About Me

Rebecca Blouwolff has been a French teacher at Wellesley Middle School in Massachusetts since 1998. Her practice was forever changed by attending a 2014 workshop with Laura Terrill, co-author of ACTFL's The Keys to Planning for Learning. Since then, she has abandoned her previous hobbies in order to rewrite her curriculum, blog about thematic units, participate in #langchat, and provide professional development to colleagues in the Boston area. She holds a B.A. from Brown University and Ed.M. from Harvard's Graduate School of Education, served as a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in France, and is a candidate to become a National Board Certified Teacher.

When the Tail Wags the Dog, or How a Standards-Based Rubric May Make Me a More Effective Teacher
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When the Tail Wags the Dog, or How a Standards-Based Rubric May Make Me a More Effective Teacher

How do we convince students to stretch beyond their comfort zone when writing and speaking in the target language? I believe that teachers have to educate students about proficiency, both on a course level and the task level, so that they are invested in our collective work. Truly, we have a mighty task before us as we […]

Creating Order Out of Chaos: Crafting Appropriate Lessons Within a Thematic Unit
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Creating Order Out of Chaos: Crafting Appropriate Lessons Within a Thematic Unit

What can the biblical creation story teach us about unit and lesson planning? A lot! The Book of Genesis explains that God began with “tohu va’vohu” (sometimes translated from the Hebrew as “unformed and void”) and then differentiated the world into heaven and earth. From there, the Divine went on to separate light from darkness, […]