Tag: ci teaching

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!

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!

Think For One Extra Second When Choosing Hot-Topic-Discussion Content

I’m writing this post from the airport in Boston, where I had a wonderful time at the ACTFL Convention meeting online friendos (haaaayyy!), and where I learned from some really inspiring, skilled educators. What a gift it was to have been here!

I’ve been thinking about a discussion that comes up on Language Teacher Social Media every once in a while: is Comprehension-Based Communicative Language Teaching (CCLT) inherently more equitable than legacy approaches? A few years ago, I may have quickly answered, “Yes!” Learners need lots of comprehended input to build their linguistic systems and be able to draw on them to communicate, and the learning of grammar rules and memorized vocabulary do not contribute much to building that fluent communicative competence, especially at the Novice level of proficiency.

Through the ensuing discussions I’ve been a part of on social media and the work I have done with LLLAB, I have changed my answer. I don’t think any method, approach, technique, what have you can be “inherently” more equitable because language does not exist in a vacuum as such. Methods, approaches, and techniques that work “better” for more language learners can still be instruments of harm.

When we communicate with our students, helping to build their implicit systems, we communicate content. We communicate messages. And these messages have an impact on the thoughts and emotions of our learners, which may change their level of willingness to even engage with the communication/input at all. It may also lower their willingness to engage with anything they perceive as “too different” from themselves. If the messages we communicate are comprehensible, but “other” our students, and/or reinforce stereotypes or disrespectful conceptions of other cultures, that’s not “inherently equitable.” Language always has content.

Well-meaning CCLT teachers may try to inspire communication in their classes by selecting content that they know their students will react to – something that students are interested in, something funny, something controversial. Nothing feels better than when students scoot to the edges of their seats, eagerly waiting their turn to contribute to the class conversation about something interesting. I want to use this post to make this recommendation to teachers as we are trying to pick content for our courses:

Think for one extra second when choosing hot-topic-discussion content.

If you are exploring the theme of Health and your prompt to get students to communicate is a photo of the bare torso of a plus-sized man, head out of frame, what messages does that send to your students about the humanity and worth of family or friends with that body type? What if they themselves have that body type? What if the class gasps in disgust? (I have been doing some learning and unlearning about anti-fat bias via the Maintenance Phase podcast, which I can’t recommend enough.)

If you choose to talk about a slideshow titled “Weird Breakfasts from Around the World,” how are you prompting students to react to foods that may very well be the breakfast foods of their classmates? Do you feel comfortable potentially labeling the eating habits of your students’ families as “weird?” Why not approach the same topic without the evaluative label of “weird,” and instead with curiosity?

If you display photos of any sorts of spaces in other countries (schools, homes, public spaces, etc.) from the angle of what they don’t have compared to your community, do you feel comfortable presenting another culture as deficient compared to the home culture? And do you feel comfortable potentially presenting areas of the Global South in confirmation of widely-held stereotypes, presenting them as monoliths of deficiency?

I am with you: I want students to talk, to engage, to see and learn new things. It is fun when students get a prompt and a conversation ignites immediately. But we have to take the small amount of extra time to wonder if the materials we select reinforce negative ideas about people and cultures that deserve dignity and respect, for there are many ways of living in this world.

This is hard work. Let’s keep learning and unlearning together.

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!

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!

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!

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!