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.

Upcoming Webinar: The Personalization Mindset: Using Card Talk to Build Proficiency and Community

I’m super excited to announce that I will be presenting a webinar for ACTFL on using Card Talk to personalize language learning, and build the skills of creating comprehensible input and interactions in your language classes!

Who: The CCLT SIG and the German SIG (join for free if you are an ACTFL member!)
What: The Personalization Mindset: Using Card Talk to Build Proficiency and Community
When: March 4, 2024 from 4-5pm PST
Where: Online! Register for the webinar here.

As for why?
– Maybe you want to learn how to do the activity Card Talk because you’ve never done it before.
– Maybe you’ve done it before, but want to work through some trouble spots you encountered.
– Maybe you want to learn different ways to utilize Card Talk in your class.
– Maybe you’re looking to build more skills of creating comprehensible interactions with your students.
– Maybe you’re brand new to “teaching with CI” and just want to soak up as much information and perspective as you can!

If you’re looking for somewhere to get started, I have blog posts about Card Talk, as well as doing Card Talk online that can be a good place to start.

Looking forward to seeing y’all then!

Are you going to be there? Let me know in the comments below!

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!

ACTFL Policy Speech

Dear Reader – in November of 2023, I was a finalist for ACTFL National Language Teacher of the Year. Though I didn’t end up winning, it was an incredible honor to be nominated and to share the stage with four colleagues I now consider friends. And Alicia is a really incredible teacher and advocate, so really, everyone wins!

As part of the application process, I had to write and deliver a 3-5 minute policy speech, like one might give to a political group. This is not exactly my wheelhouse, but I did the best I could, with LOTS of help from JJ Melgar, my BHS colleagues, and my husband. I am posting it below in all its imperfection so that maybe you might learn something from my experience, too. I have tried as best I can to link all citations and sources, and get the wording as close to how it was when I actually delivered it. (The draft I printed got a lot of marking up, even in the final hours before I had to deliver it!)

So…here it is! Enjoy…? 🙂

Prompt: THREE-to-FIVE-MINUTE PLATFORM/TOPIC OF INTEREST SPEECH GIVEN TO A CIVIC GROUP OR OTHER OUTSIDE ORGANIZATIONS, MAKING THE CASE FOR WORLD LANGUAGES. (as taken from the ACTFL TOY Selection Rubric)

Do you remember where you were when you found the words for what you believe in?  Do you remember where you were when you realized how you will thrive, connect, and contribute in society?

For countless young people, these moments of discovery happen, as they did for me, in world language classes.

But we are at a moment in which we have an important decision to make: do we accelerate a trend of condemning K-12 and university language programs to wither and die, as is happening at West Virginia University and across our country, making the lives of our countrymen smaller, teaching our young people to cast a wary eye toward difference?  

Or do we champion a bolder vision, do we set our hands to the creation of a more prosperous society that can mediate those differences, do we amplify our collective pursuit of happiness through intelligent investments in multilingualism for all?

Consider: At present, the Census Bureau reports that 79% of US residents speak only English, and the American Councils for International Education estimate that less than 20% of K-12 students are studying a language other than English at their school.

At the same time, the demand for multilingual employees is rising across the skill spectrum, including in healthcare, trade, and technical services.  A survey by Ipsos Public Affairs indicates that “nearly one in four employers surveyed acknowledged losing or being unable to pursue a business opportunity over the singular lack of foreign language skills.”  Businesses across our nation are pleading for investments in a more multilingual workforce, and why wouldn’t they?

Studies show that multilingual people have better reading abilities than monolinguals.  Multilingual people have better overall academic performance.  Multilingual people even show more rational decision making in their additional languages, and craft more creative scientific hypotheses.  But these skills, these societal gains are lost with every program that gets abandoned.

I see the growth of these important skills in my own classroom across years of study.  My first year learners initially encounter cultural differences as strange and off-putting, but with time, they are more able to observe other cultures from a stance of suspended judgment.  Students move from using evaluative terms to more relative or descriptive terms for other cultures.  Not bad, not strange, but different.

Our profession has evolved from fill-in-the-blank teaching toward engagement with the authentic voices of other cultures.  Learners of German, Spanish, Japanese, are learning not only about, but with and from members of diverse cultural groups through multimedia documents on a wide variety of topics.  They are reading magazine articles about futuristic technologies, watching video essays about intercultural identities, and analyzing infographics for trends, all in their new languages. 

And instead of taking for granted what others might try to convince them about a given culture or group, they are listening deeply into these cultures and experiencing them through their own words.  This is what we stand to lose if we turn our back on multilingual education.

We turn our back on international connection and business, on reconnections with family and heritage, on opportunities to find shared belief and shared humanity.  Charlamagne is quoted as saying that “To have another language is to possess a second soul.”  A soul is something that you must nurture and care for.

We must nurture and care for multilingual education, and invest in its sustained growth.  We must nurture and restore funding to Title VI and Fulbright-Hays, which changed my life forever.  We must take care to pass the World LEAP Act into law.  We must invest in the protection of language departments like that of West Virginia University, so that our countrymen can thrive.

These programs are not in competition with initiatives in STEM, the trades, and vocational education: these are complementary and supportive initiatives.  They are pennies on the dollar investments in a more innovative, connected, and peaceful future.  I found the words for what I believe, and found humanity in myself and in others in a language classroom.  Let us be champions of that future of possibilities: multilingualism for all.

Thank you.

The ABC-Quiz: Cultural Learning Through Movement

In the summer of 2022, I was lucky to attend a seminar put on by the Goethe Institut titled “Sprache, Landeskunde, und kulturelles Lernen” that explored the concept of integrative Landeskunde in language instruction. That is, exploring how to teach our students not only facts about our Target Cultures, but also skills of intercultural communicative competence and discourse about cultural phenomena – all through the Target Language. It was an absolute blast to take the course entirely in German with German teachers from four continents, and the ABC-Quiz stuck out to me as a fun way to get students thinking, moving, and engaging with cultural concepts.

Why should you do it? Because our dear kids need a bit more movement in their school day, even if it is just a little bit of standing up and walking around! Plus, they tend to get competitive about finding the “right” answers, which ups the engagement factor as they think about cultural Products, Practices, and Perspectives.

When do I use the ABC-Quiz?

The ABC-Quiz is primarily an input-oriented activity as students read and process questions about cultural phenomena in the Target Cultures, voting with their feet as to what they believe to be the correct answer, and it can be inserted into a unit just about anywhere – either to introduce a topic and relevant vocabulary, or to extend learning about a given topic.

If you use an ABC-Quiz early in a unit, you will definitely want to preview new vocab in some meaningful context, or build in that contextualization into the Quiz itself.

In this example slideshow that I can use very early in my German 1 course, new academic vocabulary is bolded, and contextualized given students’ knowledge about the world. Even if they maybe think that “Hauptstadt” means “largest city” at first, they quickly learn that it means “capital,” and can then use that knowledge immediately for the next prompt to guess / state Germany’s capital. The number ranges in the population and number of states questions also give clues as to what is being talked about before students are asked to guess facts about Germany, based first on their learning the new vocabulary in German as relates to the home country (in my case, the USA).

Otherwise, the vocabulary in this example is very limited to basically “is,” “has,” and then names of countries! With more language proficiency, students will obviously be able to read and contextualize more information and new vocabulary.

How do I do it? – Logistics

The main principle of this activity is that students are given a multiple choice question, and move to a designated part of the classroom to indicate what they believe to be the correct answer. You can simply use scrap paper, writing “A” “B” and “C” in large print on three separate sheets, and then lay those sheets across the front of your classroom to designate three areas. Perhaps you already have a “Four Corners” procedure with country names, cardinal directions, or some other indicators in your classroom that you can use in the same way.

You will also need to prepare either some slides, or, much more challengingly, an oral text with multiple choice questions about your Target Cultures. This can range from geographical facts, like in the example above, to questions about the Products and Practices of your Target Cultures. See below for more inspiration in this regard!

How do I do it? – Procedure

  1. Explain to your students that you will be asking them questions to see what they already know about the Target Cultures (and maybe also their Home Cultures!).
  2. Tell learners that they will answer the questions you ask by moving to what they believe to be the correct answer, and indicate the areas for A, B, and C (or whatever other system you use in your room).
  3. Start with a question that could be fairly easy to answer, and model wondering aloud about any new vocabulary that might show up. Referring to the example above, maybe you say, with special emphasis on the italicized words, “[In the L2] The capital…of the United States is…Los Angeles…New York…or Washington DC.? Hmm…the capital. What does capital mean? I wonder…What do you think? Go to A, B, or C, and we’ll learn together!”
  4. Reveal the answer to the question, and celebrate all students’ answers. Reread the complete sentence with the correct answer in it, and do a comprehension check on any new vocabulary (or maybe even the meaning of the whole sentence) by asking, for example, “[In L2] What does capital mean in English?” Celebrate the answers you get for that!
  5. You can easily reinforce new vocabulary by asking follow up questions using the newly-learned word, indicating with a gesture when students can give a choral response (or if maybe they should just shout it out). “[In L2] Ah, so Washington, DC is the capital of the United States! Is [our city] the capital of [our state]? What is the capital of [our state]? What is the capital of France?” All along the way, restate the correct answers, using the new vocabulary, in complete sentences.
  6. Continue on asking content questions, having students move, showing the correct answer, and extending the input with further questioning. If you want to make sure any new academic vocabulary really sticks, you might limit yourself to 3-5 new terms that you use in a variety of contexts throughout the activity.

What do I do with it now that we’ve finished?

Because you may be introducing new information to students through this activity, it is recommended that you follow up with some sort of review activity. Maybe you do a Write and Discuss with your students about what they learned, or just engage in some oral questioning.

In the example slideshow above, I provide students a gap-fill reading that reviews all the information students learned in a short paragraph that uses connecting words like “and” and “but.” It is simple enough for a Novice learner to understand, and all they have to provide in that example is place names and numbers! You could confirm correct answers as a class by reading the completed paragraph aloud, and then have students complete a Volleyball Translation in pairs. Gap fill paragraphs like this could easily have larger gaps or more complex clauses for students with higher proficiency, like “When entering a restaurant in Germany, it is polite to…” or “Something that is similar to my culture is that…”

This activity is a great way to discuss cultural Products and Practices, so written reflection or discussion about the underlying Perspectives is also a natural place to go after an activity like this. I like ACTFL’s reflection question that is included in the Intercultural Can Do reflections: “What new insights about yourself and others have you gained from thinking about this?”

Pro Tips!

  1. Extend the learning! To drive up the amount of input and thinking in the activity, make a discussion out of every answer. Use new target vocabulary to ask personalized and knowledge questions, and share experiences with any cultural phenomena come up.
  2. Follow up! A gap-fill text, multiple choice questions, whatever – just make sure that students have to recall the information they learned. It can get exciting to move around and try to “win” during activities like this, so it helps to have a paper-to-pencil component that confirms what was learned and what might need reinforcement.
  3. Go beyond facts and products! For illustrative purposes, my examples above use geographic facts about Germany, but we could train our students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence even further by discussing social situations and phenomena that students may discover in the Target Cultures. (This would be the Practices P of the 3 Ps!) Let the image below provide some inspiration for possible topics for an ABC-Quiz:

What do you think? Do you have ideas for an ABC-Quiz you could do with your students? Comment below and send me any questions you might have!

For the German Teacher Stretched Paper-Thin: The German Club Ideas List

Many German teachers teach multiple levels of German, and/or are the only German teacher at their school. Added to that, with the pressure to “advertise” their programs so that they “get the numbers” such that their programs don’t fold, German teachers take on a lot of additional roles and activities to increase their “reach” within the school community, including international travel with students, German-themed events and festivals on weekends, honors societies, outreach clubs at other schools, culturally-themed events after school hours, making t-shirts and posters…the list goes on. It can feel like the individual teacher is the reason a program lives, or dies. That is a lot of weight to bear.

Advising a German Club can feel like Just Another Thing in that list of Extras, even if the students are wonderful and it increases your “reach” at your school. (This is the case for me – my officers this past year were incredibly fun, dedicated, and enthusiastic! And I was still very tired at times in trying to help make German Club happen.) Also, ask any German teacher who has hosted a Spaghettieis-centered event how it went and you will watch their eyes unfocus as they travel to a dark, ice-cream-sticky place. If you have to do Just Another Thing alone, in addition to everything described above, it can be all the more frustrating and draining.

So, fellow German teachers, maybe you shouted “FELT THAT!” at the previous 2 paragraphs. Let’s put our heads together and make German Club easier for us all so that we can endeavor to put control over the club into students’ hands and just enjoy it with them. With some guidance, ideas, and inspiration from colleagues across the world who have already made some German Club Magic happen, we can streamline our planning, reduce our stress, and maybe even learn some new stuff about the cultures we are interested in.

In April of this year, I put together a Google Doc that listed ideas for German Clubs I had culled from various teacher groups and websites. They are categorized into “Anytime” ideas, “Month/Day-Specific” ideas, and then full curricula. (Shoutout to Amanda Beck for the excellent year-long German Club curriculum that she shared!) There are already six full pages of ideas, and I feel like we’re just getting started.

Take a look at the doc linked below, and if you have any ideas that aren’t on the list, click the link at the top of each page to submit the idea for inclusion in this master German Club idea list. I thank you, and your colleagues thank you. Here’s to a less stressful year of German Club fun! ❤️🌈🇩🇪

German Club Ideas List

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!

Victories from the 2022-2023 School Year

PHEW it is already July 12th and I’m just now getting to a post I outlined right at the end of the school year. I’ve been busy busy with my honeymoon, my brother’s upcoming wedding, LLLAB summer work, ACTFL stuff, CI Reboot… Lots going on. But I really got a lot out of reviewing my victories last school year, so here we are again. Here’s what went well this school year:

Free Writes / Focus Writes

I use timed Free Writes as a way for students to show their language growth over the year, with each student storing all their Free Writes in portfolios that we keep in the classroom. This is consistently a winning procedure, as students love comparing their disjointed writing from the beginning of the year with the more fluent, detailed writing they are producing by the end of the year. Our greater consistency with doing them just about every 2 weeks helped me in my planning and gave us lots of evidence of growth to reflect on at the end of the year.

A related win has been doing something I’ve titled Focus Writes at the end of each major thematic unit. Students get 5 minutes to write about themselves in relation to the major topics we explore throughout the year. For example, for Level 1:

  • End of unit 1: Introduce yourself
  • Unit 2: Introduce yourself and your hobbies
  • Unit 3: Introduce yourself, your hobbies, and your important people
  • Unit 4: Introduce yourself, your hobbies, your important people, and your school life
  • Unit 5: Introduce yourself, your hobbies, your important people, your school life, and your food/drink preferences

It’s simple, quick, definitely not the only kind of writing they do, but kids get to see how much easier it becomes over the year to write more. We reflected on how comprehended listening and reading input becomes greater ease in writing about yourself over time. And my two Level 1 classes averaged 96% and 116% increase in word counts on these Focus Writes between Focus Write 1 and Focus Write 4 this year, which I brought to my evaluation conversation with my assistant principal, who loved it. Definitely keeping Focus Writes for next year – kids like increasing their skill in talking about the most important thing: themselves!

Reviewing and Clarifying Expectations

Every year, I have been trying to refine my classroom expectations so that they are clearer to students, both in what to do and why we do it this way, and making them expectations that I feel comfortable and justified in enforcing. Inspired by Lance Piantaginni, I used the following expectations this year:

I reviewed these expectations Every. Single. Day for the entire first month of school, and regularly thereafter. (This is especially important after long weekends, breaks, big events, etc.) In addition, any time we did a new activity type, I specified how these expectations applied to the new activity. And this year was so much more peaceful! It was easier to enforce clear expectations whose justification we went over thoroughly. I am keeping these expectations and these procedures for sure.

March Music Madness

I participated in March Music Madness this year in all my classes and it was a huge hit. If you are not familiar, excellent teachers across the world collaborate on a March Madness-style bracketed tournament for new music from our target cultures with the goal of finding a “winning” song from the contenders. Teachers can either link up with international online voting calendars or keep all the decision making up to their own classes (I opted for just doing a school-internal tournament this year because of scheduling). I had my TAs put up a bracket with images of the artists, pictured below, and my students grew so possessive of their favorites that it made my heart smile. They were arguing with each other about their preferences related to Target Cultures music – arguing about content – awesome! I can’t wait to participate again next year.

Free Reading

My students started reading earlier in the year, and read more than ever before. Kids traded books, talked through plot twists, and generally got so much in linguistic competence from daily free reading. Not to mention, it was an absolute joy to read outside when the weather was nice.

Something I touched on but want to do in greater depth next year is discussing with students what successful Free Reading in the TL should feel like. Students have different tolerances for ambiguity/volume of new vocabulary and thus need to try different levels of difficulty for themselves, and sometimes learners need reminders of how to use the glossaries of the books they’re reading. Reading can be a very efficient, effective way to acquire a lot of language, but not if students are frustrating themselves out of potentially successful experiences.

Teaching a Novel

I have only ever done free reading of novels in class, but this spring, I taught my first-ever whole class novel. And I loved it! I taught Mit dem Wind in den Westen from Fluency Matters, and the Teacher’s Guide made it so easy for me to plan and read with my students. My students loved learning about the former East Germany and its culture, and Reader’s Theater was a hoot. I tried a variety of reading formats with my students, including whole class reading, group reading, partner reading, and individual reading, and the group reading procedure pictured below was the favorite of my students:

1. Reader (reads text aloud in L2) 2. Explainer (explains what’s happening after each paragraph/page) 3. Dictionary person (looks up words) 4. Questioner (asks content/context Qs) [Roles change after every page / logical amount of text]

This Tweet

This Tweet was my most successful Tweet this year.

I asked my Level 1 students what color they associated with each school subject and it got…heated lol. Try it as a warmup some day and report back – lots of fun!

WAFLT / PNCFL / NEA

In October, I was named the Washington Association for Language Teaching (WAFLT) Teacher of the Year. This was a huge surprise to me, and I was deeply touched by the recognition. I have felt lots of love from colleagues I have met through WAFLT conferences, and I was honored to be chosen as a representative for language teachers in our state.

In February, I submitted a 30-page (!!) teacher portfolio to the Pacific Northwest Council for Languages (PNCFL) as the WAFLT candidate for PNCFL Regional Teacher of the Year, and interviewed with members of the PNCFL board for about 45 minutes, touching on topics of best practice in language teaching, the teaching of culture, advocacy for language teaching and teachers, and so much more. At our online conference, I was named the PNCFL Regional Teacher of the Year. This really made my head explode, and it has been so incredible to meet language teachers from across our 6-state region and learn from and with them.

The next step is the ACTFL Convention and Expo in Chicago in November of this year. I am one of five candidates for National Language Teacher of the Year, which makes my heart pound every time I think about it. The process of refining my PNCFL portfolio and adding to it as part of my ACTFL candidacy has been truly transformational for me. I am prone to self-deprecation and anxiety about my work as a teacher, and the reflection built into the portfolio process has really helped me identify what I do well, and areas where I want to grow some more. I feel really proud of myself, and no matter what happens in November, I am ready to use my teaching and advocacy skills for the good of all the language teachers I have the pleasure of connecting with.

If all that wasn’t enough to make my heart explode, I found out in April that I am Washington’s nominee for the NEA Excellence in Education Award. My lovely colleague Kei nominated me (knowing this feels like such a wonderful professional hug – professionally hug excellent educators in your life!!), and it means that I’ll be headed to an awards gala (!) in Washington DC in the spring of 2024. Wild. Wild! I am so thankful for these opportunities and can’t wait to see how they evolve over this next year.

Whew – enough from me. What were your victories from the past school year?

CI Reboot 2023 – Reboot Your Skills and Passion!

Are you looking for a summer professional development opportunity that is fun, focused, and uplifting? Let me tell you about the CI Reboot!

I attended and presented at the CI Reboot last summer and was blown away with the format, presentations, and connections that I came away with. There is a variety of tracks for different experience levels with Comprehension-based Communicative Language Teaching, which makes it easy to find sessions that fit where you are in your teaching journey. There are sessions about content-based language teaching, applied DEI in the language classroom, and fundamental techniques that we all need refreshers on!

What really made it awesome for me was the availability of the presenters after their presentations to engage in deeper conversations. After the day’s presentations, presenters move into an online conference lobby of sorts where people can group up by topic of interest and go deeper. I got some burning questions answered last summer, and got to hang out with some really inspiring figures from the language teaching world. Conversations ebbed and flowed like they might in a convention center lobby, and it felt very natural (and fun!).

My teaching journal is full of notes from last summer that I refer to all the time. (I just looked at those notes earlier this week!!) This is learning that lasts, inspires, and improves outcomes for our students. And at only $149 – it’s so inexpensive! (They even have college credit available?? Slay.)

Check out this link to learn more, and I hope to see you there!

Pictured: a handsome devil inviting you to join the CI Reboot this summer in July!

Will I see you at the CI Reboot this summer? Comment below with questions – or to tell me that I’ll see you there!