Tag: ci teaching

My Class That Just Won’t Talk

A conversation with my student teacher (who slays) about student engagement got me thinking about a situation that I think most of us have run into at one point or another: the class that just wouldn’t talk. You may like every individual kid in that class, but when you try to do anything as a group, it feels like the air gets sucked out of the room. No matter what you say or do, the lack of reactions makes you feel alternately dumb, frustrated, out of touch, unskilled, straight up resentful, and like you want to throw in the towel and just sit in a monastic vow of silence for the rest of the school year.

A class comes to mind when I think of this scenario. It could have been anything – the time of day, the mix of introverts/extroverts, the class size – but the vibes just never really got off the ground. It can be easy for me to become bitter in a situation like this, especially when other classes have extensive lore in the Target Language and there’s that general buzz of connection every day.

When this happens, I try to take a deep breath, and adjust my plans and perspectives. I’ve been trying to maintain empathy for this generation’s social anxieties that are only exacerbated by the hyper-connectivity of social media and the ever-present feeling of surveillance by clandestine smartphone cameras. It can be hard to put yourself out there when there could be swiftly-shared, permanent evidence of your failures produced in an instant. So, I’ve tried various things to 1) help students build confidence in their abilities the Target Language, so that they feel less apprehension about speaking out in class and 2) help students build connections to their peers, so that they know that the audience for their attempts and experiments in the language is just like them, and will support them.

Here is the kitchen sink list of some things I have tried in classes that Just Won’t Talk, with some of the thinking behind each choice:

More Individual and Partner Work, Less Whole Class Discussion

I tend to favor input activities that develop conversation on a topic with the whole class. Story co-creation, weekend chats, personalized questions, and so on have been fuel for so much interpersonal connection across my career. But if it’s flopping, it’s flopping. We can get the same input to our students in different ways, while also building the capacity for these more open conversations in smaller ways.

That means maybe putting time limits on whole class conversations: 5 minutes-ish, and then move on to another activity. If there’s energy for more, we can keep going, but telling students ahead of time that we’re only going to do Calendar Talk (Weekend Chat, Card Talk, etc.) for 5 minutes as a class can sometimes build good will towards more time. (Or at the very least end, put a near end to everyone’s suffering, lol.)

Whole class instruction can be restructured to include more work guided by using graphic organizers to make sure students are still processing the input, or having students respond with response cards (A/B/C/D, True/False, etc.) or gestures to indicate their answers. Students can also prepare answers to more open questions by working with input with a partner before moving to the whole class discussion.

(Re-)Training Students How to Respond

Not all classes in school require students to respond chorally to questions, or even to be prepared to answer cold called questions at any time. My expectation is that students are ready for either kind of response at any moment. (One tradeoff I mention to my students is that they receive little to no German homework for their rapt attention and participation during class. A bit of goodwill comes from that – these kids have a lot of homework!)

All this to say: sometimes students need us to clearly describe and model what responding looks like. “Everyone responds at the same time, at my signal.” This can be a gesture towards the class that cues the response, a verbal countdown, or both together.

This also means we describe the why behind the procedure, so that students know what you’re looking for. I have standardized saying: “Hmm…I got kind of a weak response on that question. Either that says that I confused you, which is important for me to know so I can teach it better, or you’re just feeling sleepy. Let’s figure out which one.” Or if I’ve asked a lot of individual questions and most kids are kinda off, I have a sort of huddle with the class about how being able to answer these questions on the spot tells me the class is learning German, and giving me evidence that I’m not just talking to myself. A little bit of “why” goes a long way.

Explaining to students at the start of every class period that choral responses help me as the teacher get a sense for how the class is comprehending everything, so that I can know when to move on and when to stick with something new, keeps the expectation and the “why” fresh in students’ minds. Indeed, one of my class expectations is simply “respond” (the others being “look” and “listen.”)

Partnering Strategies

Students in quiet classes will sometimes try to plead that they “work best with people they know,” which I don’t accept as a reason for not participating or getting to know peers. I want for my students to develop Interpersonal Communication skills, which include being able to maintain conversations with others, even if they don’t know them.

I’ve developed a variety of strategies to get students partnered up and started on tasks. These include map partners a la Bryce Hedstrom, seat partners, having every other row in my classroom turn around so that they’re facing their new partner, using a service like Flippity (Random Name Picker) or ClassDojo to randomize the class list into partners, and cutting up a cultural postcard so that groups have to form based on putting the pieces together. Force students to work with a variety of students so that the social barriers between students get broken down, bit by bit.

It’s also important to have something for students to do if their chosen partner isn’t in class at that time. I always go to the same spot in my classroom, and tell my students to meet me there if their partner isn’t present for whatever reason.

What To Do When You Get There

Sometimes students don’t know how to initiate new interactions with unfamiliar peer. They’re partnered up, get to their partner, and then just…sit in silence. I try to remember to always include (and model) the first conversational turn students could make to start the task they’re working on together.

It might be something like: “When you get to your partner, say, ‘Good morning! My name is _. What is your name?'” This means that students don’t have to generate something themselves, and the conversation is already started, getting over the first affective hurdle for our shy or not-as-extroverted students. Later in the course, you can add personalized questions, content questions, just asking how their day is going, and so on.

Sentence Stems and Activating Prior Knowledge

Students’ brains need to be gear-shifted into the language and content as they enter class or take up their first communicative task. Helping students activate prior knowledge via the use of images, reviewing a summary of previous learning, and even the use of sentence stems can help students get the wheels moving in their new language, and avoid awkward struggling in front of their peers to recall what was learned maybe 24 or 48 hours (or longer!) prior.

Storyasking Tweaks

Co-created stories are an incredible way to engage student creativity, provide lots of comprehensible input in context, and build class community through the creation of common class experiences (or, as the children would say, “lore”). [We even did a whole episode of the podcast about the motivational effects of co-creating content with students!]

…buuuuut if no one is contributing ideas, none of these things are possible. One tweak to storyasking I have used is having students contribute ideas before the story even begins. For example, I have given students cards with categories on them (“something to drink”, “a number between 1 and 9999”, “a business name”, etc.), had them write down ideas individually, and then turn those cards back into me. As I was telling the story, all I had to do was draw a card from the needed category, and I had a personalized detail specific to the class, and could continue telling the story. Doing this successfully avoided the ask for details from the teacher that ended in deafening student silence, and the stories turned out pretty fun. Check out an example of the cards I cut out for a story for my level 2 students. I printed multiples of each card so that each student filled out two different categories, and then had plenty of ideas for our story.

“Show Call”

Sometimes, our students don’t know they’re doing well. If I am circulating while students are chatting or writing, and I hear or see something that could be a good model for other students, I discreetly ask the student, “Hey, can I ask you to answer that question in front of the class in a second? It sounded great!” Students usually respond positively to the praise part, and are more ready to show off. The rest of their peers get to see them trying something out in their new language, and getting positive vibes no matter what “errors” might have been present.

Because here’s the thing: it doesn’t even need to be a “perfect-sounding” answer. It is possible to communicate with others, even if you are “committing errors.” So seeing their peers just trying and getting the positive feedback of the teacher responding to the content of the message may help students let go of some of their anxieties about being “perfect.”

Mini Whiteboards

I know Dr. Liam Printer is a huge fan of using mini whiteboards to have students answer questions, and I can see why. You very quickly get feedback from every student on whether or not they’re comprehending the language you’re using, and how comfortable they feel responding in the L2.

We can pause to ask a quick mini whiteboard question, or have them at the ready throughout the entire lesson. Students can translate, provide a personal answer to a question, respond to a circling question, draw a picture, rank, sort, agree and disagree…and then the teacher can provide even more input personalized to the class by observing and responding to student answers. Because everyone is prompted to write, you avoid the trap of asking a question that everyone is too nervous to answer aloud.

Just reading a text aloud

Students tend to have anxiety about pronunciation in the Target Language. My students have tended to end up with decent-sounding accents because of lots of exposure to the Target Language in class (aka we’re not just doing textbook grammar and vocabulary activities), but actually getting the sounds out of their mouths still inspires anxiety.

Having a class choral read a text aloud can help build confidence in pronouncing the language. It may also help students build their reading comprehension in the L2, especially with repeated readings of the same text after the teacher models pronunciation, pace, and prosody. (We cover whole class choral reading as a strategy on the podcast, actually!)

Practice Before Performance – With Lots of Modeling!

My professor in my teaching program always said, “practice before performance.” Especially with new language structures and sounds, it helps to have the teacher model a lot in the language input, and then have students “practice” with partners before being asked to respond in front of the class. This can veer away from communicating with real purpose, but we can always ask students to report out on their partners’ responses, as well as compare! Just the bit of preparation can help calm nerves that prevent full participation.

Rejoinder Coaching

I learned about the power of teaching students rejoinders from Grant Boulanger. These small bits of memorized language can help students respond emotionally to something that’s happening in class without requiring them produce tons of spontaneous language.

My classes (aka I, as the teacher) tend to forget to use these as the year wears on, so in addition to modeling by thinking aloud about what known rejoinders would be logical to use to react to a situation, I can also ask the students what they think. This usually turns into a fun game as I narrate their responses and the consequences of them. (“You think it is ‘so cool’ that Soandso has three tests this week?? Are you secretly a teacher? Do you love school? How many tests do you have?” etc etc) This playfulness shows students that they can also be playful in class, and help them not feel so serious about “trying to get things right.”

Q+A Game

Again, sometimes students just need to practice using the language on a small, lower-stakes scale before graduating to more open use in front of the class. The Question and Answer Game is a great way to build that confidence because every response, even a logical response in the L1, earns points. Because it keeps communication going and shows engagement with the language!

Volleyball / Table Tennis Reading

Another opportunity for students to take the language for a spin, and confirm their comprehension of a text. This also buys you time as the teacher to help students with trouble spots and increase confidence and competence. I tend to overuse Volleyball/Table Tennis reading, but it’s a great break for the teacher that gives you time to check in on the kids.

Words of Affirmation

There are two facets to this. The first is that celebrating every student attempt at communication can have huge effects on overall confidence in the class. Just the other day, a student started to make fun of another student’s pronunciation of something, and I stopped the class. I told everyone, “I want to make sure we all know: whenever someone makes an attempt to communicate in [L2] in this class, we listen to understand it, not to judge it. We don’t make fun of pronunciation or grammar: we listen for the message behind it.” I then got the class to agree to do just that. Vibes were restored, and it also sets expectations for student behavior that will help students feel safer to contribute whatever they’ve got.

The second aspect is that students can get lost in the long journey of language acquisition, and they need a guide (us) to show them where they are on that journey. Otherwise, they may not see the point of all our questions in the Target Language. Positive responses to student participation like “every time you tried to use the language today, it made it easier for your brain to access it in the future!” and “It feels slow and little, but your responses to my questions today showed me that your language is growing!” help relieve the internal expectation students might have to produce perfect sentences readily and regularly. It’s okay to need time – communication is what’s most important!

Whisper the Answer

I saw a teacher recommend in a Facebook group that if students want to share out about something in a less-structured activity format (like during Card Talk, Calendar Talk, Weekend Chat, etc.), we can offer them to do it in the L2, or whisper in L1 to us. This can give us a chance to filter for them, use our strong voices to share their ideas and experiences like they’re the coolest thing ever, and keep the L2 flow in class. I love that this also helps keep the sidebar stories from getting too crazy. Maybe this will work to boost the status of our quieter students, too!

Sometimes, the whisper can be just answering a question ahead of time, on paper. Maybe during the warm up, maybe during a random moment in class, but then we can filter and highlight interesting answers and build more conversation out of them.

Seize the Moment

In Acquisition-Driven Instruction World, we are often told to Teach to the Eyes. This gives us a temperature check on student comprehension and confidence. It also helps us observe and listen more closely to our students – which can help build positive vibes and community. Students want to be where they felt heard.

I was once working with a teacher who lamented “not being funny” because they felt that their classes never got to the energy level that they had seen at a teacher conference from very extroverted, hyped-up-on-hotel-coffee presenter. The truth is that students are SO funny…you just have to catch the funny things that they say, repeat them, and play with them. Take your time, listen to the little whispers and side comments, and let a student’s fun response be the star of the input for a while. This works not just for funny comments, but interesting ones, too! We don’t have to create standup comedy continuously for students. We can just celebrate their experiences of life and the world, and turn them into moments of connection for all.

Just Ask Them What’s Up

Students often feel that school is something that is done to them, rather than with them. Building a collaborative relationship with your quiet classes can be empowering and engaging. Students get to know that their thoughts are being heard and honored, and we can sometimes get to the bottom of sticking points in the class atmosphere.

You might try just telling a class, “I noticed that we don’t often respond to the more open-ended questions I ask about your opinions/lives. I want to know more about y’all, and it gives us lots to talk about! What’s going on?” Students can share with each other first, and then the class if that feels like it’s going to be productive. Alternately, they can be prompted to write about what they think is going on in class, and suggestions they have for what might help them feel more confident to participate in class.

Some of their suggestions might be less-than-useful (“I just want to sit next to my friend [who I will talk to in L1 about whatever instead of engaging in L2]” etc.), but perhaps your students will provide some key info about class dynamics or habits that are making it hard for the class to buzz. At the very minimum, it is a way for the teacher to show their students that they’re thinking about their learning experiences, and that they matter to them.

And…

Sometimes it’s just hard. It just is. We must try as hard as we can to not beat ourselves up about it, and experiment, experiment, experiment with our classes until we see what really seems to work for them. Try different things out, see the effects, and ask students why they thought activities were successful or not successful.

And maybe they’ll just be quiet the whole year. What else can we do but speak life into them as future global thinkers and communicators, and show them what we love about our languages and cultures?

I had a level 2 class in the past few years that was causing me to lose what’s left of my hair. I would ask a question, and then could hear the silence, it was so loud. I emptied my teacher toolkit on that class trying to get to the bottom of it. And even at the end, when things were better, it was never easy.

And then well over half of those students chose to take an (optional) third year of German with me. And the vibes were so different! So who really knows…

What works for you when a class is just…very quiet? Let me know in a comment below!

Focus Writes: Growing in the Ability to Talk About the Most Important Subject

My units are different every year because the people who come to my classes every year are different! I try to build in ample time into my year for “wandering” with my classes – following the interesting things that come up in conversations – but I have also found it helpful to have certain topics/themes that I “do” (which really means start discussing, because topics spiral up over time) at certain levels to give me some anchors for planning. I try to tackle these set topics/themes using all of the Foundational Strategies I list here on my site, including Card Talk, One Word Image, Small Talk, and Special Person Interviews, with just a bit of steering towards each given topic.

This also helps me in speaking to the proficiencies my students are building at each level. After a few weeks of Card Talk toward the beginning of level 1, I can discuss with students their growing capacity to talk about hobbies and interests. Every student is going to be in a different place with the acquisition of the various necessary structures, but having the set topics/themes helps connect to one very compelling Why for many students: growing in their capacity to talk about the most important subject – themselves! (Of course, there are many Whys in language learning, such as building global community, learning from and with other cultures, and wanting to learn the world’s most beautiful language, German, but if our young people are in the identity formation stage of their development, it’s nice to nod to it!)

A tweet by Profe Camacho led me to the idea of essentially using the same prompt all year long as a way to demonstrate student growth. And thus, the Focus Write was born into my practice!

Why should you do a Focus Write, then? A Focus Write can be a quick, simple tool to demonstrate student growth both to outside stakeholders (read: families, administrators, evaluators), as well as to our learners!

When do I use Focus Writes?

Focus Writes are a lot like Free Writes, which many CCLT teachers have written about. Here is Elicia Cárdenas’ post about Free Writes that covers what they are, and when/how to use them. Generally, you want to start using Focus Writes (and Free Writes) after students have had time to get lots of language input into their heads. I would do one no earlier than 6 weeks into the school year, preferably closer to 9.

It also helps if you can look back on language input that students have been receiving and group it into “topics” so that you can space out the Focus Writes over the course of the school year, and select the spiraling prompts for them (this will make sense later). I aim for five total Focus Writes on the “major” topics I cover in level 1, for example: Introducing Myself, Hobbies and Interests, Important People in My Life, Our School Life, and My Food and Drink Culture. These align with the expectations of the community college through which I offer my third year dual-credit course.

How do I do it? – Logistics

To help with word counting, I like to use special lined paper that has the number of words at the end of each line! I print out enough copies of this paper, modified for each unit to include the unit number and complete prompt, as well as a goal that I think will be attainable for most students. (I lifted the template from the inimitable Meredith White!)

The prompts spiral across the year to include everything that came before, as well as the most recent topic. Here are my level 1 topics as an example:

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

My lesson plans are my slideshows, so I always have a slide prepared that looks something like the one below that I use after the fourth unit in my level 1 course:

Now, by the third or fourth unit, five minutes does not feel like enough time to answer all the prompts, and I’m actually okay with that! If my students feel like they have enough to write and talk about for five minutes, then I am content, and they will be able to see their own growth.

I have only been doing this in level 1 as students develop language, but this could easily be transferred to other levels for the purpose of building student writing portfolios.

How do I do it? – Procedure

  1. The first time I do it, I tell students that we are going to be writing as much as we can in L2 for five minutes. The first topic is to just introduce yourself, saying as much about yourself as you can in the L2!
  2. Students usually have a question at this point about the grading. I tell students that we are going to do this 5 times total throughout the year, and they will get an A if they increase their word count of logical German writing over the course of the year. (Which hopefully prevents students from just writing “My name is my name is my name is” over and over again.) If you have to take grades with certain frequencies, you can just set a very low goal for students to reach and then give them a good grade if they reach it, with gradations below that goal.
  3. At this point, I distribute the ~special paper and tell students not to start yet, but to put their name, the period, and the date on the paper.
  4. For the first Focus Write, I reread the prompt in L1, and then think aloud about how I might answer the prompt myself. As in, “(L1) Hmm, introduce yourself in German…(L2) My name is Herr Fisher-Rodriguez, I’m 33 years old, I am from California but I live in Washington… (etc etc).” In input-focused classrooms, students can sometimes get nervous about output, and might just need reminders of the kinds of things they certainly already feel comfortable writing about.
  5. Then, I set the timer…and let them have at it! I usually just observe students as they write, prompting slow starters with ideas or inspiration, if needed.
  6. After the five minutes are up, I compliment my students about how smart and awesome they are! I usually say something to the effect of, “I was reading what y’all were writing, and it looked really great and right on target!”
  7. For the 2nd-5th Focus Writes, I just remind students that they have done this (successfully!) before, and that this is just a chance to show off what they’ve learned since the last time we did this. My encouragement is to just beat their own previous records!

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

As mentioned above, I usually grade these fairly gently, mostly looking for growth over time. Follow your heart (read: the specific context of your job) for how to grade these, but remember that output grows so much more slowly than comprehension, and be realistic with your expectations.

Reading student writing (made simpler by only having them write for 5 minutes, HELLO) can also reveal what structures have really “stuck,” and which might need some more input. For example, maybe your students need more exposure to numbers and talking about age, so you can just make sure that any future input also includes ages, as appropriate. Marking things up with a red pen won’t do as much for their writing proficiency as just reading more, so provide lots of opportunities to read rich, comprehensible texts!

I keep a portfolio of my students’ “major works” from their entire time with me (Free Writes, Focus Writes, tests, reflections, etc.), so each Focus Write gets filed into their portfolio. What’s fun is later pulling them out, and calculating their percentage growth. Getting to tell a kid that they’ve increased their 5 minute writing output by 200% is a great feeling for everyone.

Pro Tips!

  1. Decide on your topics! These may be determined by your district’s curriculum, or alignment with some outside source. Then, no matter what you do throughout the year, you can remind yourself to orient class conversations toward those topics as you move along. Maybe you add in some breakfast/lunch/dinner conversations to your opening routines, or characters in your stories just so happen to extensively describe their friends and family. There is flexibility in the “how” in working towards the “what” here.
  2. Model! Write and Discuss is a great way to model the skills of writing, and guide students towards greater success while writing on a specific prompt. Slipping in a lesson similar to an upcoming Focus Write, and modeling the writing process can really help students be more successful.
  3. Keep them! Even if you don’t have portfolios for each student, demonstrating student growth back to students increases feelings of competence, which can increase student motivation. Make sure they get tucked away for future celebration.
  4. Use them! I used this one year as part of a Student Growth Goal during my evaluation cycle, and my evaluator was blown away by the data I was able to provide. Admin love to hear informed statements like, “these students I chose to focus on increased their 5 minute writing fluency by 100%, while also growing from using mostly Phrases (NM) to mostly using Simple Sentences (NH) with some Strings of Sentences (IL)!” Focus Writes provided both qualitative and quantitative data for these conversations. Check!
  5. Do other types of writing! This is just one way to elicit output from students – building diverse portfolios of student writing is essential for us to know what students have acquired, and what needs more input. I mostly focus on input for the first two years I have my students, so there is not a crazy amount of additional writing for them beyond Free Writes and Focus Writes, but variety is the spice of life!

What if I want to learn more?

This original tweet by Profe Jackie Camacho is what inspired me to write this post, so check that out!

What do you think? Do you feel ready to use Focus Writes? Comment below and send me any questions you might have!

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!

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!