As world language programs suffer budget cuts and yearly uncertainty as to how employed each teacher will be, we teachers often ask ourselves:
How do I get students to join my program and stay with it?
This is the beginning of my sixth year at my current school, and since I began as the only German teacher at my school, student enrollments have grown 70%, from 87 students to 148 students. I am very proud of and excited about this, of course, but I wanted to know more about why I was able to get this sort of growth in enrollments. So, I asked students in my upper level (3rd and 4th year) German class about why they were still in German, and had many informal conversations with students and their families to determine what had worked so far. This blog post was born of those reflections.
Below are factors that have been attractive and motivational for my community, and helped grow the German program in my specific context. I would say that some of these factors are out of my control, but some are within my control. Perhaps something I write here will resonate with you, or challenge you.
Orientation Toward College
My student population is very oriented toward college studies, and are very aware that they need about 3 years of language study in order to get into the colleges they are interested in. German is not offered at the local community college that many Running Start students attend, so I get a bump of students in my third year class who are taking college classes, but need my class to stay in German.
College credit is also very enticing to students, as they know it looks good on college applications. Using AP German for that credit was tough because it seems like every university treats AP credit for languages differently (one student needed a 5 in order to get ANY credit at all, for example, while others took 3s and up), and I never had a standalone AP class on my campus. This made it hard to teach toward the AP exam when I also had (significantly more) level 3 students in the same class. I think a stacked class like that is doable, but I struggled with it. So, I sought an alternate arrangement for college credit!
Forming a partnership with a local community college helped secure college credit for my students, and gave me more flexibility in delivery of content. The professor I have been working with loves seeing what is happening at the secondary level in German teaching, and helped me make my upper level classes more college-y.
Extracurricular Activities
My school has a German Club that is very active, and I believe it plays a role in attracting students to my program. Students have said how much they love having a community of friends, and that they have even more opportunities to learn about German cultural products and practices that are hard to cover during normal class times.
The German Club Bundestag (parliament, our group of officers) makes extensive use of the German Club Idea List, a list of potential ideas for club activities that is divided between “anytime” ideas and month/day-specific ideas. This makes planning easier for everyone (me included) and makes sure that we are always doing something together. As much as the students like German Club as a social group, the activities give a unifying purpose that makes them feel like they learned something special by choosing to come to German Club that day. Our Club Time is incorporated once monthly into our school day schedule on a Friday, and we try to host a couple after-school events per quarter.
I have also created a chapter of the National German Honors Society that helps add some prestige to students’ study of German, as members of the Honors Society get special recognition at graduation. I’m trying to plan some more Honors Society-only events that add more fun and privilege to that group.
Proficiency-Based Instruction
Research indicates that moving towards proficiency-oriented language instruction increases student motivation and feelings of confidence, while also helping students attain better oral proficiency than traditional, grammar-and-vocabulary language instruction. We’re talking students that are more likely to stick with programs because they’re learning more. It can feel terrifying to shift away from the safe refuge of a textbook curriculum, but you don’t have to do it alone. Working with colleagues to change your instruction – identifying Can Dos to center your planning, using more of the Target Language in class, having more spontaneous, supported interaction in class, and so on – can help take away the fear and uncertainty. Many hands make light work.
Ultimately, proficiency-oriented language instruction chooses an asset mindset, versus a deficit mindset, in regards to students’ language development. We are focusing on cultivating what students can do with the language, versus what they know about the language, or what “errors” they make in their first attempts at communicating in a new language. That mindset is refreshing and inspiring, and helps learners focus on how they are being successful in their language classes instead of “failing” at this or that verb ending or sentence structure. Success motivates – and students want to stick around where they have been successful!
Choosing activities that increase student joy also increases student attachment to the course, and makes it more likely that they will keep it in their schedule as a bright spot in their day. My students have described German as “a break from my other classes” in the way that it makes them feel.
I suspect that some of this comes from spontaneous, co-created content. This includes creating stories with TPRS, creating characters with OWIs, Special Person Interviews, small talk and chit chat in the language, and any activities where you don’t know how students are going to creatively respond. It is terrifying to jump into a class and not know what content is going to be “covered” in the period based on student responses, but giving yourself as the instructor bail-out moves and skeleton structures to support you while leading these activities can help you still get students lots of language, no matter what. And students find the spontaneity exciting, memorable, and motivating.
Motivation and Inclusion
The through-line of a lot of the ideas mentioned above is an orientation toward that which motivates as many different students as possible, based on their basic psychological needs. I view motivation through the lens of Self-Determination Theory, which I learned about from Dr. Liam Printer. According to SDT, people are motivated by their basic human psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness.
Being flexible and responsive to student curiosity and creativity gives choice, fulfilling student needs for autonomy. They help co-create our stories, share their interests with me and their peers regularly, and are provided differentiated activities to show their growth in a way that most speaks to them.
By choosing Comprehension-Based Communicative Language Teaching, I am giving my students a greater chance at developing competence in the Target Language by teaching in a way that is acquisition-supportive and aligned with how their brains actually process language. Partnered with realistic expectations for how acquisition works (and the time that it takes) and regular formative assessment, students get to notch consistent victories in their language classes (which can turn into college credit, more opportunities to create community with others, etc.).
Building relatedness does not stop after the first weeks of the school year. Every activity is an opportunity for personalization and connection to others, building a sense of community. A student once left the feedback, “I feel like I could say something interesting about each person in our class,” and that felt like the greatest indicator that we had taken time as a class to get to know each other well in the Target Language.
This only works if every student builds the belief that they can learn another language, and we treat every student as if they will become a very proficient user of the language. Our vision, our curricular choices, and our practices must all be viewed through a lens of inclusion. How can I make as many students as possible successful in this class?
I can do that by reading IEPs and 504 plans. I can do that by auditing my curriculum to increase student access to windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors in their learning, and challenging them to grow as thinkers and people. I can do that by challenging myself in the ways I think about “difficult” students, and seeking ways to make certain that they are successful.
An inclusive and motivating classroom is a place where youth will want to be.