Tag: teaching with CI

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!

Participating in Students’ Lives with Real Conversation and Connection During Virtual Learning

Amongst the many triumphs, failures, victories, and indignities of Pandemic Teaching, I have found it incredibly important to stay in regular contact with teachers (and non-teacher!) whom I love and respect. This has meant planning Zoom chats, starting a book club, and rallying a local PLC to monthly meetings on Saturday mornings, even when we all feel tired and over it.

This dedication to planned socialization is what got me on Zoom with Mr. Mike Peto, who I have learned so much from at conferences like the ACTFL Convention and Comprehensible Cascadia. We talked about teaching online, frustrations and wins, and how to get back to the basics of providing rich CI to kids.

One thing that Mike said slapped me right in the face, and was a reminder that I hope can positively shape my planning and mindset as we journey into the darkness of our first winter of COVID: Real conversations do not have a planned outcome – you can’t expect what will happen next!

Now, on the surface, this is like “well…yeah.” We don’t launch into conversations with others knowing exactly what they are going to say, how we will respond, exactly what words we’re going to use.

But! In hearing this, I recognized how that need to meticulously plan and “cover” curriculum had creeped into my mindset for teaching, and I think it has been slightly stifling the sparks of real conversation that turn into real engagement in class. Not every moment in a CI class has to be wild and crazy. Most days are not! But taking time to ask about and pick up on the little details of my students’ lives is what has made me so happy as the teacher – and what has helped me provide loads of engaging CI.

The many anxieties of this year have me wondering things like “Are we where we are supposed to be?” “Is this class good enough for the level they’re supposed to be at according to the course title?” “Am I doing enough?”

That thinking is garbage, and I am done with it. Real conversations have participants, not performers. I don’t need to perform us “getting through” my curricular objectives when things are this difficult. I have less than half the contact hours I would have had during a typical year, and we are still in a global pandemic that is irreversibly impacting just about every aspect of our lives.

I want to participate in my students’ lives, participate in them maintaining and growing in their hope, their joy, their intellectuality. We can participate in each others’ lives through genuine engagement around topics that kids care about. Which means that I can let go of including every single little assignment, reading, and word that I “would have” got to in an ideal world, and just be where I am. Be, where we are.

Now, I’m obviously still a teacher paid to grow the students in their proficiency in an additional language. I am going to recommit myself to using as much TL as possible (though 90%+ is definitely not in the cards for this year) because I believe you can make genuine, strong connections in the L2, even with Novices. And I will continue to touch on themes and topics that are interesting, continue to have my students question their assumptions about culture. It will not be the same as a typical school year because it cannot be so. And that’s fine. We need this connection now more than ever.

Maybe I can do myself a favor by keeping a list of high-frequency verbs nearby to serve as springboards for every conversation. I think of this post by Mike that talks about the advantages of having those high-frequency verbs in your classroom – if all students had these verbs rock solid in their acquired language, they would be capable of quite a lot, and there would be so many ways to keep our conversations going without having to just repeat the same sentences or vocab over and over and over. Maybe the minimal-seeming goal of just the Sweet 16 as curriculum is what this moment calls for. Imagine the possibilities…

In any case, as our students are being crushed by trying to learn difficult subjects on line, crushed by mountains of homework after hours seated in front of screens, crushed by missing their friends and their teachers, I am recommitting to connections over curriculum. (I think I may have got that from Martina and Elicia at The Comprehensible Classroom.) Let our classes be those that lift the weight for them.

Do you feel connected? Cheer your fellow educators on in the comments below!

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!

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!