Tag: teaching with CI

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!

Question of the Week – An Easy Ritual for Building Memorized Language and Community

Online learning, for me, has been about simplifying and streamlining my planning processes to yield maximum results without sending me into internet search spirals that last hours and generate maybe one slight adjustment to what I was already going to do in the first place. (It has not, however, cured me of my tendency to write giant compound sentences like the previous one. #BAinGerman)

I have been feeling pretty successful in providing high-quality, personalized CI, given the circumstances. But I had been missing those little bits of memorized language that I was using as “Passwords” (a la Bryce Hedstrom) to get into my classroom – how can I get students those helpful phrases in this online way? Enter The Question of the Week!

Why should you use it? Because often times, students enter language courses with expectations of what they should be learning, and how that learning should look. We can definitely through them a bone with these phrases, which are very useful and help us ensure that they have natural, powerful language for use right away!

When do I use the Question of the Week?

I use the Question of the Week outside of my normal lesson cycle, usually during the “Warm Up” or “Do Now” portion of the lesson, before we really get going where we’re headed that day. It has been a nice ritual for my first lesson of the week with each class because it is expected, and it makes it easy for me to remember to plan it ahead of time!

How do I do it? – Logistics

When thinking of potential Questions of the Week, I have been thinking about phrases that might be expected by the student, given the class or unit content, or are just difficult to weave into stories or discussions. For example, it’s helpful for students to know how to say “My name is…” but awkward to ask it of them if…Zoom just tells me their name on the screen at all times. (These are called “Display Questions” in pedagogical literature – questions to which we either already know the answer or for which the answer is apparent to all and thus for which there is no communicative purpose – they are only for “language practice.” “What color is my shirt?” is not communicative if all students can see it.)

Here are some examples from the first units of my current courses to help clarify even more:

Level 1:
What is your name?
Where are you from?
Where do you live?
How old are you?
What languages do you speak?

Level 2:
What is your favorite food?
What is your favorite drink?
What do you think about that? (or, “What’s your opinion?” after I make some statement)
What do you like to cook?

Level 3:
How do you feel? (reflexive in both Spanish and German)
What are you interested in? (also reflexive in German!)
What does that remind you of?
What is important to you?

How do I do it? – Procedure

I introduce each Question of the Week during the first class meeting of the week. I have students note down both the question, and the sentence frame that they can use to respond to it! For example, they would note:
“What is your name?” –> “My name is…” in L2, as well as what it means in L1.

Then, I have my class answer in the chat all at once (which I have turned so that they can only chat with me), and I repeat and comment on their answers. “Oh, Soandso is from California? I am also from California! Where are you from specifically, Soandso?” etc etc.

After I get all these initial answers, I move on with my lesson. BUT ALSO: throughout my lesson, I randomly ask the question to my class to make sure they are there and engaged! This helps both reinforce that memorized language, as well as help me make sure that cameras aren’t just off because students are off secretly recording Tik Tok dance videos or something during class.

After we have built a repertoire of these questions, I sometimes cycle through a couple and have students respond to all of them in the chat. Great spaced practice – especially if you ask “Level 1” questions in level 2 or 3!

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

Use these questions all the time! I have built the Questions of the Week into stories I’ve told with class, just to build out what we know about characters and setting. Variations on the questions and statements have also appeared in readings I have given my students to reinforce the different forms (person, tense, etc.)

My level 1s have talked a lot this year about “wanting practice speaking,” which we know can be very pleasurable even if it doesn’t necessarily lead directly to language acquisition itself. So I am creating an assignment where students introduce themselves by answering all the Questions of the Week. Because they have practiced and heard these questions and their responses over and over again over the weeks of class we have had together, this will be a slam dunk-easy assignment for students to just speak their memorized answer and get comfortable with the new language in their own voices.

Truly though, if you pick a meaty question (“What is your favorite movie?” “What do you do in your free time?”), you could make the question your entire lesson. Once you start a discussion, you can just focus on a couple answers, write up a summary of the discussion with Write and Discuss, and have spent a good long while getting to know your students and the way their minds work.

Pro Tips!

  1. Pick useful questions and sentence frames! What are some basic sentence frames that allow students to describe, express an opinion, show their emotions? With an eye to useful functions, we can give our students a strong and flexible set of conversational moves that they can apply across their language learning experience. I tend to forget to build some of these phrases into my class stories and experiences, so planning like this ensures that I get the students the useful stuff they need.
  2. Recycle them! Use them over and over as attention getters, in new contexts, make them really stick.

What if I want to learn more?

Bryce Hedstrom’s post about his passwords (which students have to say before entering the classroom) can be a great source of inspiration for ideas of what sorts of things you can build in to your Question of the Week repertoire. Check out his posts about his higher levels, too, to see how the idea scales.

What do you think? Do you feel ready to use the Question of the Week? Comment below and send me any questions you might have!

Card Talk – Online!

This post will assume familiarity with the Card Talk strategy. If you haven’t heard of it or done it before, check out my post here about it and then come on back for some thoughts about how to bring it online!

As we move into a school year where many of us are fully online (and many are doing some sort of wonky not-normal something), I have been thinking about high-powered strategies and how to best bring them into the online environment. At the same time, I have talked to so many other teachers who are falling into the spiral of internet discovery that leaves them with too many ideas and not enough confident planning. It reminds me to be clear about what are the most important principles for my teaching – access to high-quality input, personalized discussions about relevant content, frequent chances to read on-level texts, and getting feedback on all of the above – and stick to making those things happen, over and over again.

I have always loved Card Talk for a couple big reasons. For one thing, it is a very flexible strategy. You can give a prompt for any sort of topic/theme, and boom! You have generated content for possibly weeks. For instance, this year level 1’s prompt is the typical beginning-of-level-one “Show a picture of an activity you like to do (bonus: put a picture of you doing that activity!)” Level 2, starting a unit about food? “Show a picture of a food that has meaning to you and/or your family, and another picture of a food you absolutely hate.” Level 3, beginning the year with a unit on art? “Show a picture of an artwork you listen to/view over and over again, and another picture of an artwork that really inspires you.”

The other big reason I love it is because it lends itself so nicely to community building. It does this by beginning conversations around individuals that enable us to draw connections between the members of our classes. This has been helpful to remind us all that behind the screens are real people who share some of the same interests as you – which we will be able to capitalize on once we’re back together in the beautiful future!

Adaptations for Virtual Learning

For synchronous learning: I shared a blank template (like this one you see here) with my entire class, and created an “assignment” on our Learning Management System (LMS) to fill in their slide, and then tell me which slide number they had claimed.

To prepare for class, I scrolled through and found two slides with similar-seeming interests (maybe both are related to sports, or music, or both students do gymnastics!). I copied these into my daily slideshow, and maybe noted some high-frequency or interesting vocabulary that I would need to have a conversation with my students about that interest. (I keep note paper in front of me while teaching asynchronously to keep my thoughts organized.) With some slides, I also had to edit them down a bit, because some students took the directive of “post a picture of AN activity you like” to fill the entire slide with every video game they had ever played ever. I wanted to keep the discussion focused, so I cut it down to about 2 or 3 pictures for each student (and explained that I had done so during class).

During class, I did a big drum roll, and then showed the students’ slides. While doing the activity, instead of sharing the slide fully presented, I instead showed the slide in the “edit” mode, as we would see it when we are working on it. That makes it easy to use the “presenter notes” at the bottom of the slide as a sort of whiteboard to introduce new vocabulary in big font.

With my level 1 students, because they had posted a picture of themselves on the slides, I used that as an opportunity to begin physical descriptions like, “Ah, Soandso has brown, wavy hair. Nice! I’m bald, I don’t have hair. (fake cries)”

Then, I moved into the discussion about that student’s interest(s). The power questions that tend to generate lots of good discussion are where a student does the given activity, as well as with whom. That usually provides enough fodder to stick on the slide for a couple minutes, learning more about the student’s preferences.

With any activity focused on just one kid, it is important to strike a balance between talking to just that kid and panning out to address the whole class. The questions directly to the kid tend to generate most of the content, whereas the questions to the class (“hey, translate what we just said quickly in the chat,” “Do you do this, too?” “Which of these two alternatives is better?”) keep the rest of the class engaged.

After discussing one slide for a while, I moved to the next, and drew connections between the two students. I rounded out the period with some Write and Discuss, Translation of the Class Text, and a Quick Quiz.

For asynchronous learning: I have not done this asynchronously, but I could imagine altering the template for the activity to generate the information I would need to do a presentation without the student there. In the “presenter notes” section, you could include “wh- questions” (who, what, when, where, why) that the student has to fill out in addition to posting their picture response to the prompt. This gives you as the teacher more information to work with as you perhaps create a video recording (I use Screencastify!) of you describing the student’s response with all the information you have, also comparing it to yourself! To check for understanding, you could have students write a short summary in their L1, or do a 4-question true/false quiz in the L2 after watching the video.

In the beautiful future…

I have kind of appreciated having the “cards” online. I didn’t have to spend money on card stock (HELLO) and didn’t feel bad about environmental waste. Perhaps I will make “creating the card” a digital assignment for the future to reduce waste and make it easier for me to see them all at once and plan. Hooray positives!

I also found myself getting frustrated that we were “only” getting through 1 or 2 cards in a long period, but that is also totally okay. Less is more with online learning! Better to feel very solid about even one card versus just hitting students with tons of new info and words about their classmates.

Have you done Card Talk online? How did it go? Leave your tips and tricks below!

Kultur: Ramadan 2020

Hallo, meine lieben DeutschlehrerInnen! My perception is that there are so few resources for Teaching German with CI (especially compared to Spanish and French). I’m going to make it a goal of mine to share things I have created for my students that might be helpful to you.

Today, I am sharing a document that introduces students to the Muslim celebration of Ramadan. It is very basic: it describes how Muslims celebrate Ramadan, why, and when. While I am no expert, I think it is important to ignite students’ curiosity about different cultures. Also, Ramadan 2020 began yesterday, April 23rd, 2020!

There are two versions of the text in the document. The first is a bit simpler, with emojis to support comprehension and a glossary of lower-frequency vocabulary. The second is slightly more complex in sentence structure and vocabulary. On the third page of the document, you will find an infographic about the fact that how long a person fasts during Ramadan is dependent on where they are on the globe – the length of your day is determined by what latitude your home is on! Finally, I included some phrases for how to wish others a blessed Ramadan.

How am I using these texts with my students? Well, during this period of online learning, I am using these as “extra credit” texts, though I plan on assigning them to my Level 2s later when we do a bit of study on “Feste und Feiertage.” As extra credit assignments, I’m just instructing students to read version 1 until they are comfortable with it, and then move onto version 2 if they want a challenge. Then, they answer in a Google Form four things they learned. This could be new vocabulary in German, cultural information, or questions that they continue to have after reading the text. Simple!

Here is the document in docx format!

Here is the document in PDF format!

Here is a nice video in German that goes great with the text! (Brief mention that sex is forbidden during the fasting time of Ramadan.)

Ich wünsche euch einen gesegneten Ramadan!

Let me know if you end up using the text, and how students respond to it! What are some other German resources that you would like to see? They could be about cultural topics, short stories, etc.!