn’t work for me, for the inclusive vision I have built for my entire German program. I am on a weeklong midwinter break as I write this, and will return with a plan to go slow, painfully slow, stick with students, try my hardest to make sure that every student is experiencing success. I know that it will be hard, but that these adjustments will end up making all my students feel stronger, more confident, more like the German speakers they want to be.

Another set of images flashed into my mind:

For five summers in my twenties, I was the program director of an outdoors summer camp.  Every year, our staff included new counselors who, like me, had once been young campers at the same camp.

Reliably, these young staff members were thrilled at the speed at which they could hike with other adults, and would blaze ahead on the trail at grown-up speed.  But that also meant that they were leaving slower hikers behind, hikers who were inexperienced rock hoppers or who just needed an extra bit of time to get to the destination.  When they would eventually catch up, the fastest hikers were finished resting and would power on, leaving the slower hikers out of breath and scrambling to follow.

Eventually, frustrated by how these trailblazers were burning up the stamina of their peers, and that they were missing out on opportunities to slow down and connect with their peers on a personal level, I decided to be the voice in their head that would encourage them to keep track of their slower peers.  At intervals, I would shout up the trail: “look back!”  Those in the front would turn to check that they could still see the furthest hiker back, and would adjust their pace to keep the group together.

When we would stop to drink water or catch our breath, I reminded everyone, fast and slow, to rest.  The idea was not for everyone to just stop breathing hard and double up protection against blisters, but to really be ready to conquer the next stretch of trail with confidence, connection, and enjoyment.

We saw so much more, hiking together. The mood was so much brighter, even if it took us longer to get to our destination. And the young staff members were so much better prepared for the real-world task of being able to accept whatever skills and speed their young campers brought to camp during the actual weeklong camping session.

Maybe this is a good metaphor for what we must seek to do with our learners.  Look back, and rest.  If not, we run the risk of turning something as beautiful as the slow hike of language acquisition into a blur of exhaustion, isolation, and pain.

Go slow, colleague.  Slower than you think.  Look back, and rest.

Reflecting on Fall Semester 2023

Inspired by the reflections of Bill Langley, I wanted to take a moment to look back at fall semester 2023 and reflect on what I learned and experienced.

Questioning

My goal for this year has been simple: more questions! Asking lots of what Mike Peto calls “Artful Questions” allow students to hear more language in context as students get repetitions on vocabulary and grammatical form. I think I’ve upped my “artful questioning” this year so that students feel very comfortable with new language pretty quickly. I was also super interested in this research article by Gardner and Lichtman, which showed that contingent questions (aka either/or questions) helped students be more confident and accurate in their own output – I’ve upped the volume of either/or questions in my classes and am looking forward to more confident student output!

What has also gone well for me this year has been adding more personalized questions with new vocabulary. I’m always trying to find ways to connect what we’re learning with the lives of my students, and I feel like I know my students better this year than any other year. When I’m unsure what to ask next, leaning into the use of Sweet 16 verbs and question words helps me find the next logical (and engaging) thing to ask.

Leaning Into Card Talk

I used to do Card Talk for a week or two at the beginning of the unit, and then sort of abandon it after interest had run out or I wanted to move onto something else. A lot of “cards” went unused, even with students asking if one day we would look at theirs.

What has been really nice this year has been returning to the “cards” from the beginning of the year throughout the semester. Honestly, any time I was struggling with planning and needed a quick “filler” that still felt worthwhile, displaying a new card and chatting about it with the class turned out to be super engaging for students. There has been lots of personalization in my class because of this foundational activity, and it’s been fun to see how much language growth we’ve achieved in one semester when we pick up and talk about a new card.

New Activities

Overall, I try to limit the amount of different things I do just to make my own planning easier and not have to teach new activities to my students all the time. It saves time and we can go deeper with language if we’re not constantly explaining new activity formats. But! I do love trying stuff out, and these three activities have been huge winners for me, so I’ll be keeping them in the rotation:

  • Quick Draw (AnneMarie Chase)
    This is a great, fun game to review a text that students are familiar with that takes the teacher off the stage and engages students’ competitive spirits. Students love drawing, and half of the fun is the images they create! But they’re also secretly reading and rereading a ton…! (AnneMarie is a master of secret input!)
  • Input-Based Vocabulary Quizzes (AnneMarie Chase)
    This is the first year of a dual-credit “college in the high school class” for upper level German, and I am beholden to a textbook for the first time since I started at this school. As such, I have wanted to make sure kids are getting lots of exposure to each textbook chapter’s vocab, and these input-based quizzes have been really great to meet the textbook’s goals while also meeting my goal of getting students lots and lots of contextualized input.
  • Hatschi Patschi (Cécile Lainé)
    I had heard of this activity before, but never saw how to implement it in my own classes until I read Cécile’s blog post linked above. Though it got a bit, uh, physical, my students LOVED this game. A great way to practice answering questions about familiar topics, and also have FUN.

TPR

I have used gestures in the past to help students remember specific target structures, but never done just classic TPR. I think part of what stopped me was not knowing what to start with and how to build up with it over time.

I got a copy of Berty Segal Cook’s Teaching English Through Action and everything clicked into place. By following (but also modifying for my own needs) the lesson plans provided, I was able to inject some movement into my students’ days, which really has helped with focus. Having someone else’s structure made it easy to modify for my needs (most specifically for my deskless classroom).

But it also helps with listening and vocabulary! TPR gives immediate feedback to both student and teacher, so it’s easy to see what needs more repetitions and practice before moving on. I’m a fan – I think 7-10 minutes of TPR most days will remain especially for my lower level students to build listening stamina and vocabulary.

Warm Ups

I’m still pondering on this one: I find that the same students aren’t doing my Warm Ups every day. Many are able to answer questions I ask while we are checking the warm ups, but my wish would be that they write down German at the start of class to get their minds into German mode while I have time to take attendance and check in with students.

I had contemplated handing each student a quarter sheet of paper every day with the warmup on it that they return to me at the end of class (the other blank side could even be used for the end-of-class Quick Quiz), but that feels wasteful. Having a warmup sheet with 2 weeks of spaces on it, like I do now, is more environmentally-friendly, and gives space for notes, new vocab they learn during the warmup, writing down our weekly Classroom Passwords…

Still thinking about this one. I’m thinking I just need to make clear that doing the warm up is part of our opening routines, and warmly insist that students follow the routine with greater fidelity.

Setting Up for Absences

I went from being almost-always at work to feeling like I was missing tons of days this year. Between ACTFL, family events, illness, and PD opportunities, I’m missing a lot of time this year.

Luckily, I knew about many of these things ahead of time and could plan for learning to happen, even if I wasn’t there. Part of the success I’ve had was training students on my expectations of where to find assignments if I wasn’t there, and part of it was setting up students with specific jobs for my absences that help the class function very well. Sub notes have been very complementary and kind, and work completion is up over other years, even on days where I was unexpectedly absent. Even in years where I am anticipating being in school most of the time, I will continue to train students to adjust to my absences without missing a beat.

Writing

I just purchased Eric Richards’ book Grafted Writing a couple weeks ago and have already implemented three of the activities into my own classes. I highly recommend it as a way to scaffold student writing in class in an input-focused way!

German Club Planning

This has felt really great: since I put out the call on social media that I was soliciting ideas for a German Club Ideas Master Document, so many teachers have shared their amazing resources with me, which I have been able to share back to other German teachers who are spread too thin. (A special thanks to Amanda Beck, whose Central States presentation on German Club activities formed the backbone for a lot of the list.)

The result of this is that German Club has gone from something that really weighed on me to something that is not at all stressful. My officers have resources to plan with so it’s not always on me, and we’ve tried tons of new activities this year that members have loved. Win win win!

What have been your reflections from fall semester 2023? Comment below!

Reflections from the 2022-2023 School Year

Another post that was outlined three weeks ago and is only now getting written…oH WELL. I had a lot of victories last year, so now’s the time to lay out some goal areas for improvement!

Setting Appropriate Tasks to Avoid Online Translators

I have been lucky to avoid too much online translator interference by mostly doing on-demand, in-person, handwritten writing tasks. (Online learning made me too wary of writing tasks completed on the computer, so when I have students ultimately turn in something digitally, I make sure there was a handwritten copy beforehand that they truly did produce alone.) (Sidebar: another benefit of mostly doing handwritten assignments is that I have a long paper trail of student writing samples that are easy to refer to when I suspect translator usage. “I looked back at your writing from a couple weeks ago, and this latest assignment seems very…different from that!”)

Every time I ran into online translator usage this year, I think it was because I set tasks that were too intimidating for my learners. I believed that they had the capacity to complete the tasks in some form, but they did not share that belief, so they sought the path of least resistance. In my Teacher Brain, I thought we had completed enough smaller tasks to make the Big Task doable, but in the minds of my students, those tasks were in the past and unrelated.

I think students need more scaffolding for Big Tasks in the L2. This could be sentence starters, exemplars, models that we co-create in a Write and Discuss-like procedure…but I’m also thinking that we need to gather together all of the formative writing tasks we’ve done, lay them all out visually, and think aloud about how those tasks connect to the summative task. That way, all students are able to see that they actually have already done a decent amount of the cognitive heavy lifting and can draw on their past performances as inspiration for the Big Task.

Level Ups

I’ve been thinking a lot more about how to help students build the bridges in their writing to get to the next proficiency sub-level (blog posts forthcoming!), and something helpful that I did in the past was a procedure I learned from Mike Peto. I have transition words that I have printed on card stock and stuck magnets to that I then hung all around the edges of my board. While we were doing Write and Discuss, I would challenge my students to find ways to incorporate those words into their suggestions for the text we were co-creating. Students loved the challenge, and after seeing the words and phrases modeled in usage, they sometimes started showing up in their writing! Score! I just fell off doing that this year, and am looking forward to slapping those magnets back on my board in September and issuing the challenge once more. Transition words and subordinating conjunctions help move students from Strings of Sentences to Connected Sentences, the jump from IL to IM that introduces complexity and depth to their writing.

I have also been fascinated by this level up procedure I discovered by Erin Carlson (that I learned about via Bethanie Drew). The reminders to try to add Affirmative/Negative, Myself/Someone Else, and Answer/Add More Info to their writing will probably help them just write more words, which feels very satisfying and can help them reach higher levels of complexity and detail.

Circumlocution

I got to film one of my lessons as part of my ACTFL TOY portfolio, and one of the reflections to come out of that process was that I heard a lot of “How do you say…?” in my level 2 class. (That is to say, more than I wanted to hear!) It reminded me to train my students on the skills of circumlocution, and I think an easy and fun way to do that could be to play more 20 Questions (via AnneMarie Chase) as a sponge activity.

Classroom Jobs

When I taught middle school Spanish, I had a variety of classroom jobs to support the functioning of my classes, and even a whole whiteboard dedicated to listing who did what in each class. It was fun and a great way to build community, and I want to bring that to my high school classes. The truth of the matter is that there are plenty of little tasks that I would…prefer not to do (passing papers, etc.) that I can turn into jobs. I don’t want to lean too far into extrinsic motivators to make the students do the jobs – mostly just positive comments about how helpful these professional students are – but maybe once in a while, I’ll let a kid leave class a little earlier than everyone else, or give them a cool pencil or something. Or a sticker! Kids love stickers.

Claudia Elliott has an episode of her excellent podcast here where she talks to John Sifert and Annabelle Williamson about classroom jobs that I’ll be listening to, and Bryce Hedstrom has a great article here about classroom jobs that I’ll be reviewing.

What are we doing in the upper level class lol

The title of this section was a joke to myself, but I figured I’d keep it because it reflects how lost I’ve felt with my upper level classes for the past few years. I began offering AP German at my school a couple years ago, but it never ended up being a good fit for my school. Between COVID really hurting enrollments and preparedness, AP students always being put in a class with third year students who weren’t ready for AP-level tasks, and having students melt down under the pressure of multiple AP exams all at the same time, I never quite found a way to make it work. My pass rate was okay, but I didn’t feel great about being beholden to that specific test.

My students responded very positively when I told them I was thinking of changing to a College in the High School / Dual Enrollment German course for the third year and beyond. That gave me the push to get the program set up, and it looks like I’ll be offering a year-long college credit course starting in the fall. This is brand new territory for me, but I look forward to the challenge of planning towards the college’s very clear curricular requirements (the breadth of AP is what got to me a lot of the time), and refining my lower level courses to set those third/fourth year students up for success. I’m hoping it will be a better fit for my learners – and me! Luckily, I will only be teaching three preps next year (German 1, 2, and then dual enrollment German), so I will really be able to focus on making it great from the beginning.

What about you? What are you looking forward to doing (or not doing) in the coming school year? Comment below!