Reflections from the 2021-2022 School Year

Phew. The last day of school was only 12 days ago, but so much has happened in my personal (and even professional) life in those 12 days that it feels like a lifetime ago. Despite my best efforts, this summer will be as packed and crazy as my last two, so I’m looking to carve out time for reflection on the lessons from last year, lest the time escape me and I collapse like a dying star when we have to start up again in August. So, here are some reflections from our first year back in the classroom full time since the beginning of the pandemic:

It’s Time to Raise the Bar

Most days, right after school, my Spanish teacher colleague Laurel and I take a walk around our school and neighborhood. We chat for ~30 minutes about whatever comes up – sometimes it’s reflections from our teaching day, sometimes rants about unruly classes, sometimes it’s just talking about what’s going on in our personal lives. I always feel refreshed and reoriented after these chats, because they get me away from my computer right after school and help me process lots of stuff. If you read this and take anything away, let it be that you find a Laurel for after-school walks!

Many of our final conversations towards the end of the year were, of course, looking ahead to the 2022-2023 school year. The pandemic has taken so much from all of us, from just about every aspect of our lives, and has required us as teachers to be dealers of grace: not only to our students, but also to ourselves as professionals. There was so much from The Before Times that we just had to let go, because we could see that our students (and sometimes the exhausted professionals we saw when looking in the mirror) were just maxed out with all the upheaval and change.

But the agitation of all that change seems to be settling a bit, for better or worse. Maintaining the empathy and SEL skills that we have learned from these past two school years, it might be time for us to start raising the bar of our expectations a little bit. We want to make the most of our time with our students and see where denying ourselves the easy way out (with behaviors, learning, whatever) helps students flourish even more as they build their competencies. These last two years were definitely not a waste, but we, carefully and lovingly, want to push for more now.

An aspect of this conversation was definitely our students’ relationships to their cell phones, and the impact that they have on our jobs. I won’t get into that here because there is, uh, plenty of great writing about that online right now, but it has helped to see that other teachers have struggled with this these past two years and are looking to try to demand more from their students, as well.

Moving My Posters Around

Last year was the first year I had a classroom allllll to myself, and I have to admit to not being the best decorator slash practical user of wall space. (Luckily, this is one of the many strong suits of my husband-to-be, phew.) I am going to demolish some old (bad) displays I have in my room to make way for spots for the Sweet 16 verbs (also written about here by Mike Peto), common classroom phrases (“Excuse me?” “Can you give an example?” “Can you repeat that?”), and also rejoinders. I think these will be crucial in giving students language with which to create their own responses to what’s going on in class, as well as remind me to recycle these super important bits of language over and over throughout the year.

More Retells

Input is what drives acquisition, but I’ve found my students build a sense of momentum in their language journey by remarking how retelling class stories becomes easier over the course of the year. The first retell is a little bit of a struggle, but it gets better as we go! I tried Blind Retells for the first time this year, and they seemed to go really well. Plus – it’s actually a secret input activity!

Rejoinders / Passwords

I was using both rejoinders and passwords in The Before Times, but they fell by the wayside as we adapted to the many changes coming our way. Time to bring them back! My third years (who were in their first year when things went sideways) brought them up a couple times this year, so I think they stuck out as something cool / helpful /important.

Ungrading

I recently read a fascinating book about Ungrading, a collection of essays by practitioners at different educational institutions about how they go about reducing the importance of grading within their courses while also increasing student ownership of the course content and also their learning outcomes. I am always uncomfortable with grades – they are so arbitrary and not helpful – especially as they relate to the messy work of acquiring a language. I would like to decrease their relevance in my classes as much as possible, while also not uh…getting in trouble at my place of employment.

To that end, I want to see if I can move towards a more portfolio-based assessment system with clear goals that students can personalize and work toward. Part of that will be changing my listening/reading quizzes from having “A/B/C” rubrics to just listing the approximate performance/proficiency level the student demonstrated instead, so that the emphasis is on building performances towards lasting proficiency.

Additionally, I want to try to give only feedback (no grades) on writing and speaking performances as much as I can get away with. Students just look at grades on assignments and trash the rest, so I want to make sure my feedback is actually doing something for them and that it doesn’t go to waste. They have to be able to do something with it, which might end up being revisions and resubmissions. Sooooo that will require a bit more thinking as well, as red-pen-ifying a piece of writing (or a speaking sample) doesn’t do much for a student’s acquisition. But some kids want that red pen! I’ll be thinking on this a lot.

Choosing / Creating Rubrics That Show Growth

I learned a lot from my Avant ADVANCE training about what the different proficiency sublevels actually look like. I think that this knowledge could help me craft better writing/speaking continua that help students see the stair steps they are making towards higher proficiency. They need to be granular enough to be able to demonstrate growth, but student-friendly / not crazy technical. I started creating a writing continuum based on that training, but I think it needs a lot of work for me to feel comfortable using it as a tool for my students’ reflection and learning.

Writing Moves for Each Level

There are certain phrases that came up as part of the Avant training (“Added Details”, “Complex Components”, “Transition Words”) that, again, are a little opaque to our novice learners, but they are the markers that help move them from one level to the next. I’m thinking of creating little cheat sheets of prepositions, conjunctions, and transition words, and then angling my use of them toward the levels that “need them” to move up to the next proficiency level. These could be good reminders to me to keep everything as rich as possible in class (so I don’t just resort to making them memorize the lists), while also being a nice resource for the students who actually do want something to study while at home. Mike Peto also has these brilliant magnets for whiteboards that remind everyone to draw these vital words into our Write and Discuss to make it flow better.

More Backwards Planning from Authentic Resources

My relationship to #authres is that it’s fine-ish if (and only if) I can find ways to use it comprehensibly without breaking my brain / spending 8,000 years preparing ancillary materials. I generally think that time is better spent providing more comprehensible input to students vs. having them hunt-and-peck for words and phrases in otherwise incomprehensible texts. But some things have just proven to be interesting conversation pieces, if just a bit above where my students are. So, I want to be more intentional about creating Embedded Readings or front-loading vocab for stuff that is really cool and merits a closer look.

Using AP Cultural Comparison Prompts as Research Questions

AP was kind of my Big Fail for this year. I taught it as part of a combined Level 3 / AP German class and I never found the correct balance between the two courses. Lots of students expressed frustration about it, and I was frustrated, too. There didn’t seem to be a logical throughline to the course, so I’m brainstorming ways to make that happen next year.

One idea I got from my AP German training last year was to take all of the Cultural Comparison questions that the College Board has generated over the years, assign one to each student, and make that student the “expert” on that area of culture. It allows them to go deeper on one specific topic and its related vocabulary, perhaps even teaching it to their classmates, and helps me broaden their cultural horizons in a way that also prepares them for that exam. That exam I love so much. What an exam. (Muffled screaming)

Answer Questions That Regularly Come Up for Our Whole Department

As department chair, I fielded some questions from parents at an incoming freshman night that I think would be powerful to answer as a department. There is quite a bit of diversity in teaching philosophy / beliefs in my department, which I think ends up being okay because there seems to be a lot of alignment within the languages themselves. That being said, it’s important for us, in both defending our jobs and promoting our content area, to be able to compellingly answer, “What does a successful language learner do to create that success?” “Why is it worth studying a language for more than two years?” “How can the home adults support a student studying a language they don’t know?” Having a, er, common language for this can help us promote our department and hopefully create stable enrollments (a historical problem for us as elective teachers). As we all know, there are plenty of adults who had poor language learning experiences in high school and can’t imagine the magic we create nowadays. 😉

What were your reflections from this year? Let me know what’s been on your mind as we transition out of the school year and go into summer mode!

Victories from the 2021-2022 School Year

Whew, what a year. My last post was in August of 2021 (!!!!! woops), but like many teachers across the world, this year was just about surviving. I have 6 days (including tomorrow) left, and I’m feeling my brain relax and have more space to try writing again, so I figured I’d grease the wheel by just listing out what went incredibly well this year. Despite the many challenges, there was so, so much good.

Being World Languages Department Co-Chair

I shared the department chair role this year with my colleague Andy, and it taught me a ton about communication and advocacy. I have empowered myself to speak up in meetings more, and make sure that WL does not (as it usually does) get put on the back burner. I successfully advocated for some policies that will help the more vulnerable languages at our school have more insured enrollment at the lower levels (thereby making my job / my colleagues’ jobs more secure), and I’m really proud of that. I have stepped down from the post for the next school year, and will not miss the extra morning meetings. 😉

Strongest, Most Unified Level 1 Ever

I learned a lot from implementing the SOMOS curriculum in my one section of Spanish 1 about how one can structure a lower level curriculum, and taking the lessons from that into my German instruction has made for my most effective year in German 1 yet. I know what my students can do better than ever, and our use of language in class has really pushed up to levels I had not previously imagined. And next year only promises to be even better, in this regard!

Biggest Level 1 Enrollments Yet

My level 1 enrollment has grown from this year at 37 to next year at 57 (!), which almost guarantees that I will have enough students the following year for two sections of level 2. (This will, in turn, make me full-time German with no more one-off sections of Spanish to teach!) Overall, the German program has grown by 39% (!!!) since I arrived at my school in the 2019-2020 school year. I attribute this to really investing in the lives of my students and finding ways to be a part of the community here as often as I can.

My First-Ever Batch of AP German Students

Last year, I had two students take AP German almost entirely online and it was a hot mess. One never really wanted to take the exam, and the other backed out at the end because their college only accepted a score of 5 for credit. (Which is wild to me!) This year, I had 9 students enrolled in AP German, and two took the exam! It will be a nail-biter getting their scores, and I learned a TON from having the AP class together with my level 3s, but I am proud of those two excellent kiddos, no matter what scores they end up with.

Reusing Materials I Have Created

I don’t use a textbook or pre-made curriculum for German, so much of what I do is created by…me. This year, I finally had a back catalog of materials that I could draw from, and holy cow did that make my prep life easier. I’m going to try to use some time this summer to curate more materials that others have made and insert them into my curriculum plan, but I was really thankful to have stuff to draw on when I was planning for my 5 different courses.

Receiving German Visitors in Class

When I lived in Chemnitz, I was an English Teaching Assistant (with the Fulbright Program) at a high school. At the time, my now-friend Moritz was in 7th grade. We somehow kept in touch via the powers of the internet and I may or may not have helped Moritz with his English homework. Fast forward nine years, and he is in his final year of studies to be an elementary school teacher in Germany with a focus in English teaching. Moritz and his girlfriend came to visit my classroom this week, and I had one of those rare teacher sit-back-and-watch-it-happen moments as my upper level students asked thoughtful, interesting questions about life in Germany, and got answers that showed so many cultural differences that we could learn from.

Student Panel on LGBTQ+ Life at Our School

I invited about 10 students to stay after school on a Friday and discuss how it is to be LGBTQ+ at our specific school, as well as what they wished their teachers knew about these experiences. What I thought would be an hour-long discussion turned into a 2-hour long discussion, and I was (and am) constantly astounded by the depth of thought and willingness to share my students showed (and show). This was both personally fulfilling as a gay teacher who had a tough time with myself in high school, and also incredibly revealing about how much work remains to be done to make our schools safe for LGBTQ+ students.

WAFLT Board

This spring, I was invited to join the board of the Washington Association for Language Teaching, our state organization for world language teachers. I am truly honored to be joining the board for the coming school year, and look forward to seeing how I can best advocate for language learning and help provide professional support to language teachers across the state.

German Embassy Teacher of Excellence

This one really warmed my gay little heart. Alysha Holmquist nominated me for the German Embassy Teacher of Excellence Award. As part of the nomination process, I received letters of support from a former student, the parent of a current student, my assistant principal, and a colleague. Winning the award felt like a warm hug from all the people who have supported me in my career, and the cherry on top is that I get to go back to Germany for the first time in 9 (!) years and take a teacher training course in Munich! I am dying of excitement, as I am definitely missing Germany and my beloved Chemnitz (European Capital of Culture 2025).

Braving the Post-Remote Learning Teaching World

This was the year I thought most about leaving teaching, but I have not yet. There were so many unforeseen (and foreseen) challenges, and it was hard to get my footing professionally for the longest time. But I know that students acquired more German this year, and that my program continues to grow, and that on most days, my students leave Fisherlandia with a smile in their hearts. I think it was all worth it, in the end.

What were your victories from this school year? Sound off below and celebrate yourself!

Notes for a Strange, New Year

School starts in just about a week – a week! – and I have started reflecting on what I would like my priorities and mindsets to be for this new school year. Last year was quite the punch in the face. But! For better or for worse, it refined many areas of my pedagogy and (I think) made me a better teacher.

Here are some ideas that have been bouncing around in my head as I prepare for a masked, fully in-person learning experience in the ’21-’22 school year.

Targeting

I trained in Teaching with Comprehensible Input (TCI) in a milieu that favored a non-targeted approach – no pre-determined vocabulary targets, and no mass repetition of those targets. I learned that letting go of targets would help refocus lessons on real communication with students instead of bogging the teacher down with preconceived notions of what students “should” acquire, when. Additionally, I learned that high-frequency language, by virtue of being high-frequency, would just show up enough for students to acquire without much effort, planning, or forethought.

After working with the SOMOS curriculum last year, I have decided to gently re-embrace targets, fully understanding that students will acquire our “targets” in their own time (aka not on any “pacing guide” that I, or anyone else, could create). But having vocabulary targets last year helped me streamline my planning, know and plan what sorts of questions I could ask students ahead of time, maintain focus as a teacher, and reuse previously-created readings and materials that I knew contained language for which I had planned ahead. Now, I can definitely still throw in activities like Card Talk and OWIs that generate tons of student-centered and interesting vocabulary, but I will also have rails to get back on should my brain implode and should I be in need of a “safety plan,” so to speak.

Consistent Routines

As soon as I gave myself permission to reuse activity types last year, my life became SO MUCH EASIER. There is no need to reinvent the wheel for every class period. I have started creating a list of my best, favorite activities that reliably get a lot of language, and can just pick from that list if needed. (I am looking into building out my Essential Strategies page to reflect the menu of activities that I tend to choose from.)

In addition, it can be very comforting for anxious students (and teachers!) to know that each lesson will have a familiar contour to it, and that we will not have to guess at what is coming next on any given day. Do Now – Warm Up Reading or Speaking – Input Activity – Review – Closing. Boom. Fill in the blanks with content, but the structure is always roughly the same.

Do LESS, Go DEEPER

I typically plan for 5-6 big units over the course of a school year, with all sorts of fun asides sprinkled in, and last year, I got to about…3 per class. Kinda sorta. 3.5? Oof. My “Coverage” lizard brain was on HIGH ALERT but really, it didn’t matter. The deeper I went with any given content, the more that I felt confident it had been worth our while to dive into. I could feel it in the way students responded during lessons, and the confidence with which they tackled any homework or assessment I gave them. On the flip side, things I threw in “just to cover,” felt like such a waste of time, because we all just felt panicky and confused. So – no more of that! Go deep until we are ALL ready to move on.

Plan My Planning Periods

This will be important for me as I make the return to teaching in-person, on campus. I am…social…and can definitely while away all my planning time checking in with colleagues, spacing out, and just being a Silly Billy. I have five preps this year (German 1-4AP, Spanish 1), and want to use my time at work thoughtfully to reduce the amount of work I bring home. (Goal: zero time at home doing work!) This means setting up processes for each specific planning period to get things done and ready, and sticking to them. It will require me training my focus and writing down plans ahead of time, and those are skills I would love to build, anyways!

Be Explicitly Human

I am incredibly nervous for this new school year. And I don’t think it serves me or my students to pretend that things are okay, because I am sure they are nervous, too. It is a goal for me this year to be honest about what I am thinking and feeling. I want to open up dialogue with my students so that they don’t have to hide what they are thinking and feeling, and so that they can be heard.

One of my reflections during a staff meeting this week was that I have grown the most as an educator and person when I have been invited to explore and be myself in a given context. I want to extend that invitation to my students so that they, too, can grow.

What are your reflections and goals as we head into this strange, new year? Comment below, and may you and yours be safe and healthy!

Preaching to Acquire Podcast – “Kaitlin & Ben Fisher chat about supporting LGBTQ+ students in the WL classroom”

Hey you! Long time, no see. You look great! What have you been doing???

I took this summer off to rest and relax, because unfortunately, that is NOT what I did last summer. All the work I was doing last summer made the launch into a difficult school year…even MORE difficult. I decided to prioritize my own health this summer, and spent 6 weeks at a summer camp in the middle of the woods. Long story short: just what I needed.

In June, I decided to read tons of LGBTQ+ Young Adult (YA) novels to celebrate Pride Month. My younger self did not have access to them when I was first coming out, and it is important for me to imagine new possibilities for young queer youth through art. It has been wonderful to revisit that youthful time of change and growth with hope, instead of with fear.

At about the same time I decided to read more queer YA, I became aware of TPRS Books’ donations to California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, and engaged with the discourse around that on Twitter. See here, here, and here for some thoughts about the donations themselves, as well as my reaction to the since-deleted response video that TPRS Books put out and the reactions of others involved in the conversation.

Part of what came of all that conversation and reflection is a sense that some straight US-Americans think things are “all good” for LGBTQ+ people in the US. I definitely feel that things are better since I came out in 2008, but we still experience homophobia and transphobia all. the. time. All the time! And that sometimes appears to be shocking news.

I’ve been called a slur in the past year. My fiancé, the man I’m fully gonna legally marry, has been called my “roommate,” repeatedly, even after gentle correction. I have been advised to act “less gay,” out of fear for my physical safety.

It makes me reflect that in my allyships, I will never completely understand the scope of how others have to move through this world, and how the world treats them in multitudes of moments. But it also has inspired me to speak more with my colleagues about LGBTQ+ students and issues, so that maybe, we can all be less afraid to live in our world.

I was delighted at the opportunity to speak with Kaitlin Leppert on her Preaching to Acquire podcast about ways to support LGBTQ+ students in the classroom. I don’t know if I expressed myself as eloquently or with as much organization as I would want from myself, but I am also happy to get my thinking and experiences out into the world and open a dialogue with you, Reader, about steps we can take to make our classrooms and schools spaces where students can be more themselves.

I would be happy to hear from you in the comments on this post, or on Twitter. Thanks for reading, and/or taking the time to listen to my conversation with Kaitlin.

Here is the link to my conversation with Kaitlin on her podcast, Preaching to Acquire.

What are your thoughts, wonderings, questions? Let me know in the comments below!

Small Talk / Chit Chat in the Language Classroom – Free Resources for German and Spanish Teachers!

Every language teacher knows that relationship building is essential to making the language classroom a place where students can lower their Affective Filters and acquire tons of language. This is easier said than done – so we have to be on the lookout for techniques that can intentionally make this happen. And if they accomplish two goals – both building relationships AND giving students personalized input – all the better!

Why not just start each class with some Small Talk or Chit Chat in the language? Nothing groundbreaking, nothing curricular, just asking good questions and following up on the answers! Through these conversations, we can learn about opinions, experiences, and life circumstances of our precious little flowers, and also fill them up with tons of input. Boom.

Here is a free resource: a set of slides for starting Small Talk conversations in your virtual or in-person classroom! Lots of visual support for your learners, and I can imagine they would be easy to “annotate” on Zoom or turn into a workspace for Jamboard!

Huge shoutout to Bill Langley, who created the Spanish version that I then turned into German! (Any comments / suggestions for the German versions are welcome – I am a lifelong learner myself!)

German Small Talk / Chit Chat Slides

Spanish Small Talk / Chit Chat Slides

Do you just…chat with your students at the start of class? How else do you intentionally build relationships? Leave a comment below and let me know!

Feedback in the CI-Centered Classroom That Helps Students Grow

One of the things we are asked to do as teachers is provide feedback to students to help move their learning forward. It appears on any rubric for evaluation, and is a natural and necessary part of the teaching and learning process.

Best practice in teaching dictates that we set a clear goal for our learners to begin the feedback cycle. Then, we describe to the learner both where they are relative to that goal, as well as what the next steps for that learner are to meet or go beyond the original goal.

Often, we find ourselves giving lots of comments on student work, and then watch that marked-up work end up in the garbage after a cursory glance at the grade. So, to complete the feedback process, we have to create a need for students to use the feedback as part of their learning. The cycle begins again after students produce a new product or draft using the feedback given.

Here’s the thing…

These processes and practices have been researched and developed as relates to the explicit teaching and learning of facts and processes. Think skills like describing the functionality of a cell, crafting a historical analysis, or modeling a real-world situation using mathematical notation. If students “miss” something or make an “error,” the teacher can show students areas to consciously focus on to improve.

With language acquisition, we can say that there are no “errors,” but rather “developmental forms.” (I take this term from the writings of Bill Van Patten.) A learner’s linguistic system develops in an ordered way in response to basically one thing: comprehended input. Any of the “developmental forms” we hear in a learner’s production along the way are just indicators of where they are in their development, and this development is to be honored and celebrated.

So…the answer for what feedback is needed to develop learners’ linguistic systems: more input! Any explicit feedback about things like verb endings, adjective agreement, etc. will not necessarily make its way into the learner’s linguistic system, because language (in its abstraction, complexity, and implicit nature) does not reside in the realm of consciously learned facts and skills. Indeed, studies on explicit error correction show no lasting benefits for students’ accuracy so…let’s ditch it!

Our challenge, then…

…is to find ways to keep our learners calm and focused on input in a school system that shows great value in always being correct, getting things perfectly on the first try, and ranking systems like grades. To that end, teachers who have moved away from traditional language teaching must make clear to students what acquisition is going to look and feel like, that it’s okay to make errors in efforts to communicate, that progression is going to be messy and seem nonlinear, and that it all just takes time. We as teachers cannot be too explicit about these values – otherwise, students will have no reason to believe that this class is unlike any other class in school, when really, I think it should be. Language is special and different from content area courses.

I also know that there are the linguistics kids out there (bashfully raises hand because I was/am one of those) who want to know more about “proper” L2. It never hurts to throw them a bone with grammar pop-ups during readings once meaning has been thoroughly established! Meaning has to come first, so then we can draw connections between the forms and the meanings they create.

My experience has also shown me that it’s not until usually the third year (or even later!) that many students start to take an interest in how the language works at that grammar-y level, so I’m giving myself permission to hold off on too much grammar-y stuff until that interest bubbles up after lots and lots of input. Again, they need lots and lots of meaningful experiences with the language to contextualize any grammatical musings so, for now (and especially in this age of limited input because of all-virtual teaching!), I’m just going to focus on meaningful classroom interactions.

What about marking up student output?

Some kids might want it – most won’t know what to do with it. I have borrowed Meredith White’s idea of giving an option on any assignment to get corrective feedback on output, if students want it. I usually focus on one or two big ideas that students can focus on, and try to explain “fixes” in non-grammar-y terms that spotlight how the grammar contributes to meaning. (“Oh, this -o at the end of the verb tells us that we’re talking about ourselves, so if you’re talking about yourself, double check that it has that -o!”) Less is more, in this case – no one wants an assignment back that has been given the Red Pen of Death. 🙂

But really – the answer is more input! What systems or tricks do you have in your tool kit to focus mostly on providing great communicative input, while also satisfying the need students sometimes has for your class to look “like school”? Let me know in the comments!

Participating in Students’ Lives with Real Conversation and Connection During Virtual Learning

Amongst the many triumphs, failures, victories, and indignities of Pandemic Teaching, I have found it incredibly important to stay in regular contact with teachers (and non-teacher!) whom I love and respect. This has meant planning Zoom chats, starting a book club, and rallying a local PLC to monthly meetings on Saturday mornings, even when we all feel tired and over it.

This dedication to planned socialization is what got me on Zoom with Mr. Mike Peto, who I have learned so much from at conferences like the ACTFL Convention and Comprehensible Cascadia. We talked about teaching online, frustrations and wins, and how to get back to the basics of providing rich CI to kids.

One thing that Mike said slapped me right in the face, and was a reminder that I hope can positively shape my planning and mindset as we journey into the darkness of our first winter of COVID: Real conversations do not have a planned outcome – you can’t expect what will happen next!

Now, on the surface, this is like “well…yeah.” We don’t launch into conversations with others knowing exactly what they are going to say, how we will respond, exactly what words we’re going to use.

But! In hearing this, I recognized how that need to meticulously plan and “cover” curriculum had creeped into my mindset for teaching, and I think it has been slightly stifling the sparks of real conversation that turn into real engagement in class. Not every moment in a CI class has to be wild and crazy. Most days are not! But taking time to ask about and pick up on the little details of my students’ lives is what has made me so happy as the teacher – and what has helped me provide loads of engaging CI.

The many anxieties of this year have me wondering things like “Are we where we are supposed to be?” “Is this class good enough for the level they’re supposed to be at according to the course title?” “Am I doing enough?”

That thinking is garbage, and I am done with it. Real conversations have participants, not performers. I don’t need to perform us “getting through” my curricular objectives when things are this difficult. I have less than half the contact hours I would have had during a typical year, and we are still in a global pandemic that is irreversibly impacting just about every aspect of our lives.

I want to participate in my students’ lives, participate in them maintaining and growing in their hope, their joy, their intellectuality. We can participate in each others’ lives through genuine engagement around topics that kids care about. Which means that I can let go of including every single little assignment, reading, and word that I “would have” got to in an ideal world, and just be where I am. Be, where we are.

Now, I’m obviously still a teacher paid to grow the students in their proficiency in an additional language. I am going to recommit myself to using as much TL as possible (though 90%+ is definitely not in the cards for this year) because I believe you can make genuine, strong connections in the L2, even with Novices. And I will continue to touch on themes and topics that are interesting, continue to have my students question their assumptions about culture. It will not be the same as a typical school year because it cannot be so. And that’s fine. We need this connection now more than ever.

Maybe I can do myself a favor by keeping a list of high-frequency verbs nearby to serve as springboards for every conversation. I think of this post by Mike that talks about the advantages of having those high-frequency verbs in your classroom – if all students had these verbs rock solid in their acquired language, they would be capable of quite a lot, and there would be so many ways to keep our conversations going without having to just repeat the same sentences or vocab over and over and over. Maybe the minimal-seeming goal of just the Sweet 16 as curriculum is what this moment calls for. Imagine the possibilities…

In any case, as our students are being crushed by trying to learn difficult subjects on line, crushed by mountains of homework after hours seated in front of screens, crushed by missing their friends and their teachers, I am recommitting to connections over curriculum. (I think I may have got that from Martina and Elicia at The Comprehensible Classroom.) Let our classes be those that lift the weight for them.

Do you feel connected? Cheer your fellow educators on in the comments below!

Maybe You Are Needing Positivity, Advice, and Support Right Now, Language Teacher Friend

I am very lucky to have a local PLC of CI-oriented teachers that keeps me sane. We meet once a month to exchange ideas, experiences, joys, and frustrations. The problem solving power of the group has only grown with time as we have worked together longer. No, really: get yourself a PLC of people who are focused on the same (or similar) goals as you and who can grow in trust and capacity to push each other. I am a better teacher for this group’s love and support.

Today, our check in question was, “If you were to give advice to another language teacher who is teaching online, what would you say to them?” Everyone shared for two minutes each. Our shyest members tended to begin their sharing with something like “well, I’m here to mostly listen for advice for myself, so I don’t promise anything profound. But I’ll give it a try!” …And then they laid down some absolute wisdom. Reader, teacher friend, please don’t discount the expertise and wisdom that you do have. Sometimes, we just have to dust it off in trying times like these and let it shine again.

If you’re reading this and thinking that you yourself could use some advice, I even challenge you to search deep within, right now, for the wisdom that is already there. I’m a big fan of journaling (and I keep a separate teaching journal for this purpose), and it has helped remind me of the many things I have learned in my life. Give it a try.

Whether you try to retrieve the wisdom from yourself first or not, here is some of the food for thought that our PLC produced. I hope it is thought-provoking, or maybe even comforting for you. I am so thankful for the group that generated it.

Some Advice from October 2020, Month One Million of Quarantine, the Zoom Mullet (Button-Up Up Top, Pajama Pants Down Below), and Unthinkable Challenges:

  • Input is the data learners need to acquire a language, so remember that it is still a top priority. We play a long game when teaching for acquisition, but that input is definitely doing something in learner’s brains, even if it is impossible for us to see it. Personalize it, make sure it is comprehended, repeat.
  • Find a fairly predictable and productive schedule of activities or routines that works for you, and stick to it. One of our colleagues is doing martes de música (Music Tuesday), and showing cooking videos in the language on Fridays. When they haven’t followed the routine, the kids have asked for it. Because they love it! There is comfort in routines and predictability. Routines and schedules make planning for the teacher easier, too – you just find the song, the game, the recipe that fits into the open block in your lesson plan and you’re good to go.
  • See how early and how often you can get learners to respond to prompts in the chat, if you are virtual or hybrid. This can be for answering personalized questions, comprehension checking, whatever. Give students plenty of opportunities to show their engagement (and help prevent them from spacing out too much, though spacing is natural and necessary).
  • Work smarter, not harder. Find one single goal you want to focus on for a week, and make it your everything. When you are feeling confident in your growth, move onto a new single goal. Go back and forth between goals as you ebb and flow in your progress, as needed. One. Single. Goal.
  • Maybe sometimes, an activity’s secondary (or primary!) purpose is just to give students (and you!) a chance to socialize a bit in the L1. Many of us are lamenting the slip away from 90% TL, but we are in a pandemic. It will definitely be forgiven, and both you and your students need that connection. I have been leaving my kids in breakout rooms for slightly too long, and they’ve told me how nice it was to get the task done and then just talk to their peers in L1.
  • Slow down. Put a post-it on your computer, write it on your lesson plan, do what you have to to make sure that you are bringing all students along for the ride with slow, comprehended language.
  • Don’t try to teach like you’re a YouTuber. YouTubers are known for breathlessly moving from topic to topic, talking mostly to themselves with insane amounts of energy. It will be natural if you take a pause to come up with a good question during instruction, because you are in conversation with your students. You are not attempting to garner a “like” from them with a roller coaster of “content.”
  • Create self-grading assignments. You will thank yourself when everyone turns in homework and you just get to sit back and watch results roll in. Glorious.
  • It’s okay to not put as much emphasis on output this year. There certainly may be good opportunities for it, but you may save everyone a ton of stress by focusing on personalized, comprehended input.
  • Sing! Frequently! Poorly! It’s food for the soul, and music is a great connector.
  • Alternate between pushing students forward, and moving back into their comfort zone. If they’re starting to break down, walk back into safer territory to let them know they’re on the right track and experiencing a good, necessary challenge.
  • Challenge students’ fixed mindsets. Be prepared to repeat “Everyone can learn a language” like an incantation with students who are struggling. Let them know that you believe they can meet your high standards because you want so much for them to be a multilingual rockstar of the future.
  • Ask yourself: what can I let go of? It may be much more than you initially think.

What advice do you have for language teachers right now? Do not be afraid to share – who knows whom it may help!

Among Us – The Game Your Students Are Obsessed With Right Now

Surely, at some point this year, a student in one of your classes has mentioned the mobile game “Among Us.” It is a social deduction team game where a group of brightly-colored astronauts is hurtling through space, attempting to keep their spaceship intact and complete ship maintenance tasks. Among the crew mates, a couple “imposters” sneak around the ship, sabotaging the work of the crew members and taking them out of the game. The goals of the crew mates are either to identify all the imposters and vote them out of the game during an emergency meeting, or complete all the tasks on the ship. The goals of the imposter(s) are either to irreparably sabotage the ship’s systems, or take out enough of the crew mates such that the imposters have taken over the ship.

I think students love it because it is very fun to debate who saw what, who has actually been completing tasks for the good of the ship, and who is acting “sus” – that’s “suspicious.” I personally love social deduction games (like One Night Ultimate Werewolf, or Mafia), so I totally get it when my students want to talk about their strategies, the tricks they have played on friends and strangers, and their frustrations when no one believes them when they knew the truth all along! It’s intense, and so much fun.

But how can we talk about it during class? Just now, I happened upon a post in the iFLT / NTPRS / CI Teaching Facebook group by a teacher named Christan. They had created a template with vocabulary for talking about the game in Spanish, and another teacher named Christy quickly offered a French translation. I’m here to offer the German one I whipped through real quick!

How might we use these? It sounds to me like a great brain break. Maybe we just want to show the students the vocab so that students can have it for themselves – they LOVE talking about this game. Christan suggested displaying the vocab, and then actually playing a game as a class! (This is possible if you make your own private game room within the game, as far as I know.) Students who have the game will obviously be very involved, but students who are not playing can follow along as the teacher or a chosen student plays, and the teacher can narrate the whole time in the L2. Students could even give input on what the teacher should do, or who to vote for during the emergency meetings, based on what they have seen from the projected game or their classmates’ reactions!

I think we could all use more play generally, and also specifically this year. I think I’m going to try this out, and I’ll try to report back, too, about what worked! For now, check out these chat mats for the very popular mobile game “Among Us:”

Spanish – “Entre nosotros”

French – “Entre nous”

German – “Unter uns”

Have you ever played “Among Us”, or talked about it in class? Comment below and tell us how you utilized this very popular game for fun and language gains!

Question of the Week – An Easy Ritual for Building Memorized Language and Community

Online learning, for me, has been about simplifying and streamlining my planning processes to yield maximum results without sending me into internet search spirals that last hours and generate maybe one slight adjustment to what I was already going to do in the first place. (It has not, however, cured me of my tendency to write giant compound sentences like the previous one. #BAinGerman)

I have been feeling pretty successful in providing high-quality, personalized CI, given the circumstances. But I had been missing those little bits of memorized language that I was using as “Passwords” (a la Bryce Hedstrom) to get into my classroom – how can I get students those helpful phrases in this online way? Enter The Question of the Week!

Why should you use it? Because often times, students enter language courses with expectations of what they should be learning, and how that learning should look. We can definitely through them a bone with these phrases, which are very useful and help us ensure that they have natural, powerful language for use right away!

When do I use the Question of the Week?

I use the Question of the Week outside of my normal lesson cycle, usually during the “Warm Up” or “Do Now” portion of the lesson, before we really get going where we’re headed that day. It has been a nice ritual for my first lesson of the week with each class because it is expected, and it makes it easy for me to remember to plan it ahead of time!

How do I do it? – Logistics

When thinking of potential Questions of the Week, I have been thinking about phrases that might be expected by the student, given the class or unit content, or are just difficult to weave into stories or discussions. For example, it’s helpful for students to know how to say “My name is…” but awkward to ask it of them if…Zoom just tells me their name on the screen at all times. (These are called “Display Questions” in pedagogical literature – questions to which we either already know the answer or for which the answer is apparent to all and thus for which there is no communicative purpose – they are only for “language practice.” “What color is my shirt?” is not communicative if all students can see it.)

Here are some examples from the first units of my current courses to help clarify even more:

Level 1:
What is your name?
Where are you from?
Where do you live?
How old are you?
What languages do you speak?

Level 2:
What is your favorite food?
What is your favorite drink?
What do you think about that? (or, “What’s your opinion?” after I make some statement)
What do you like to cook?

Level 3:
How do you feel? (reflexive in both Spanish and German)
What are you interested in? (also reflexive in German!)
What does that remind you of?
What is important to you?

How do I do it? – Procedure

I introduce each Question of the Week during the first class meeting of the week. I have students note down both the question, and the sentence frame that they can use to respond to it! For example, they would note:
“What is your name?” –> “My name is…” in L2, as well as what it means in L1.

Then, I have my class answer in the chat all at once (which I have turned so that they can only chat with me), and I repeat and comment on their answers. “Oh, Soandso is from California? I am also from California! Where are you from specifically, Soandso?” etc etc.

After I get all these initial answers, I move on with my lesson. BUT ALSO: throughout my lesson, I randomly ask the question to my class to make sure they are there and engaged! This helps both reinforce that memorized language, as well as help me make sure that cameras aren’t just off because students are off secretly recording Tik Tok dance videos or something during class.

After we have built a repertoire of these questions, I sometimes cycle through a couple and have students respond to all of them in the chat. Great spaced practice – especially if you ask “Level 1” questions in level 2 or 3!

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

Use these questions all the time! I have built the Questions of the Week into stories I’ve told with class, just to build out what we know about characters and setting. Variations on the questions and statements have also appeared in readings I have given my students to reinforce the different forms (person, tense, etc.)

My level 1s have talked a lot this year about “wanting practice speaking,” which we know can be very pleasurable even if it doesn’t necessarily lead directly to language acquisition itself. So I am creating an assignment where students introduce themselves by answering all the Questions of the Week. Because they have practiced and heard these questions and their responses over and over again over the weeks of class we have had together, this will be a slam dunk-easy assignment for students to just speak their memorized answer and get comfortable with the new language in their own voices.

Truly though, if you pick a meaty question (“What is your favorite movie?” “What do you do in your free time?”), you could make the question your entire lesson. Once you start a discussion, you can just focus on a couple answers, write up a summary of the discussion with Write and Discuss, and have spent a good long while getting to know your students and the way their minds work.

Pro Tips!

  1. Pick useful questions and sentence frames! What are some basic sentence frames that allow students to describe, express an opinion, show their emotions? With an eye to useful functions, we can give our students a strong and flexible set of conversational moves that they can apply across their language learning experience. I tend to forget to build some of these phrases into my class stories and experiences, so planning like this ensures that I get the students the useful stuff they need.
  2. Recycle them! Use them over and over as attention getters, in new contexts, make them really stick.

What if I want to learn more?

Bryce Hedstrom’s post about his passwords (which students have to say before entering the classroom) can be a great source of inspiration for ideas of what sorts of things you can build in to your Question of the Week repertoire. Check out his posts about his higher levels, too, to see how the idea scales.

What do you think? Do you feel ready to use the Question of the Week? Comment below and send me any questions you might have!