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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
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!
If you are in the CI Blogosphere or in any of the numerous fabulous Facebook groups dedicated to discussing Teaching with CI (TCI), you may have heard of an activity called a One Word Image, or OWI. (Another TLA for you!) (TLA = Three Letter Acronym) (Buh dum tss) You may have seen teachers raving about how fun they can be, or the wacky images their students create. But what even IS this activity, whose creation is attributed to Ben Slavic? Let’s explore!
Why should you do it? Because our students are wonderfully creative, and it sometimes seems extremely rare that they get to explore that creativity in the current pressurized school environment. Building a character together as a class can be a fun outlet for them (and you!), in addition to accomplishing your Secret Language Teacher Goals. Aka – they get a lot of language input out of it! Not to mention, this character could become a class icon who goes on many adventures, or at the very least lives on in your classroom as a symbol of cooperation and fun.
When do I use an OWI?
The Create phase is a session of Guided Oral Input.
An OWI belongs in the “Create” category of activities in the Star Sequence, or what we might also call the “Guided Oral Input” part of a lesson. This is an experience that generates language and common experience in the classroom, which become the basis for the literacy work of the other star “points.”
A One Word Image is an inanimate object or animal that your class customizes and anthropomorphizes through your questioning and the collective use of imagination. The image gets drawn up (more on that below) so that you can revisit it later and use it for more literacy!
As for when during the school year to create an OWI with your class – it can be whenever! Many teachers use this strategy early on as a bridge to whole class, co-constructed storytelling, but it can pop up whenever in the year if you want to inject some fun and energy into the proceedings. Plus, it is easy to angle an OWI towards whatever unit you’re in. School unit? The image has to be a school supply! Food unit? Food with a face on it is hilarious! House unit? One of my most successful OWIs was a Roomba! (By the way, the German word for “vacuum cleaner” is “Staubsauger” – literally, dust sucker. Ding!)
How do I do it? – Logistics
Before you get started with anything, you’ll need to set up a way to get the image drawn for you! Most teachers find it useful to hire two student artists to draw the image as you and the class build it. This allows you to use the image later as an anchor for further discussion and literacy activities. Elementary teachers sometimes draw the images themselves to make it easier to see and more accurate.
Tina Hargaden once recommended announcing that you need to hire someone who is very good at drawing, so everyone needs to point at someone who is very good at drawing on three! One, two, three! A lot of the time there are 1-3 artists in a class that just rock and everyone knows it. You can use positive peer pressure, or just asking the student to get them on board. They then will need an assistant to help them out, so I take volunteers for that part and let the primary artist choose someone with whom they are likely to work well.
I set my students up at an easel with a giant piece of butcher paper, some chart paper markers, and some colored pencils. (You’ll also want for them to have a pencil sharpener and maybe a ruler, just in case.) My instructions to the the artist duo are as follows: 1. Draw exactly what I say (not what the class says…it’s easy to get distracted), and the Assistant has to follow Artist 1’s direction and vision 2. Take up the whole piece of paper so that the image is easy to see 3. It should be more cartoony than realistic – like a logo! 4. Do the outline in marker, and then color in with the pencils 5. Do not talk at more than a whisper so you can hear me and we don’t get distracted 6. Work quickly! They will have essentially 20 minutes to make this happen, in most cases
Many teachers also choose to hire a Professor #2 in this moment. This student will make the final call on details if there is a huge disagreement in the class. It is best to choose a student who may be quiet or not quite fully integrated into a group in the class, as this gives them a moment to be an important part of the classroom community without being overshadowed by the more…uh…active participants in your room. When there is a knockdown, drag-out fight about whether the Roomba is blue or red, Professor #2 makes the call and it is final. Instruct the students to respect the decision and move on.
How do I do it? – Procedure
The first time I do it, I say in L1 that we are going to create a character as a class using the power of our imaginations. We are going to create something that doesn’t exist already – so no rehashing of a famous character or person. It could be any sort of object – a car, a food, a piece of clothing – just not a person, or a character that already exists!
Then I start taking suggestions. Don’t bother translating to the L2 at this point – you’re going to get lots of excited suggestions. I take raised hands, and if students say anything that causes The Teenage Giggles (something inappropriate or that could be construed as such), I just say, “No,” and give a lingering glance to the student who suggested it.
A lot of the time, there will be one suggestion that has a lot of resonance with your class – pick that one! If there are a couple warring factions, propose 2-3 ideas and then just make a decision for the class. Write the object in L2 with L1 below it on the board. (Be prepared to learn a lot of random words in your L2…like when your students want to create a muskrat and you have no idea how to say that in German…)
Switch into the L2 (I have a student yell “DEUTSCH” to make that happen), and repeat the word for the object in the L2. I then tell the class to look at the object (again, in L2), while gesturing to a space in the front of the classroom. Saying the word with wonder and admiration, even asking students if they see it too and exhorting them to really look, adds a bit of magic to this initial moment. (I usually try to find a good moment to pop over to the artists and quietly whisper that they should start drawing a basic outline of the object, but without a face or color yet.)
Then, ask students in the L2 if the object is big or small. Use your body to convey these terms to students if they are not quite fully acquired – for example, I usually draw out my arms really widely for “big,” and then say the word in L2 so that students’ brains are cued up to hear the L2 word for its meaning. Then, do the same for “small.” If there’s a split decision, send it to the Professor #2 to make the call. Then, repeat the size with wonder, looking at the imaginary object you’ve established. I also say things like, “Wow, this muskrat isn’t small, no…it’s big!” in the L2 to just give more input. After that base detail has been established, you can play with the degree. For example: is it big, or VERY big? Is it VERY big, or is it GIGANTIC??? (Gestures galore!) This can be a fun way to up the ante and introduce students to similar words in a natural context.
After size, I usually ask what color the object is. It is helpful to have some sort of colored poster, like this number poster from Teacher’s Discovery, to quickly establish meaning for the colors. After the class chooses the color (or you defer to Professor #2 to make the call), it can be fun to compare this to objects in the class. Is it red like a Coca Cola bottle, or is it red like Jackson’s sweater? All the while, gesture to the imaginary object in the space you established earlier. Tell students to look at it, and repeat what it is. “Wow class, look here. We have a gigantic, red vacuum cleaner in our classroom. Hello up there! My name is Herr Fisher! How are you?” HAVE FUN. HAVE FUN!
After size and color have been established, compared, and wondered over, ask if the object is happy, or sad, establishing meaning through gestures or writing on the board in L1 and L2. With both options, I usually go back to the object to play with that a bit… “Hey! How are you doing? Badly? Oh no!! Don’t cry…it’ll be okay!”
For the first attempt, having these three class-decided details may be enough. Make sure you ask some questions along the way as a memory refresher for you and your students (“Wait…is our vacuum red or blue? Oh yeah! Thanks, y’all. It’s red! Wow!”), and don’t be afraid of playing with the wonderment of creating something together. This also can buy your artists some time to finish up their drawing.
You can do this as part of a written exit ticket, or asking the class as a whole: ask why the object feels the way it does. It helps to contextualize the emotion with details that the class has established. For example: “Why is this gigantic, blue muskrat so sad??” This can help focus the problem that students generate. Have them create the problem in L1 so their creativity can run wild! If it is written, you can tactfully combine ideas for the next class (or see if there is a dominant theme you could follow), and if you decide as a class, you’ll have to be prepared to do this live, gently turning down ideas that are too insane/violent/whatever.
I like to wait on the reveal of the character until the next class meeting, but whenever you do it, make sure it is done with a drum roll and some celebration of the artists for their contribution to the class’ history!
What do I do with it now that we’ve finished?
So you’ve created a character, and somebody (maybe you, maybe some students) drew it up! What’s next you ask? The possibilities are endless!
The obvious first step is to reveal the artwork to students. Now, because you’re working so heavily in the imagination during the creation of the character, you’re going to have as many imaginings of the character as there are students in your class. I like to preempt any negativity by saying, “Now, we’re going to show our appreciation to our classmates for creating this artwork for us! How much positivity and love can we give them?” (You may still have to address students privately who think they “could have done it better,” or publicly if the class is being unkind. Just prepare a set statement like, “Soandso took a great risk by volunteering to create something for us, so we will only honor their bravery and artistic choices!”)
After revealing the artwork and having the class show appreciation for the artist(s), talk through the character again in the L2. Maybe some features are easier to see than imagine all together – the large image is a great visual scaffold for you to talk about many more aspects of the character’s life. Maybe it has especially expressive eyes, the artist gave it a shock of crazy hair, or it’s interacting with its environment in an interesting way! Talk about that in the L2, conveying wonderment with your voice to show appreciation to the artists.
It is easy to segue from describing the character to a Write and Discuss, where you write up a description of the character with the class. At this point, you’ve repeated the language of the character description a lot, so students may be able to contribute to the paragraph that you write up on the board with ease and enthusiasm! A nice Quick Quiz after writing the description and rereading it can make the whole thing feel like a very academic experience – even if it was insanely fun!
If you feel like you want to try your hand at storytelling, you can use the problem generated at the end of the OWI process to turn into a very simple story. For example, the aforementioned vacuum cleaner was sad because he didn’t know where his parents were. Easy peasy! Mike Peto suggests a sequence of story creation that goes along these lines: 1. Describe the character again, where they are, and who they are with (usually a friend of a similar character species) 2. Describe their problem and the character’s reaction to it 3. Attempt to solve the problem a first time, and fail 4. Resolve the story by either solving the problem, failing, or failing and rethinking the problem
This can generate a quick story that can then be used for more literacy! And the language will naturally repeat, so student will get lots of CI in many restated contexts.
Beyond the Basics
Usually after a first class character, you can extend the time you use to create the class character, as well as the breadth of the questions you ask about the character. I got many of these ideas from Ben Slavic and Mike Peto. Consider asking about the following traits:
Kind or Mean
Intelligent or Dumb
Rich or Poor (gets old quick… Gucci belt Gucci belt Gucci belt #seventhgraders)
Brave or Scared/Timid
Optimistic or Pessimistic
Hardworking or Lazy
Honest or Dishonest
If you find some of these not-so-inspiring, try different traits! This keeps it fresh and can also help start discussions about these values.
Also consider asking the following, which can be hilarious and so fun:
Character’s name
Likes and dislikes
Age
Job that they have
A superpower they have
Pro Tips!
You don’t need to have a certain personality to do this! I am a zany person, but you do not need to be loud and extroverted like me to make this (or any “TCI” strategy) work. I have seen teachers regarding their imaginative creations with calm, professorial wonder, where I’m hopping around, crawling on the ground, etc. Try this strategy again and again until you develop your own relationship to it – don’t feel the need to BE any one teacher until you’ve experimented and found what works best for you.
Don’t let it run wild, part one! Kids are extremely creative, but it’s easy for things to get out of hand if you allow students to interject constantly with “Does it have seven legs?” “Is it wearing a tophat?” “Does it speak with an Italian accent?” You, as the teacher, need to make clear that creating with large groups of people can be very difficult because everyone is creative in different ways, so YOU will be the one asking the questions and will only accept answers to those questions. And when you have to cut it off, you will for the sake of actually getting something done and created. This can feel creatively disappointing, but we sometimes have to accept our ideas not getting used, and maybe they will be used next time!
Don’t let it run wild, part two! Kids like inappropriate stuff. When you are creating something in a more open-ended way with students, they will attempt to push the boundaries and say things that will make their classmates laugh. If you get a sense that there is a secretive in-joke laugh going around because of a suggestion, just nip it in the bud by lightly turning down the suggestion and giving a meaningful glance to the students suggesting it.
Sometimes you just have to make the choices! Students will likely feel very strongly about this activity, as it is quite unlike the rest of their classes and assignments. Sometimes you just have to make the call for students (often with the help of Professor #2), and accept that not all students will be satisfied. (“No one even wanted that one!”) Understand that these are your loudest voices and don’t necessarily represent your whole class. Let them know that a decision just had to be made, and that we can all accept our feelings of disappointment and hope that our ideas get chosen next time. (Sometimes students will strike deals with each other about a detail, saying that they’ll save something for next time…hilarious. And quite cooperative!)
Offer choices! Sometimes, asking questions such as “What color is it?” can lead to seemingly hours-long discussions that never get anywhere. Especially early on as students are acquiring these terms, just offer 2-3 choices – one that is kind of logical, one that is a little more out there. “Is the apple red like normal, or BLUE??” Students will usually have some sort of response as long as you show them what each word means, and you can decide if it will be normal-seeming or…not. (Most of the time, asking the class, “Is this a normal ____?” leads to an emphatic “NO!”)
Make it quick! As I said above, lingering on an open-ended question can just feel like an endless L1 slog of pain and misery. Keep the conversation moving: offer choices, allow for a short moment of lively debate, and then make a decision (relying on your Professor #2, when necessary). This can be a very fun activity – don’t let it, uh, fester.
End it if you have to! Some groups are not used to their teachers offering them such fun choices, and can get overstimulated very quickly. We (people who teach with CI) have all had a class who just couldn’t even. In-fighting, debates that got personal, no consensus building, etc. If that is happening to your class and it is starting to feel a little out of control and not so fun for you, tell the class you have all you need for today, and shift gears to something like a Dictation or a Quick Quiz. It has to be something quiet to signify, “hey, this didn’t work so well this time.” Reuse whatever language you were able to come up with as a class, and maybe add a detail or two yourself as the teacher, clearly establishing meaning and making sure your artists are with you.
If it fails, try again! Sometimes, we try a new strategy, and the first go-around feels quite…train wreck-y. Students don’t get it, you feel unsure, you question your abilities to teach “this way,” it doesn’t seem like it did anything for your classes, etc. We can have any number of thoughts go through our heads as we try something new, and this is absolutely normal. You’re learning something new and those muscles aren’t conditioned yet for maximum performance! I encourage you to try the strategy again, and as SOON as possible. Get back on the horse! That way you can implement the lessons you learned the hard way RIGHT AWAY and leave class with a sense of accomplishment, not a sense of defeat, embarrassment, or bitterness. End on the best note possible – practice again and again!
What if I want to learn more?
Check out the Bite-Sized Book of One Word Images by Ben Slavic and Tina Hargaden – this is an excellent resource that I have drawn a lot of my inspiration from. Ben Slavic is credited with creating the OWI, and his work with Tina in this book is very illuminating when it comes to how using images inspires our students’ imaginations and gets them so focused on creation that they effortlessly acquire the language used along the way.
Sarah Breckley has this video that shows her trying an OWI for the first time, with real kids!! It is very brave of her to show a first attempt – and can give you some inspiration as you learn for yourself.
Here’s Brett Chonko seamlessly working from an OWI to a Write and Discuss – what a pro! This can show you how these two strategies interact and lock together seamlessly to provide some awesome CI to your students.
There are many more videos of teachers doing OWIs on YouTube – search “One Word Image” for a treasure trove of different teaching styles!
What do you think? Do you feel ready to create a One Word Image (OWI)? Comment below and send me any questions you might have!
Recently, I went to a workshop with Lynn Johnston, who is an absolute rock star and will be PNCFL’s representative for ACTFL Teacher of the Year this November in Washington, DC. I have seen her present multiple times at WAFLT and WAFLT-COFLT conferences, and so appreciate her creativity and energy. I feel like her students’ brains must be bursting with L2 at the end of class – she has fabulous systems in place to make sure kids are getting tons of input every single day. She is also a reading rock star, and really turned me on to doing WAY more reading with my students.
One thing I have been thinking about a lot is how Lynn uses sentence frames to give students opportunities to express themselves, while also modeling higher level language use. In CI World (disclaimer: not a real place slash no one owns “CI”), teachers are often discouraged from “forcing” output – that is, pushing students to output beyond whatever mental representation they have acquired. This makes sense: you can’t wring water out of a dry sponge. But we also know that outputting can be motivating to learners (especially secondary learners), and that it may provide opportunities for their interlocutor (here, usually the teacher) to provide even more input as they follow up on whatever the learner said.
So, maybe we can provide sentence frames with most of the language filled in, and students can use those to express themselves at higher levels than they would be ready to produce on their own. This can give the teacher a brief break from providing all the input, while also modeling correct language usage.
I saw someone say once that even if students are working on super complex/”advanced” grammar and topics, if they are filling in a blank, they are only functioning at a Novice level – just words! With this in mind, if I’m working with Novices, I can provide them the structure to use their Novice-level words and phrases skills to build simple sentences. We each provide about 50% to get them successfully functioning at 100% Novice High, and we can do this early! Then we can push them towards Intermediate-Low (strings of sentences with supporting details) by modeling how to do that, too.
Ultimately, you get out what you put in. If we consciously feed our students a healthy diet of comprehensible language steps above their level, they will eventually (truly eventually – we’re playing the long game) be able to work at that level independently – because they have had repeated opportunities to see what that level looks like. If we’re only speaking to them in short, choppy sentences, or just short phrases, or via vocabulary lists, then…that’s what we’re going to get back. (“Hey Jimmy, how’s it going?” “Pencil…teacher…desk…Sit down please…”)
So! I’m going to try to give my students comprehensible, useful sentence starters/frames that match our topics. I can use them for quick turn and talks, as support for whole-class interactions, or even as exit ticket assessments. Again – I will be providing the grammar/vocab that pushes them up the proficiency scale, and they are filling in with information personal to them. I will have to support that with helpful vocab and input, too, and it will lead to some satisfying student language use in class.
I’ve been doing a training recently to assign performance levels to L2 writing, and I’ve learned that one of the indicators that a student has moved from Novice-High (simple sentences) to Intermediate-Low (strings of sentences) is the inclusion of supporting details, usually in the form of prepositional or verbal phrases. So maybe if we’ve been talking about food, I can model for my students the addition of details that move it towards Intermediate-Low writing/speaking. Take the simple sentence “I like to eat pizza,” for example. If it were in a composition with other similar sentences like “I play videogames. I rarely shower.” it would be rated at Novice High. But with some prepositional phrases, it can look like this:
With this image, I enter the Great Internet “Pineapple on Pizza” Debate. (For the record, I think it is a nice sweet counterpoint to the saltiness of the pizza, so I like it.)
Again, not life-changing in terms of wild L2 complexity, but by adding on any of these details, you’re moving out of Novice and into the Intermediate range. If we, as teachers, can model a variety of ways to add detail like this to our sentences (either through using these sentence frames as conversation pieces during class, or during Write and Discuss), we will push our students to use them more, as well. And all we would have to do is put up a sentence frame like “I like to eat _____ with _____” or “I like to eat _____ at _______” and students can fill in to their heart’s content!
The jump from Intermediate-Low to Intermediate-Mid is marked by increased use of “Complex Components,” which are dependent or subordinated clauses. Think clauses like, “When I was younger…” or “I like people who are…” or “I shop in stores that…” Those conjunctions build complexity by linking together clauses, and this is what really makes a student’s writing/speaking flow. Upper-level students could definitely benefit from getting sentence frames like these, especially when applied to AP/IB themes or topics!
This year, I am going to try to use more sentence frames so that students can “get practice” speaking the language and feeling successful. (Even though I know that this does not necessarily contribute to their acquisition of the language in the most efficient way, as I’m taking a bit of time away from providing more compelling input, we serve many masters in school jobs. This might help students feel more like they’re “doing something” in class beyond just trying to understand, and might head off possible administrator comments about a class being too “teacher-centered” or that the students never “actually speak the language.”)
But I can start small! Early in level 1: My name is _______. Then: I like ______. Do you like _______? Then: I eat a lot of __________. I can leave these frames posted for a certain amount of time, so students can refer to them and secretly get a bit of input if they look at them. Maybe I can put them in a pocket chart, or dedicate a section of wall to them. I want to commit also to changing them out regularly, so we don’t get to April and I’m like…uhh…Why is “Me llamo…” still cheerfully posted? (Last year, I was super gung-ho for rejoinders, but sadly only managed to post like…5 different ones. Oops. Growth area!)
This use of sentence frames for structured student output will also (hopefully) remind me to create related Writing Checklists for our class Write and Discuss work that will help us incorporate more strong writing moves into our shared writing. I’ll start small with conjunctions like “and” and “but,” and work my way up to including storytelling elements like “First…then…finally…”, nice transition words like “Nevertheless,” and those subordinating conjunctions that help build “Complex Components”: that, who, which, when, if, etc.
Here are some example sentence frames, linked to their performance indicator and a theme you might find in AP or IB.
Can you think of sentence frames that you could incorporate into your units or daily lessons that will push your students towards the next proficiency level? (Oof, there were prepositional phrases and two subordinated clauses in that one sentence! You get Intermediate-Mid, Benjamin.) Comment below with your thoughts and wonderings!
I have used Write and Discuss ever since I began teaching with CCLT strategies, but it was my experience with it at Comprehensible Cascadia last week in Portland that finally brought it all together for me. This is an ESSENTIAL strategy for classes centered on providing engaging CI, as it makes concrete the beautiful aural experience that students have just had with the language. If the Create phase of the lesson is playing a jazz ensemble piece with your students (structured with some improv), the Write and Discuss is putting that composition on sheet music so you can enjoy those moments and that exciting language again and again.
Why should you do it? To show students the written form of the language they’re able to understand aurally, and introduce how to be a strong writer in the L2 by modeling writing moves that push students towards higher levels of proficiency. Plus, the texts you create can be used for literacy activities and extension in the future!
When do I use Write and Discuss?
Use Write and Discuss after having any sort of language experience with your students, what we might call the Create or “Guided Oral Input” phase of the lesson. These Create experiences could be Card Talk, Calendar Talk, co-creating a story using an OWI or Invisibles, Scripted Stories a la TPRS, Picture Talk, Movie Talk, Special Person Interviews – whatever provides rich, compelling aural input in the L2 to learners. Move from the Create phase to a Review phase (any sort of activity that orally reviews the information learned/discovered/created in the Create phase of your lesson), and then to Write and Discuss.
How do I do it? – Logistics
There are a couple different ways to do this, but they have the same underlying principles. You can 1) write directly up on the whiteboard, 2) write by hand on your doc cam, or 3) use a keyboard (maybe a wireless one!) to type up the information into a word processing document. With any of these formats, you’ll want to save the texts you create somehow because they can become the basis for great literacy work the next day, the next week, or even much later in the year. If you write by hand on the board, take a picture of the completed W+D at the end of class so you have it for later. If you have a hand-written version or a pic of your board, you can type it up, or use Voice Typing in Google Docs to dictate it into a document. (Click “Tools” and then “Voice Typing”! LIFE-CHANGING – make sure you change the document language in the “File” tab as well to ensure maximum awesomeness / self-editing.) Some teachers also assign a student job of typing up what you are hand writing, to save you time and to give a special job to a fast processor.
Once the W+D is in digital form, you can share it with students in a format that allows them to “review” (aka just reread) it whenever they like. I usually create a class Google Slide that has all of the texts we have created as a class over the year, one on each slide, and I share a link to it on our learning management system. Whatever works for you and your students!
How do I do it? – Procedure
The first time I do it, I say (in L1 or L2) that we are going to write a summary text about our class conversation/experience. Also, something to the effect of “Please help me, my memory is terrible!” (Not a Teacher Lie for me…)
I find it helpful to begin every Write and Discuss by writing a good starter word in the L2 (e.g. “Today…” or “There is…” or “Once upon a time…”), and then saying it expectantly while slowly panning out across the class. This says “hey, this is the first word, keep it going!”
Give students a bit of nonverbal encouragement to help finish the sentence, especially at first. Students might be silent for a long while, but then you might get one who says some stuff in the L1. That’s okay – see if giving them an encouraging smile pushes them to try some L2. Or! You’ll get a random string of L2 words from a student. CELEBRATE! This is a chance for students to tentatively try some L2 production in a low-stakes setting. If a student tries to finish your sentence with literally anything, love on them!!
…And then take the language they provide and formulate a (probably more correct) sentence. Say the sentence slowly and thoughtfully – this may cause more students to shout out more details that you can use to enhance the sentence. For German at least, this may trigger some fun adjective endings or some subordinated clauses – fantastic! The students are aware of the language you’re using (because it came up in class and they’re able to provide it now), so you’re just reformulating it in a more natural, flowing way. This will serve as good input that will result in good output – in the future!
Ride the wave of the details you can elicit to make the sentence fuller until you reach a good stopping point. To use Card Talk as an example, this might be repeating the information you learned about a student until students have filled in all the details. (“Ben plays soccer…oh! On a team. Ben plays soccer on a team…is it a school team?” etc etc) At the beginning, you don’t want to go all Thomas Mann (#DegreeInGermanLit) and have a 3-page sentence, but you can safely integrate all familiar language into a nice-sounding sentence that flows naturally. This is the Discuss part of Write and Discuss – if you just take what students say initially and write it right away, you might get shorter, choppier material like, “Ben plays soccer. He plays soccer on a school team. He likes it a lot.” Why not something more like “Ben plays soccer on a school team, and he likes it a lot.” This conveys the same information, but flows more like the language we would want our students to eventually produce. If you have established all this info with those shorter sentences during the Create phase, students will get to enjoy the natural melody of your language as they polish up what they’ve heard with you. Make a nicely flowing sentence, then write it up! Boom! (You might have an opportunity to show students language/conventions that are hard to hear…very fun/natural time to make comparisons between languages or marvel at the majesty of Umlauts.)
After every few sentences, pause to reread the sentences you have already created to the class. More input! And they can appreciate the fruit of their brain labors.
Keep going – discuss, and then write! You don’t want to go too long on this, because it can certainly lose its luster after a while. Some teachers choose to set certain limits: they only write for 6 minutes, or they write until one of their board spaces is filled, or they only write until they have like 5-6 solid sentences. Try not to let the energy die as you get some more good input in, and then choose a stopping point and be satisfied with that.
After the text is completed, many teachers have their students copy the Write and Discuss into their own class notebooks. Do not have them do this while the text is being created – they will be distracted from the conversation if they are simultaneously attempting to hand copy information in the L2, whose writing conventions may need their undivided attention (especially at first). This copying time can give the teacher a break, too! And a notebook full of Write and Discuss can show families and other school community members all the text that your students are able to read and comprehend – what a lovely PR piece…
What do I do with it now that we’ve finished?
What’s fabulous about Write and Discuss is that you’ve just created a level-appropriate text for students that captures the energy of what class was about that day. It makes concrete what was previously a mostly oral/aural experience.
“House Pets,” an award-winning text by the Comprehensible Cascadia 2019 German Track (made comprehensible by my lovely orange Mr. Sketch marker)
The first thing I tend to do is reread the text aloud, so students can hear their creation in all its flowing glory. Then, I tell students that they are going to read the text to me, but in the L1. I go along pointing word by word, in the L2 word order, to make sure that students really understand word meanings, and also to illustrate specific characteristics of the written L2. (German word order, y’all…so funky. So fresh!) I stop to clarify any words/constructs that trip up students, marking the text in a different color to support more comprehension, and then reread to allow students to try it more confidently.
I also allow students to notice things about the L2 after they have seen it written. Some recent noticings have been “Oh hey, these two sounds are very similar! Can you re-pronounce them for us?” or “Oh wow, German capitalizes all nouns!” Let students take the lead and you will get lots of neat grammar noticings…without having to shove grammar down their throats. Win!
After this re-establishment of meaning, there are so. many. things (!) that you can do with the text. You can have students illustrate the text, you can give a Quick Quiz, you can dramatize it with a bit of Reader’s Theater – again, it’s a level-appropriate text that students co-created! The sky is the limit!
One thing to keep in mind is that this text you’ve created can serve as a base text that you can enhance during your planning. Maybe it’s the lowest level of an Embedded Reading that you flesh out to build in more transitions or written language conventions. Maybe you have some thematic vocab that your department wants you to target, and you find ways to slip it in to the text. Maybe you rewrite the text from a different perspective, or have students do that to get more input in different forms! (E.g. taking a story written in the third person, and rewriting it from a character’s perspective. With this, you could include more information about how the character is feeling, or what they are thinking!) This text you’ve created with your class can really be the jumping off point for any language or content goals you have for your classes.
Pro Tips!
Keep it going! Like I said above, short, choppy sentences don’t sound great. (My early Write and Discusses were guilty of this awkwardness…character descriptions would read like “There was an elf. He was short. He was mean. He was blue. He was 12 years old.” Ugh.) Why not make the L2 flow more naturally with some transition words? In the lower levels, it might just be suggesting words like “and” or “but” to keep the expression of ideas going. (It might literally just be inserting a comma that provokes students to add more life to a sentence.) For higher levels, you might use constructs like “On the one hand… On the other hand…” or “Nonetheless…” Again, don’t get all classic-German-literature with the sentence length, but allow sentences to be more natural, longer, and more connected.
Let students drive it! Early on, I tended to just use Write and Discuss to essentially circle information into text form, and I was truly leading the charge on what was written, where, and how. Now, I see it as more of an opportunity for students to try out some L2 and have you be like “AW YEAHHHH” while writing their awesome ideas on the board. Let awkward silence reign – with enough calm slowness in the Create phase, they’ll definitely have language in their heads to play with during the Write phase. (During Cascadia this year, some students – in their first week of German! – were putting the verb at the end in subordinate clauses. German swoooooon!)
Use your boards as a scaffold! Chances are, you will have L2 words or images on your board that supported your conversation during the Create phase. Use these during W+D to help remind you and the class what might get included in the summary. You can indicate an image or word when writing stalls out to inspire students, or just erase information that has already been “covered” by the writing.
Don’t forget dialogue! I often forget to include dialogue when using Write and Discuss, which is a bummer! Dialogue can be a great place to get reps on stuff in the first and second persons (third person often reigns supreme because we’re always talking about someone or something like that). Make sure to ask students “What did Soandso say?” or “What might Soandso be thinking in this moment?” Or maybe even, “What WOULD Soandso say about this?”
Teach some punctuation! While you’re writing, use the L2 words for “comma,” “period,” “quotation marks,” etc. This is easy and natural, and can also help if you are doing a Dictation in the future.
It doesn’t have to be perfect! Whatever text you create might be missing some things you talked about as a class, or the sentences may have come out in a less-than-smoothly-flowing order, despite your best efforts. You, as the teacher, can make pedagogical choices about how to enhance and change the text later, so don’t worry about it being ab.so.lute.ly perfect.
What if I want to learn more?
Many people have written glorious posts about Write and Discuss, and posted videos of them doing it with real students – check these out for more info, and to see if something in how they describe helps it “click” even better!
Mike Peto has an example of doing a Write and Discuss in class here! He also has great posts about what do with W+D after it’s done.
