Tag: world languages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing to CI-Centered Instruction Saved Me As a Teacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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