Tag: CI

On Silence

My last post here was in December of last year, and the last post was a month before that. In the meantime, I was still teaching, still giving conference presentations, still going to PD, still trying to be a fierce advocate for communicative language teaching.

But I was also experiencing a darkness in my professional life that I hadn’t anticipated, a life-consuming shadow. My start in teaching had been great! I was making lots of teacher friends, kids seemed to like my class, and my teacher evaluations didn’t make me feel like a total failure. Why, then, did I feel like I was drowning? Why, then, did I silence myself when the rush of learning in my early career was still there, and my growth felt day by day, week by week? Why, then, was I thinking about quitting?

I was finding myself in the middle of the age-old problem: the more I learned, the more I realized I didn’t know. The more I found myself doing, the more I realized there was to do. The more I tried, the more I thought that it would never be enough. And this mode, this mindset was doing damage to my mental, emotional, and physical health.

Around semester (the end of January), I saw the need for change in the way I was living my teaching, but I was stuck in bad habits. Then suddenly, we had five snow days in February, and I had nothing to do. The scared part of me thought I should be creating or perfecting or learning something for school, but for the first time…I just didn’t. I rested and relaxed, and came back ready to go once school got mostly back to normal. (I played a ton of video games and ate a lot of vegetarian chicken nuggets, for transparency’s sake.)

I deleted the Twitter and Facebook apps off my phone during that time. This, paired with committing to spending less time on my phone in general, changed the things I was actually doing with my time. I was enjoying my relationship and my friendships more, and I suddenly had time to read for pleasure. I had justified my insane use of both apps for a long time by insisting that the professional development I got through both was helping me grow as a teacher and be better at it. That was true to an extent, but the drive to compare myself with other teachers on the internet was also causing me to reduce myself in my own eyes, minimize my own accomplishments, and constantly be on the search for something new. There was no joy and gratitude for what I had inside me and around me.

I left any books related to teaching at school. I was in a weird place of having teaching both as my job and as my hobby – I was always reading something about teaching, always trying to find new ideas and research, always trying to be “in the know” about everything in CI world. But no one can do everything, and you certainly can’t learn to do things well if you’re not focused. So school was for school, home was for home.

And I started leaving school earlier. I’d have days where I’d be getting home close to 6pm, having arrived around 7am, and scrambling to get dinner ready and try to have some time for myself before Brent got home. When I looked back, the time at school was spent socializing to avoid work, searching the internet for resources I wouldn’t end up using, and getting lost clicking around my computer. I started thinking: What did we do today, and how can it grow into more proficiency tomorrow? A lot of times, the answer was simpler than I had imagined.

I went back to basics. I found that everything I knew I wanted to do with my teaching was inside of me already. Realizing this helped me slow down, see my students where they were, and actually teach them something. Classes and students I had started feeling despondent about suddenly turned around and created interesting stories and moments for everyone (instead of just for the overachieving do-gooders and the overachieving distractors). And then suddenly, I was able to go to work on time every day, do my work with smiles in most periods, and go home and enjoy my life. MY life.

Sometimes, you need a period of radio silence, the silence going both directions. When you go silent, you often find that you can see and hear things so much more clearly. This was true for me, and I know I am a better teacher to my students for that.

There are lots of blogs, websites, videos, trainings, ideas out there. Forgive yourself for not being able to do them all. My plea is for teachers – thoughtful, hard-working, innovative, passionate, self-sacrificing beings that you are – to just focus on being with and loving your students. Silence the voices (from without, from within) that drive you to scuttle parts of yourself in the never-ending pursuit of more. It’s enough. You are enough.

Inspired Proficiency Podcast

Y’all, I’m so thrilled to have been included in the Inspired Proficiency Podcast episode about Takeaways from #ACTFL18.  Ashley is such a gem for putting this podcast together – teachers need to hear from diverse perspectives to better know themselves and more deeply know their work.  Also…she is so sweet to talk to.  Her laugh is #iconic and listening back to our conversation, I am proud to have elicited a very deep laugh from her.  Hee hee!!

Take a listen, and let me know what you think!

I name drop like a total dweeb, but here are some of the people I mentioned and where you can find their resources:

Brett Chonko – Brett is such a great guy and does cool stuff with nontargeted CI that can align with district-mandated thematic units.  His blog is on point, too.

Sarah Breckley – I am OBSESSED with Sarah Breckley.  Shh just don’t tell her or she’ll take away my potato!  But also like…watch her videos and be inspired to film some of your own teaching for your benefit and the benefit of others.

Tina Hargaden – Opened my life up to the world of CI.  Check out CI Liftoff and her books – A Natural Approach to the Year being the guiding source of inspiration for many teachers this year.

BVP – Bill Van Patten’s book While We’re On the Topic is a super thought-provoking look into principles of communicative language teaching.  Easy to read and full of food for thought – I wanna book club it in my district!!

Did you go to ACTFL 18?  What were your takeaways?  Let me know below!

Reviewing Body Parts and Reenergizing with a Brain Break – Peluche / Kuscheltier

Brain breaks as an idea has been showing up a lot in the Facebook groups that I follow, as well as the conferences I have been attending lately.  People are starting to catch on to how much our students sit every day!  TOO MUCH

I’m finding that it’s helpful for me to build them into the lessons at natural in-between points.  These are the gear-shifting moments of a lesson – when you’re moving from input to a Write and Discuss, or between segments of input on different subjects.  This guarantees that we do them, and I can experiment with specific brain breaks to see if the kids like particular ones.

Here’s one that’s been a hit recently in class!  Kids love competing with friends, and I get to review body parts with them.  I heard about this one while I was at the WAFLT-COFLT Bi-State Conference in Portland this October.

Peluche

I bought 10 stuffed animals the other day (at the dollar store, hollaaaaa) and have a little basket I keep them in.  Children LOVE stuffed animals, no matter the age.

In this game, pairs of students get a stuffed animal and place it between them.  The teacher then says some body parts, rapid-fire. The kids are listening and touching the body parts the teacher names with both hands.  (“Head! Nose! Arms! Knees! Shoulders!”)

When the teacher says “Peluche!” (or “stuffed animal” in your language!), the students try to be the first to grab the stuffed animal between them.  Having students use both hands prevents them from hovering over the stuffed animal…you know how we all get when competition is involved. After there are winners…you keep going with the body parts!  I imagine you could keep score or something, but my kids were content to just compete and play multiple rounds without too much extra.

Easy, quick, and the kids have fun!  A winner in my book – I hope you and your students enjoy it.

What brain breaks have really worked for you?  Let me know below!

3 Takeaways from the 2018 WAFLT-COFLT Bi-State Conference

Teachers are wild.  “Let’s get a sub so that we can…do more school stuff.”  But seriously y’all I love conferences.

It has fully been like a week and a half since the WAFLT-COFLT Bi-State Conference in Portland, OR but I still have so many thoughts bouncing around in my enormous head!  My practice has actually shifted in the past few days as I’ve taken more time to work through my notes and reflect on the changes I want to make to increase student enjoyment and learning!  (Well…acquisition. Whatever.)

Let’s keep it short(ish) – three thoughts I’ve been playing around with:

  1. 90% Target Language Usage is Scarier for Teachers Than for Their Students
    Paul Sandrock, the Director of Education for ACTFL, reported during his session on Facilitating Target Language Comprehensibility that teachers have FAR MORE anxiety about using 90% TL in class than their students do!  This blew my mind. Kids are actually pretty chill if we’re like, “yeah, let’s just drop the English and DO THIS THING, MUCHACHOS!”
    Maybe they actually expect it.  Like, they go into a language class thinking that the teacher just WILL use the language most of the time. Because as a young person, YEAH THAT SEEMS LOGICAL. It’s us adults that come up with reasons not to use the language in class.  This is probably because we’ve tragically developed the ability to overthink things.  (How…wonderful.) J. Marvin Brown talked in his book From the Outside In about how adults struggle so hard in language classes because they, unlike children, let their thinking and their brains get in the way of just experiencing the language and enjoying it (and being able to subconsciously acquire the language).  He posits that we don’t lose the ability to learn languages as we age, but rather gain the ability to overthink things and ruin it for ourselves. I can see this same thing happening with target language usage. Of course it seems natural to use the language all the time in class because…duh.  But!!! But what if they don’t understand! But what about management! But what will I say! But what if I don’t feel strong enough in the L2 to fill awkward silences! But!!!
    Y’all, we can do this.  Our kids want this. They want the input, they want the language, they want to be good at this.  So let’s stop holding ourselves back and make it happen! I’ve started having little interactions (before class, in transitions, giving directions) in Spanish and surprise…everything is going fine.  Just more opportunities for me to work on my skills for comprehensibility! (That thing I present on…gulp.)
  2. You Are Putting On a Silent Film (+TL)
    In presenting with Tina Hargaden (of CI Liftoff and The CI Posse) about body and voice skills for comprehensibility, I learned something seemingly small that has made a big impact on my class flow.  Any time I do a gesture, point to something on the board, or do any of the other magical tricks to make language comprehensible (#futureblogpost) (#magicaltricks), I have to do that thing, then give a beat, then say the word in L2, then give a beat, let students process, then move the interaction along.  I see them anticipating what I’m talking about, hearing the word in the L2, linking the meaning, and having greater chances for success in interacting with whatever we’re talking about because they for sure GOT IT.  Silent film actors had to show EVERYTHING and know that it was going to sink in. I have to do the same! I’m working my silence more to watch their eyes and know that the connection is there instead of breezing through comprehensibility links and later thinking “but I showed them everything!”  They just need that bit of processing time. And the eye contact I’m able to make in that slower way is helping students know that I’m there with them.
  3. Think (Don’t Speak!)
    Laura Terrill gave a keynote on Friday that was great for so many reasons.  But the killer quote from this one was “think (don’t speak!).” Often we employ a turn and talk as a way for students to process some new information.  Buuuuut if they turn and talk with someone who maybe is a faster speaker or faster processor, the “slower” student may lose the opportunity to synthesize their thoughts, and/or make them into something they can express.  If we really demand that students think, but don’t speak just yet!, we are giving room for 100% of our students to do some processing and have some more success once the turning and talking actually begins. (I tried this during a PD with teachers the following week and lo and behold…everyone had something very interesting and thoughtful to express.)

I LOVE CONFERENCES LA LA LA.  But dang, it takes time to process all the great info you get and put it into practice.  I’m trying to take my own suggestion of just picking a few things and working them in. More than that feels like way too much for my poor brain.

(Also every conference reminds me that I should be doing more brain breaks.  Every conference! Goodness. This will surely be a lifelong quest. #futureblogposts)

What is your most recent learning from a conference, and how is it growing your practice?  Have a fantastic day, you pedagogical flower of excellence!!

First Assessment Results of the Year – Reading and Listening Comprehension + Free Writes

Here we are, about seven weeks into the school year, and I just administered my first round of summative assessments!  I AM SO EXCITED I HAVE DATA.  I’m beginning to see what my students are needing, who is struggling, and who is excelling.  This is SO important for so many reasons (not the least of which is that I have a “data” conversation with my evaluating administrator coming up next week…all part of the eval process…gulp).  There are so many adjustments I can make to my instruction that will hopefully help my students be successful, and make that turnaround happen quickly!

Let’s backtrack: I use an approach to teaching Spanish that is centered around non-targeted comprehensible input.  In short, I don’t plan what structures are going to come up in class.  Instead, I just try to provide contexts for scaffolded communication, and leave the rest up to the gods of Spanish small talk. 

My main activities to generate input at this point have been Calendar Talk, Card Talk, a questionnaire I gave on a day I was out, and One Word Images.  (Already planning blog posts on each one, if you haven’t heard of these – and I’m going to try to make a list of links to resources from others explaining/showing these activities.)  I pick a student’s card, or select a specific survey answer that piques my interest, and we riff on it as a class for as long as the interest is there.  (Sometimes you have to jump ship – I watched some of my students astral project straight out of my classroom when Fortnite came up for the 1,000th time, soooo we dropped that real quick.)

After we have our conversation around whatever our context is for that day, I project a blank word processing document, and we Write and Discuss our conversation of the day. This repeats the input, and helps keep a written record for me/us.  (As a hyperactive person with a terrible memory, it helps me keep track of what I’ve discussed, with whom.)  Then we use that class-created text as a reading, doing translation work, further discussion and comparison with the text, and sometimes illustrating it in Mike Peto-style comic book forms.

The goal of all this is to provide rich, interesting comprehensible input to my students that builds their mental representation of Spanish, and one day allows them to express themselves effortlessly with the Spanish that will forever live in their minds. The word “grammar” hasn’t come up yet, and thank goodness. My eleven- to fourteen-year-olds have not a care in the world for such pursuits!!

In this assessment round, then, I got to see what has “stuck.” What did they acquire from this listening and reading? What can they understand? I made performance-based assessments that were light recombinations of things we had discussed in class, and used them to test students’ listening and reading comprehension. Overall, the results were very positive! Students are understanding these little paragraphs about their classmates, and by giving them more to listen and read, BAM secretly ninja’d some more input into their lil brains.

I was most curious as to how a writing assessment would go. I have done ZERO writing with my level 1 students up until now, and was nervous that they hadn’t had enough input, or that nerves would cause my students to devour their papers in despair and run screaming out of my classroom. But – hooray – they did some pretty cool stuff with their writing.

I prompted them to free write in Spanish for 10 minutes. No resources, just whatever Spanish they have in their heads. I provided a couple sentence stems for those who were really struggling (stuff like “He/she likes…” “He/she has…” “He/she is…”) so they could create little characters if they wanted. A couple kids in each class referred to them, but most just put their heads down and tried.

Most reproduced our little weather sentence stems pretty reliably. (“Today is Wednesday, the 17th of October. It’s cold. It’s cloudy. In my opinion, the weather is good.”) Some expressed some things that they like.  (“Me gusta Fortnite. Me gusta Nike.” Etc etc.) Some tried to create a character of their own. All of this falls in the Novice writing range – memorized words and phrases in familiar contexts.

Now, if I were to look at my students’ writings from the lens of “this must be perfectly spelled and grammatically unassailable! They must describe three things they like, one they like a lot, and two dislikes from our vocab list!” then I would probably think, “This writing is trash garbage! Time to launch copies of [textbook name redacted] at them until they GET IT. SPANISH IS BEAUTIFUL.”

I’m not going to do that.  Comprehensible input is the source of acquisition, and they’ve had…30 hours of it?  (As if – we know how much English goes into the setting up of the school year.)

Instead, I’m going to look at the sometimes wild creations that my students put to paper as “developmental forms.”  I love this term from Bill Van Patten (BVP), because instead of saying ERRORS, we’re recognizing that our students are developing mental representation of the language in our classes, and whatever they give back to us just shows us what they’ve got so far.  There’s still more time for them to acquire and get to more native-like production, so I don’t have to freak out right now.  And glory be – in their writings, my students are attempting to communicate something.  (Plot twist – I see this as one of the most important goals of a language class.  See ya, verb charts.  You only communicate SADNESS.)  So if they’re trying to communicate and sometimes I get what’s going on in their Spanish minds, boom.  I’m happy.

I’m happy!  I can see that my students would definitely benefit from some more reading.  More reading is going to get them more comfortable with the written form of Spanish, and that will likely show up in their own writing over time.  My focus for this next cycle of 6-ish weeks is going to be how I can create compelling texts with my classes that we milk for all they’re worth.  I need to not be afraid of repetition, because while saying the same sentence a bunch of different ways feels boring for me as an Advanced-level speaker of Spanish, my students are (secretly) (so as not to defy the middle school norm of looking disinterested most of the time) lapping up the opportunity to understand something – again!  Success feels good.  MORE SUCCESS, PLEASE.

That’s all from me for now.  This post was written, maybe in a fever dream, on a flight to Austin, TX for a long weekend.  School has had me stressed with a zillion things going on, but it feels nice to have time to really reflect on my successes and challenges from this beginning of this year.  I’m going to relish this opportunity – times for reflection have been few and far between, it seems.  Plus, I’m also going to celebrate the fact that I finished all my grading on this flight before I wrote this post?  Truly a miracle.

Have you done free writes?  Do you want to know more about the process, or the “why?”  Comment below!!!  Or just say hi, you glorious flower of pedagogical excellence!

Changing to CI-Centered Instruction Saved Me As a Teacher

I graduated my teacher training program at the end of 2016, and started looking for my first job as a world language teacher in the spring and summer of 2017.  I was so excited – I thought I had done very well in my student teaching and was on my way to having an exhausting, but productive first year!

I got a call from a middle school in a Seattle suburb, and one awesome Skype interview later, I was a real teacher!  Finally – all my years of experience in working with children were going to put me in a position to inspire and educate our youth!  Bam!

Well, the nerves crept in.  The position was a Spanish teaching position and I had majored in…German.  And done a summer travel-study program in Germany. And been the president of the German Club.  And lived in Germany for a year as an English Teaching Assistant.

I had been to a Spanish-speaking country for a total of…six days.  And though I had minored in Spanish in college…I was the German guy. Ok – I can do this! I am a creative, hard-working individual. There are MANY resources out there for Spanish teachers, more than for German, for sure!  If I flop, it’ll really be my own fault!  (What a dangerous sentiment for someone plunging into the great unknown of teaching…this, I must unpack in a future post.)

Mister Señor Fisher having a low-grade heart attack before leaving home for his first day as a Real Adult Human™ (September 2017)

The first day is a blur now, but I remember my first class coming and wondering, “will I be able to speak to them in Spanish the whole time slash at all?”  (I did it, phew. What did I even talk about? I can’t recall.) The students went home and there I was, alone in a little room that was now dubbed “mine,” with little idea of what to do next.  Okay…I’ll just follow what comes next in the textbook! And try to throw in some of those fun, interactive activities I learned about in my program! And browse Pinterest for MORE new ideas!

There are so many ideas out there.  Blogs, Pinterest boards, well-meaning colleagues, negative colleagues, district coordinators, other teachers who don’t even teach language who took a language class one time twenty years ago, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, books, instructional video series, YouTube…there are just a million ways to do any one thing.  Teach a language? Goodness gracious. Not to mention, if you shop on Teachers Pay Teachers, everyone else’s materials are BEAUTIFUL and look like they were hand-crafted in a giant marble library by angels and the ghost of Socrates.

Before I started teaching, I thought to myself, “I’ll never show a movie in class as a stalling technique!  I want to be up there, teaching, every day! No cop outs!” But the heads going down onto desks, the figuring out differentiation for six classes a day, the four preps, the days where I spent 12+ hours at the school looking for materials online, the wondering if it was fair or right for me to be a Spanish teacher when I felt I knew so relatively little….it all began to wear on me.  The beginning of November seemed like the perfect time to drag out The Book of Life over a couple days…in all my classes. I thought to myself…is this it?  Is this all there is?

A conference presenter turned me on to the CI Liftoff Facebook page, and through it, I started learning a lot about how teachers were delivering comprehensible input in their classrooms, every day!  What? My level 1 students only know some weather phrases (sometimes…well, some of them), some greetings, the numbers (sometimes), me gusta phrases…how do these language magic witch people just make these kids understand day in, day out, without planning every single word?  Devilry, I say!

So I read some more, watched YouTube videos of teachers working their classes like Vegas MCs, took tons of notes, thought aloud with wild enthusiasm (usually to myself), until one day I said, okay!  This is it! LET’S DO THIS!  [Imaginary enthusiastic table flipping]

Again, I don’t know what exactly I even talked about the day I “decided to go CI,” but I knew there was a hunger there.  I could not, would not stop. And, magically, I started learning things about my students that made me feel like I was connected to them, and actually knew their lives.  

And it reminded me: though I had not lived in a Spanish-dominant country, I had learned my Spanish and practiced it in a country with a huge population of Spanish speakers.  To me, learning Spanish represented building closer relationships with my Spanish-speaking neighbors, colleagues, strangers I ran into when they needed help, when I needed help.  It was about speaking to the hearts of people in my community. And that connection was sparked again when I started to speak slowly and comprehensibly to my students, making their lives and interests into our curriculum.  It felt like a loving tribute to all the times I or my conversation partner had made the attempt to connect in a tongue not our own, and we both smiled and understood, even if we didn’t say all the words right.

So I kept learning, I keep learning.  And the more that I learn, the more that I see that it is not about building a huge repertoire of “activities” that expands every time I log onto Pinterest.  It is really only about speaking slowly and using my body and voice so that students understand and can be understood. I look into my students’ eyes, and I feel connected, joyful.

I sense now that my career will not be an endless drudgery of activities and exercises, but an endless expansion of my ability to communicate and connect with other people.  I will get better at literacy activities, I will get better at speaking comprehensibly, I will get better at classroom management specific to this discipline. But – how wonderful – doing this will mean meeting tons of really cool young people and learning about their unique, beautiful lives.

I’m rolling into an October very much unlike the October I witnessed my first year.  There is so much space before me, space to get to know my students and myself so deeply.  And so, so many stories to tell.