As we kick off another school year, a lot of topics are swirling about in department meetings, district PD, online forums, Twitter, workshops, and more. This organization system or that one, new seating charts or going deskless, standards-based grading or category percentages, and much more. But, as Rihanna tells us, don’t get it twisted. There […]
Anybody else out there have a long commute? Mine really gets to me some days. Fortunately, podcasts keep my brain fed and me from being on the news when somebody ignores the rules of the road. I recommend the latest batch of podcasts I stumbled across called The Masters of Scale. Reed Hoffman, one of […]
Often when I’m just up to my eyeballs in to-do lists, I’m reminded of the catchy phrase in the Scrubs theme song that simply goes “I’m no Superman.” When I first started chatting weekly on #langchat back in 2014, I was elated to find a community of like-minded teachers who taught the same way I […]
I love what I do. I love Spanish, and teaching, and I love watching students “get it”. I also love presenting, and how I have a platform to share my journey with other teachers, but y’all, teacher burnout is a real thing. Last year was a crazy year for me, and after my SCOLT presentation, […]
We know that teachers make a lot of decisions, many of them split-second and with a lot to consider. In all of that question answering, however, I think we as teachers sometimes forget to do some of the asking. Coupled with that is how hard it can be to prioritize and decide when assessing if […]
This fall, I’m returning to the high school classroom after being away from teaching students for five years. During this time, I made an effort to remain professionally active and connected, and I learned more than I would have if I had been working full-time, thanks to social media, professional organization, podcasts, and conferences. Since […]
It’s important to confess right here at the beginning that I am a firm believer in learning and playing being one and the same—specifically every step along the way from Novice Zero to “survival language” Intermediate Mid-ish. So, the lessons, materials and activities I present and discuss here are firmly rooted in the idea that […]
Did I really just spend June and early July working on a series of performance rubrics (about 20 hours worth of my life) only to throw them all out in late July with a smile on my face? Well, sort of… I’ve been creating rubrics for world languages for a long time. Back in the […]
Seriously. While I love the winter holidays, I will confess that Back to School is really my favorite time of the year. I love the stores full of school supplies—row upon row of pens in varying colors and sizes, bins of notebooks and planners waiting to be filled and paperclips, post-It notes, pushpins, markers, construction […]
This year, I am taking on a big goal, and it is to become more of a language advocate. First, I had to admit that I had not really been a language advocate. In some ways, I thought that I was already doing so. I taught a language, and I believed that if students enjoyed […]
