Tag: reflection

Look Back, and Rest – A Reflection on Going Slowly

I was watching a video reflection by another teacher recently, and the teacher remarked that they had recently made changes in their instruction to go even slower than they had been going. The payoff had been that all his students were showing incredible gains, just from the single change of going so much slower.

Going slower required the teacher to provide even more repetition of the language and content to be learned, and to check in with each individual student and have them describe what was happening in the Target Language. The contention of the teacher was that before, by just developing strong responses to whole-class questions, he had been going too fast, and leaving students behind. That even though he had been implementing a Comprehension-Based Communicative Approach, he had been achieving the same level of student frustration and skill stratification within his classes as he had seen with a traditional approach. I shuddered.

For some reason, I flashed to a German class I had taught to other teachers as part of a conference. The class was fun, upbeat, and developed its own in-jokes (in German!) pretty quickly. They were all language teachers, so they just seemed to understand how things “should” work.

And there was one participant who wasn’t quite on the same ride as the rest of the class. She indicated that she didn’t understand as much of the language as she would like, and that some things were going over her head. She was more reserved than her classmates, and didn’t seem quite convinced that what we were doing was the right way for language teaching and acquisition.

I found myself overlooking her, even somewhat consciously, and just enjoying the laughter and creativity of her classmates. The class moved right along, and we generated tons of content from all the various activities I know how to do that made some great memories for us all. I convinced myself that the choral responses of her classmates would help surround her with the information she needed to be successful, that it would all click into place, eventually. She was trying – surely she would get it!

I look back now and feel sad that in a way, I gave up on her feeling successful in my German class. I had tried to repeat that “just getting the gist” was okay and totally where we all should be, but how much can one enjoy always just grasping at getting the gist? Especially while everyone else seems to “get it”? I can’t imagine how defeating, maybe embarrassing that felt. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t turn around and start a Comprehension-Based Communicative Approach in her own classes, if she wasn’t already. I hadn’t really sold it to her. Success breeds confidence, and I had, in some part, withheld success from someone who was really trying.

I flashed forward, then, to my own classes now. I was embarrassed to realize that I could quickly name students in each class that I give a similar “overlook” treatment. Their classes are moving along, we are “covering content,” some of their peers are outputting in alignment with my goals for them. But what about their goals? What about truly everyone being along for the ride so there are not clear “strugglers” in each class, ones that come to mind quickly?

The video I watched was a reminder to go slow, slower, even slower. I want to:

  • check comprehension even more to ensure that everyone is along for the ride.
  • look into the faces of all my students as we engage in whole-class discussion.
  • ask more processing questions to make the language deeply part of each student, so they can enjoy it the same way that I do, that their peers do.

“Just holding on by the skin of their teeth” for some of my students just doesn’t work for me, for the inclusive vision I have built for my entire German program. I am on a weeklong midwinter break as I write this, and will return with a plan to go slow, painfully slow, stick with students, try my hardest to make sure that every student is experiencing success. I know that it will be hard, but that these adjustments will end up making all my students feel stronger, more confident, more like the German speakers they want to be.

Another set of images flashed into my mind:

For five summers in my twenties, I was the program director of an outdoors summer camp.  Every year, our staff included new counselors who, like me, had once been young campers at the same camp.

Reliably, these young staff members were thrilled at the speed at which they could hike with other adults, and would blaze ahead on the trail at grown-up speed.  But that also meant that they were leaving slower hikers behind, hikers who were inexperienced rock hoppers or who just needed an extra bit of time to get to the destination.  When they would eventually catch up, the fastest hikers were finished resting and would power on, leaving the slower hikers out of breath and scrambling to follow.

Eventually, frustrated by how these trailblazers were burning up the stamina of their peers, and that they were missing out on opportunities to slow down and connect with their peers on a personal level, I decided to be the voice in their head that would encourage them to keep track of their slower peers.  At intervals, I would shout up the trail: “look back!”  Those in the front would turn to check that they could still see the furthest hiker back, and would adjust their pace to keep the group together.

When we would stop to drink water or catch our breath, I reminded everyone, fast and slow, to rest.  The idea was not for everyone to just stop breathing hard and double up protection against blisters, but to really be ready to conquer the next stretch of trail with confidence, connection, and enjoyment.

We saw so much more, hiking together. The mood was so much brighter, even if it took us longer to get to our destination. And the young staff members were so much better prepared for the real-world task of being able to accept whatever skills and speed their young campers brought to camp during the actual weeklong camping session.

Maybe this is a good metaphor for what we must seek to do with our learners.  Look back, and rest.  If not, we run the risk of turning something as beautiful as the slow hike of language acquisition into a blur of exhaustion, isolation, and pain.

Go slow, colleague.  Slower than you think.  Look back, and rest.

Reflections from the 2022-2023 School Year

Another post that was outlined three weeks ago and is only now getting written…oH WELL. I had a lot of victories last year, so now’s the time to lay out some goal areas for improvement!

Setting Appropriate Tasks to Avoid Online Translators

I have been lucky to avoid too much online translator interference by mostly doing on-demand, in-person, handwritten writing tasks. (Online learning made me too wary of writing tasks completed on the computer, so when I have students ultimately turn in something digitally, I make sure there was a handwritten copy beforehand that they truly did produce alone.) (Sidebar: another benefit of mostly doing handwritten assignments is that I have a long paper trail of student writing samples that are easy to refer to when I suspect translator usage. “I looked back at your writing from a couple weeks ago, and this latest assignment seems very…different from that!”)

Every time I ran into online translator usage this year, I think it was because I set tasks that were too intimidating for my learners. I believed that they had the capacity to complete the tasks in some form, but they did not share that belief, so they sought the path of least resistance. In my Teacher Brain, I thought we had completed enough smaller tasks to make the Big Task doable, but in the minds of my students, those tasks were in the past and unrelated.

I think students need more scaffolding for Big Tasks in the L2. This could be sentence starters, exemplars, models that we co-create in a Write and Discuss-like procedure…but I’m also thinking that we need to gather together all of the formative writing tasks we’ve done, lay them all out visually, and think aloud about how those tasks connect to the summative task. That way, all students are able to see that they actually have already done a decent amount of the cognitive heavy lifting and can draw on their past performances as inspiration for the Big Task.

Level Ups

I’ve been thinking a lot more about how to help students build the bridges in their writing to get to the next proficiency sub-level (blog posts forthcoming!), and something helpful that I did in the past was a procedure I learned from Mike Peto. I have transition words that I have printed on card stock and stuck magnets to that I then hung all around the edges of my board. While we were doing Write and Discuss, I would challenge my students to find ways to incorporate those words into their suggestions for the text we were co-creating. Students loved the challenge, and after seeing the words and phrases modeled in usage, they sometimes started showing up in their writing! Score! I just fell off doing that this year, and am looking forward to slapping those magnets back on my board in September and issuing the challenge once more. Transition words and subordinating conjunctions help move students from Strings of Sentences to Connected Sentences, the jump from IL to IM that introduces complexity and depth to their writing.

I have also been fascinated by this level up procedure I discovered by Erin Carlson (that I learned about via Bethanie Drew). The reminders to try to add Affirmative/Negative, Myself/Someone Else, and Answer/Add More Info to their writing will probably help them just write more words, which feels very satisfying and can help them reach higher levels of complexity and detail.

Circumlocution

I got to film one of my lessons as part of my ACTFL TOY portfolio, and one of the reflections to come out of that process was that I heard a lot of “How do you say…?” in my level 2 class. (That is to say, more than I wanted to hear!) It reminded me to train my students on the skills of circumlocution, and I think an easy and fun way to do that could be to play more 20 Questions (via AnneMarie Chase) as a sponge activity.

Classroom Jobs

When I taught middle school Spanish, I had a variety of classroom jobs to support the functioning of my classes, and even a whole whiteboard dedicated to listing who did what in each class. It was fun and a great way to build community, and I want to bring that to my high school classes. The truth of the matter is that there are plenty of little tasks that I would…prefer not to do (passing papers, etc.) that I can turn into jobs. I don’t want to lean too far into extrinsic motivators to make the students do the jobs – mostly just positive comments about how helpful these professional students are – but maybe once in a while, I’ll let a kid leave class a little earlier than everyone else, or give them a cool pencil or something. Or a sticker! Kids love stickers.

Claudia Elliott has an episode of her excellent podcast here where she talks to John Sifert and Annabelle Williamson about classroom jobs that I’ll be listening to, and Bryce Hedstrom has a great article here about classroom jobs that I’ll be reviewing.

What are we doing in the upper level class lol

The title of this section was a joke to myself, but I figured I’d keep it because it reflects how lost I’ve felt with my upper level classes for the past few years. I began offering AP German at my school a couple years ago, but it never ended up being a good fit for my school. Between COVID really hurting enrollments and preparedness, AP students always being put in a class with third year students who weren’t ready for AP-level tasks, and having students melt down under the pressure of multiple AP exams all at the same time, I never quite found a way to make it work. My pass rate was okay, but I didn’t feel great about being beholden to that specific test.

My students responded very positively when I told them I was thinking of changing to a College in the High School / Dual Enrollment German course for the third year and beyond. That gave me the push to get the program set up, and it looks like I’ll be offering a year-long college credit course starting in the fall. This is brand new territory for me, but I look forward to the challenge of planning towards the college’s very clear curricular requirements (the breadth of AP is what got to me a lot of the time), and refining my lower level courses to set those third/fourth year students up for success. I’m hoping it will be a better fit for my learners – and me! Luckily, I will only be teaching three preps next year (German 1, 2, and then dual enrollment German), so I will really be able to focus on making it great from the beginning.

What about you? What are you looking forward to doing (or not doing) in the coming school year? Comment below!

Victories from the 2022-2023 School Year

PHEW it is already July 12th and I’m just now getting to a post I outlined right at the end of the school year. I’ve been busy busy with my honeymoon, my brother’s upcoming wedding, LLLAB summer work, ACTFL stuff, CI Reboot… Lots going on. But I really got a lot out of reviewing my victories last school year, so here we are again. Here’s what went well this school year:

Free Writes / Focus Writes

I use timed Free Writes as a way for students to show their language growth over the year, with each student storing all their Free Writes in portfolios that we keep in the classroom. This is consistently a winning procedure, as students love comparing their disjointed writing from the beginning of the year with the more fluent, detailed writing they are producing by the end of the year. Our greater consistency with doing them just about every 2 weeks helped me in my planning and gave us lots of evidence of growth to reflect on at the end of the year.

A related win has been doing something I’ve titled Focus Writes at the end of each major thematic unit. Students get 5 minutes to write about themselves in relation to the major topics we explore throughout the year. For example, for Level 1:

  • 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

It’s simple, quick, definitely not the only kind of writing they do, but kids get to see how much easier it becomes over the year to write more. We reflected on how comprehended listening and reading input becomes greater ease in writing about yourself over time. And my two Level 1 classes averaged 96% and 116% increase in word counts on these Focus Writes between Focus Write 1 and Focus Write 4 this year, which I brought to my evaluation conversation with my assistant principal, who loved it. Definitely keeping Focus Writes for next year – kids like increasing their skill in talking about the most important thing: themselves!

Reviewing and Clarifying Expectations

Every year, I have been trying to refine my classroom expectations so that they are clearer to students, both in what to do and why we do it this way, and making them expectations that I feel comfortable and justified in enforcing. Inspired by Lance Piantaginni, I used the following expectations this year:

I reviewed these expectations Every. Single. Day for the entire first month of school, and regularly thereafter. (This is especially important after long weekends, breaks, big events, etc.) In addition, any time we did a new activity type, I specified how these expectations applied to the new activity. And this year was so much more peaceful! It was easier to enforce clear expectations whose justification we went over thoroughly. I am keeping these expectations and these procedures for sure.

March Music Madness

I participated in March Music Madness this year in all my classes and it was a huge hit. If you are not familiar, excellent teachers across the world collaborate on a March Madness-style bracketed tournament for new music from our target cultures with the goal of finding a “winning” song from the contenders. Teachers can either link up with international online voting calendars or keep all the decision making up to their own classes (I opted for just doing a school-internal tournament this year because of scheduling). I had my TAs put up a bracket with images of the artists, pictured below, and my students grew so possessive of their favorites that it made my heart smile. They were arguing with each other about their preferences related to Target Cultures music – arguing about content – awesome! I can’t wait to participate again next year.

Free Reading

My students started reading earlier in the year, and read more than ever before. Kids traded books, talked through plot twists, and generally got so much in linguistic competence from daily free reading. Not to mention, it was an absolute joy to read outside when the weather was nice.

Something I touched on but want to do in greater depth next year is discussing with students what successful Free Reading in the TL should feel like. Students have different tolerances for ambiguity/volume of new vocabulary and thus need to try different levels of difficulty for themselves, and sometimes learners need reminders of how to use the glossaries of the books they’re reading. Reading can be a very efficient, effective way to acquire a lot of language, but not if students are frustrating themselves out of potentially successful experiences.

Teaching a Novel

I have only ever done free reading of novels in class, but this spring, I taught my first-ever whole class novel. And I loved it! I taught Mit dem Wind in den Westen from Fluency Matters, and the Teacher’s Guide made it so easy for me to plan and read with my students. My students loved learning about the former East Germany and its culture, and Reader’s Theater was a hoot. I tried a variety of reading formats with my students, including whole class reading, group reading, partner reading, and individual reading, and the group reading procedure pictured below was the favorite of my students:

1. Reader (reads text aloud in L2) 2. Explainer (explains what’s happening after each paragraph/page) 3. Dictionary person (looks up words) 4. Questioner (asks content/context Qs) [Roles change after every page / logical amount of text]

This Tweet

This Tweet was my most successful Tweet this year.

I asked my Level 1 students what color they associated with each school subject and it got…heated lol. Try it as a warmup some day and report back – lots of fun!

WAFLT / PNCFL / NEA

In October, I was named the Washington Association for Language Teaching (WAFLT) Teacher of the Year. This was a huge surprise to me, and I was deeply touched by the recognition. I have felt lots of love from colleagues I have met through WAFLT conferences, and I was honored to be chosen as a representative for language teachers in our state.

In February, I submitted a 30-page (!!) teacher portfolio to the Pacific Northwest Council for Languages (PNCFL) as the WAFLT candidate for PNCFL Regional Teacher of the Year, and interviewed with members of the PNCFL board for about 45 minutes, touching on topics of best practice in language teaching, the teaching of culture, advocacy for language teaching and teachers, and so much more. At our online conference, I was named the PNCFL Regional Teacher of the Year. This really made my head explode, and it has been so incredible to meet language teachers from across our 6-state region and learn from and with them.

The next step is the ACTFL Convention and Expo in Chicago in November of this year. I am one of five candidates for National Language Teacher of the Year, which makes my heart pound every time I think about it. The process of refining my PNCFL portfolio and adding to it as part of my ACTFL candidacy has been truly transformational for me. I am prone to self-deprecation and anxiety about my work as a teacher, and the reflection built into the portfolio process has really helped me identify what I do well, and areas where I want to grow some more. I feel really proud of myself, and no matter what happens in November, I am ready to use my teaching and advocacy skills for the good of all the language teachers I have the pleasure of connecting with.

If all that wasn’t enough to make my heart explode, I found out in April that I am Washington’s nominee for the NEA Excellence in Education Award. My lovely colleague Kei nominated me (knowing this feels like such a wonderful professional hug – professionally hug excellent educators in your life!!), and it means that I’ll be headed to an awards gala (!) in Washington DC in the spring of 2024. Wild. Wild! I am so thankful for these opportunities and can’t wait to see how they evolve over this next year.

Whew – enough from me. What were your victories from the past school year?

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflect Early, Reflect Often!

We’re ending week 3.5 here in Washington state (we started the Wednesday after Labor Day), and I figured it would a good time to plonk some reflection into my students’ laps to help them look back on what we’ve done so far, let me know what’s working and what’s not, and get an affective temperature check. My big goals for my students are for them to feel safe and cared for in my class, and for them to comprehend buckets of input in German or Spanish. (Sometimes both when my brain fails to shift gears during 7th period…oh mein Gott…)

I gave students this half-sheet form, and five minutes of quiet to fill it out before we transitioned to my personal favorite class game, Gimkit. (Edit: the fabulous Kate Smith on Facebook made it into a Google Form, which makes gathering the data EVEN EASIER! Go ahead and make a copy for yourself!) Feel free to modify as needed, as I forgot to do when I gave the version that said “German” to my Spanish class…d’oh. Anywho, I conveyed before we started that their honest and helpful feedback would make me a better teacher, and it would make class better for everyone. So it’s a win-win!

I’ve spent this morning reviewing the trends, and I’m feeling very, very thankful that I did this. I have solicited feedback from students before, and it can definitely be awkward and painful. But I’m going into next week feeling aware of what’s working for them, and overall how they’re feeling in class.

Here are the biggest trends I noticed, both across levels, as well as in individual classes:

Gestures

Classes at every level pointed to my use of hand gestures for verbs as something that really helped them. I lifted how I do them from Tina Hargaden, so it’s nice to see that it truly is a huge comprehension support, and that I’m not just doing the Macarena for myself up in front of the class. This has also really helped me use more natural language, as I can use the same gesture for a verb’s past, present, and future forms, and use context to otherwise make things clear for students. And I can stay in the Target Language so much easier! Which leads me to…

High Levels of Target Language Usage

All my classes told me they liked how much of the Target Language we used during class, for Small Talk, Stories, Calendar Talk, Card Talk…everything! One student told me while we were watching the Homecoming Football Game that their previous teacher usually would do “only the Target Language” like…every other day. Which meant that class was 50% English, 50% TL. They really need the input to grow their mental representation of the language, so I’m glad students are appreciating my efforts to keep things comprehensible and shift that percentage in the direction of the Target Language.

Write and Discuss into Choral Translation + Grammar

Write and Discuss by itself didn’t necessarily get the biggest shoutouts at each level, but many students pointed out that doing a Choral Translation of the class text into English, funky word order and all, helped them see how German and Spanish are constructed and made them appreciate how much they understood. This is the perfect time to slip in fun grammar noticings – German word order is always fun to see at any level, and Spanish can do some wild things, too. And it’s not TOO grammar-heavy for them – one student literally wrote under his positives: “He isn’t making us remember grammar. He’s just speaking to us.” #blessings

Classroom Management

A comment to the effect of “make my classmates shut it during our class conversations” appeared at least once at every level, but was especially prevalent in my level 3 German class. They have known each other for a good long time, and have so many in-jokes and crazy stories from their last German teacher (who was/is a wonderful angel), that we often all get distracted with the fun stories in English and forget to use the most German possible. I see this as a necessary growing pain – I would much prefer that they had positive experiences with each other in the past, but I’m also convincing them of the value of 90%+ TL, so this will be an area of growth for us all. (Being a slightly hyper and easily distracted sort of dude…I am sometimes a culprit. Oops!) I think I can leverage how much my students in each class enjoy hearing the Target Language (as evidenced by their comments) to turn this tide and get us going in a fantastic direction.

Double Checking the Forms I Give My Class

Because I gave out forms that said “German” instead of “Spanish” to my Spanish classes, I received many angry face emoji drawings on my surveys, and one “you could improve by loving Spanish more! (crying face emoji)” SORRY, Y’ALL! (They actually took it in stride, but I definitely don’t want them feeling like I only love my German students…I truly love them all because they’re so FUNNY.)

Sorry, chicos. 😛

Bonus Comments!

I have a couple of heritage Spanish speakers in my level 2 Spanish class, and I got some sweet comments from them, too. One wrote, “I already know the language, but it’s nice being in here.” I have another heritage speaker who sometimes speaks like a Novice – lots of errors, but comprehensible! – and he wrote, “I appreciate that Mr. Fisher tells us that being wrong is okay!” My heart!!!

I want to make sure I do this at intervals for the rest of the year. There are regular slumps in the natural cycle of the school year, and using reflective surveys like this can hopefully help me keep students engaged and contented in class. What’s more, I hope I am conveying to them how much I appreciate and care for them, and can build good will by not pretending to have all the answers all the time.

Go forth, and reflect! What have been your reflections from the beginning of this year? What have students told you? Let me know in the comments below!

Carol Dweck’s Mindset – Mr. Fisher Gets Growing Pains

I set a goal of reading 24 books in 2019 (about 2 a month), and it’s going very well so far! I have read 18 so far this year, so I’m a little bit ahead of “schedule.” (Granted, I have read 5 since school let out on June 19th, but whatever. I will take that as a success, as it means I adequately re-appropriated time I would have spent playing video games or drooling on myself or whatever. Mindset!)

Carol Dweck’s Mindset is a book I think many educators have heard of, and no doubt we’ve all been to at least one conference presentation or PD where someone was like “we want to do [this and this strategy/activity] to help students build a growth mindset!” (And then of course, we all nod sagely because mmm yes mindset.)

As evidenced by that last bit of snark, I had developed a bit of an eye-rolling reaction when growth mindset was brought up in those settings. Growth mindset sounds like a DUH sort of teaching thing, like DUH we should set high standards and believe that all students can reach them, and DUH our own potential as teachers can also grow despite challenges. It also has that flavor-of-the-month feel, sounding like a nebulous platitude that doesn’t necessarily change your day-to-day or give you ideas of what to do when things actually go sideways (kid cusses you out, a lesson is just bombing, your admin is laying the pressure on during an eval and you’re not sure what to do, etc.) “Have a growth mindset!” Ok!!! I did it!!! …now what?

I discovered something that maybe I had learned before, but apparently not well enough: it is so much more powerful to go directly to the source material, rather than hear (often diluted) secondary interpretations. And I am glad for having done this, because I think my processing of this book will help me become a better educator and a better person.

The gist of the book (my German irony senses are tingling) is that people face the many challenges and contexts of life with one of two mindsets: the Fixed Mindset, which says that peoples’ abilities and intelligence are innate and, well, fixed, and the Growth Mindset, which says that intelligence and ability can be developed through a commitment to teaching, learning, and appropriate challenge. Dweck illustrates how these mindsets play out in the realms of business, teaching, parenting, coaching, and even relationships to illustrate how they permeate every aspect of our lives, though mostly unevenly. For instance, a person in business may know they are lacking certain skills and recognize their need to gain experience from hard work and mentorship by others as they learn their trade. They then grow, and can be fabulously successful! That same person can be fixed in their romantic relationship, deciding that their partner and the relationship will always go the way it is currently going, and if it’s going badly, then the relationship was ALWAYS bad and should be allowed to self-destruct. (Two things: if a relationship has ALWAYS been bad after reviewing all the moments together, you should probably get out. But sometimes, all it takes is just telling your partner what you’re thinking and feeling. Mind-reading is not a thing, y’all.)

This all sounds great! Be growth-minded in every arena of life! Believe in change! Try hard! WOO!

But reading this text was actually a little painful for me, and I imagine it could be that way for others. Because in reading about people who typified the Fixed Mindset in their professional and personal lives, I sometimes saw myself. Not in an “oh god I have had a fixed mindset this entire time!” unmasked Scooby Doo villain sort of way, but in recognizing that there are situations and contexts in my professional and personal lives where I am triggered to a Fixed Mindset, and it holds me back from seeing and realizing my true self and true potential.

I’m realizing as I write this how wishy-washy I’m sounding in trying to let you know that I actually had an intense experience with a book/concept that I had perceived to be fairly wishy-washy. Ah! But I want to continue reflecting on how these mindsets have played out for me: now, and as the school year progresses. Here are three quick reflections I had while reading:

  1. “That Class.” This past year I had two classes that regularly drove me up the wall. There were certain characters in these classes that I had subconsciously given up on – in my mind, they were never going to participate in the way that I wanted, and their challenges that existed outside of the school building were going to persist in making school hard for them no matter what I did. We, as educators, don’t want to admit that we think that about any kid, but it’s easy to write off a class with something like “oh, that’s my High Blood Pressure Class.” I know we’ve all had those classes, and that I have to be patient and forgiving of myself. But I want to engage in active, constant reflection this coming school year to avoid falling into the thinking traps that caught me last year. What skills are my students lacking, and how can I bring them to practice and master those skills? Have I made clear to them why these skills are worth mastering? How can I engage my class in problem solving when things aren’t going to plan, so that they get a say in how they learn and I don’t have to generate every solution? This also plays into an idea I grappled with in Radical Candor by Kim Scott – how can I open the doors for honest feedback on my performance so that we all get better, every day? If I catch myself having a “That Class” next year, I want to do a thorough, honest assessment with myself of what is happening, so I can teach.
  2. Classroom Management Leader / Nervous Wreck. I took on a role this year that allowed me and a colleague to give a classroom management workshop over the summer, with the expectation that there would be follow up one-hour meetings during the school year to check in and practice skills. I take on leadership roles because I like being helpful and sharing – and things were going well management-wise in my classes the previous year. But I think having the role almost made me stop learning more about classroom management. I found myself saying “I’ve got this, I’ve got the skills to work with my classes,” but also running into moments where I, uh, didn’t “have” it. I felt like a fraud, because I had been given a neat title, but if anyone had come into my room, I may or may not have been compelled to lay blame wherever to overcome my feeling that things weren’t going as well as I wanted them to, and I wasn’t adapting. I’m a little bit more wary of taking on leadership roles as I transition to a new district and new school, because I end up letting them be a time suck, and if I do end up taking on any roles in the years to come, I want to enter with a boatload more humility. I want to maintain that learner’s stance, always.
  3. Singing and Writing – In my personal life, two of my greatest self-care outlets are singing and writing. I sang in choirs for 6 years, and have been writing poetry since I was 11 years old. (I’m also published, it’s fine.) But asked to present these “talents,” I freeze. I am so afraid of being judged – finding that my voice is unpleasant to listen to, that I don’t sound good singing songs that I like, that my writing is trite garbage. But at the end of the day, truly, truly, they are for me. Only me. I sing and write because it feels good. Now, if I decide that I want to be a pro at either, or even just perform either in public for fun, I will have to accept that people will offer their opinions on my performance whether I want them to or not. And I can either take those as value judgments, or search for nuggets of wisdom and constructive criticism, and grow.

I recommend reading this book for yourself, and pausing whenever you find yourself reflected in a description of a fixed mindset. It is hard to be honest with ourselves about these things sometimes, but I think that this specific hard pain can help us grow. And maybe at the end of the day, you’re very content with your life and will find it to be self-help-y junk. But the other possibility is that you grow.

Have you read Carol Dweck’s Mindset? Let me know what you thought!

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.