Blog – Page 12 – Path 2 Proficiency

Grammar and the Airport

Here is the continuing saga of the travel unit…as promised.

Would you like to jump into my classroom experience for a moment? “Sra. Rhodes, I’ve never even been to an airport…how am I supposed to know what happens there?” So….The students have to learn all the different places in the airport, the people they need to talk to, and also the process of going through security, finding their gate, and eventually going through customs and immigration on the other side of their pretend international journy…but they’ve never been to an airport. Ever.

This one took some thought the first time because I can show them all the target language videos in the world taking place parts of an airport, or one of those comedies where a family runs hysterically through the airport, but short of some lovely Spanish-speaking person wearing a Go-Pro narrating their experience through an airport for me, we’re not really getting the essence of the airport experience. (Please email me if you find the Spanish Go-Pro airport video…that is some #authres I seriously need in my life.) My solution? My crazy life. I tell them a story about my trip last summer to Canada using the slides from my word wall. My parents live in Canada, which they know, so that lends credibility to the story, despite it being completely made up. They somehow believe that if I tell them a story about me that it is absolutely true. I’m not sure why.

As I tell them the process of how I drove to the airport, parked my car, talked to the ticket agent, checked my bags, received my boarding pass, waited in line, passed through security, etc. I show them a picture that represents that part of the story. I put each picture up on the board as I talk, but all over the board, not in order. The story ends when I leave the airport, having arrived in my destination city. Not too complicated, but it did require listening and connecting images with my words. As their first practice, I have them try to order the pictures as a whole class based on what I said. There is lots of “No, no…she said she bought a coffee BEFORE she got on the plane” and “first you take off, then you land” and other types of corrections. They’re correcting each other in English, but here as in the Art Quest example, if they CAN correct each other, it means they understood. Students who did not understand are typically quiet.

Here’s the amazing part, and the real key for me: I told them a story in the past tense. Every sentence was “I walked. I talked. I waited.” They understood my story. I haven’t taught them the preterit tense at all yet, but not one kid freaked out. They got the meaning from the words and the visuals and the setup which was “Mi viaje el verano pasado…” (My trip last summer…) So, when I saw that they were understanding my words and getting the meaning, I pushed it one step further and wrote out a story for them to read.

This time we went to Bogota. No idea why. I numbered each sentence and had them draw out the story like a comic strip, 1 sentence per box, including every detail somehow. Once they had it drawn, which shows me their comprehension of the overall text, we started to do an analysis in the target language! I had them underline every word they thought to be a verb based on the structure of the sentence, and my brave volunteers went and circled those verbs on the board.

Then they wrote all the verbs in a column, and at that point, I switched into English to ask them what they saw. They told me that each verb ended in “e with an accent” or “i with an accent”. Then I asked them which infinitive verb they thought each one came from. They got them all right because of the context and the stems. Because I was intentional about including –AR, -ER, and –IR verbs in my story, they were able to see which types of verbs had which endings.

I asked them to talk in their group about what they had figured out and to come up with a rule about verbs. They came up with “in the past tense, when the subject is ‘yo’, -AR verbs end in “e with an accent”, and –ER and –IR verbs end in ‘i with an accent”. I may have jumped up and down… We also looked at a few examples in the story that were weird or problematic and addressed those changes as well.

While I know that it doesn’t cover every form, or most irregulars, or really weird irregulars, it does give them a baseline to understand the tense. The process took less than 10 minutes, and they got it from listening, reading and then thinking about it. How cool is that?! You may have noticed they were just writing their notes on a blank paper. At that point I had not made a cute guided notes page because I wasn’t sure this was going to actually work. I have attached the pretty version of the notes sheet for you lovely people, that I made AFTER the activity worked so well. I hope it works for you as well. Have fun!

En el aeropuerto Read-Draw

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Image Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_(Bogotá)

On their own path this week (01/30/16)

I keep getting the same question: how do you make time to read all these blogs? Well, here is the secret I don’t read all of them all the time. Thanks to great apps like Feedbin however, I can check in on these blogs when I have a free moment: in the TSA line at the airport, the car-pick up line at my daughter’s school, the sixty minutes of peace and quiet when everyone else sleeping in on Sunday morning. Once again, I found a couple of interesting posts that I thought were worth sharing:

Proficiency Descriptors Not Numbers – Students React To The Change

For the past couple of week’s I’ve shared Japanese teacher’s Colleen Hayes posts on formative assessment. While it’s great to follow along with her and read and I couldn’t have been more excited when she brought her students’ voices out this week. As educators we like sometimes forget that every action we take makes the learners in our classes feel something. Reading these student responses to giving up numeric grades is just priceless and should remind all of us of the real purpose of assessment in a world language classroom: performance & feedback. Read Colleen’s post –>
Are We Designing Extrovert-Focused World Language Classrooms?

Good blog posts make you think. Great blog posts make you think for multiple days. High school French teacher Amy Conrad’s, title of course caught my attention. I don’t have a reaction to it yet, because I’m still thinking. It’s worth a read as Amy reminds us to make considerations for all kinds of learners. Her post also reminded of a similar conundrum about teachers and I wonder if there is another post in her about introvert and extrovert teacher needs. Read Amy’s post –>
Why I bristle when I hear the term “legacy”

It was the week of provocative blog post titles. And if great blog posts make you think, the best kind of blog posts make you react. High school french teacher Stacy Finelli’s post did just that. I don’t agree with everything you wrote (that’s the beauty of blogging), but her emotional response to some of the labeling of teachers resonated with me and you can read reaction to her post in the comment section. It’s an important reminder, that every teacher is on their own journey. Instead of labeling, we should figure out a way to help each other. Read Stacy’s post –>
Quick tech to start your year: One-Click Timer

Uberbloger, Sara-Elizabeth started a nice series of quick technology tips on her Musicuentos blog and this week’s timer extension is a good one. Go read it now. Download it. I did and can’t wait to use it. It will be fantastic for when you give students five minutes to complete a task. Instead of giving them five, students ignoring the task for three and you extending it by two, which turns out to be really five more minutes for a total of ten minutes, …. This tool will keep you and your students on task (or at least on time). Read Sara-Elizabeth’ post –>

Take a Trip with Us!

You know that unit in your curriculum that should be so amazing and interesting and chock full of culture, but ends up being kind of surface and overwhelming? Well, for me, that’s the travel unit at the end of Level 2. They have to revisit how to pack for a trip, and read weather forecasts, and learn to make reservations, navigate an airport for international travel, travel by bus and train, tour around a foreign place, look at stuff, do stuff, eat stuff, possibly get hurt, lost, or sick, make it back to the original airport on time, AND THEN come home and tell someone else what HAPPENED on their trip!! Are you exhausted? I certainly am every time I teach all that. Not only does it have a ton of content, it basically begs for days of explicit grammar instruction to get the HAPPENED part (fight that temptation, my friends, my next post will talk about what I figured out on that topic…). That being said, I wanted to show you how I reworked my travel unit this semester, since I was amazed at what my kids produced, and give you the slides if you wanted to try it with your own! Let’s take a trip!

So as a bit of background, this project came about as I was working to figure out how to teach communication through culture, and to make the travel unit relevant and connected to my kids in some way. Not many of them will travel abroad, so I wanted to find a way to show them as many people and places as possible within the time constraints of 1 unit. I chose to take us on someone else’s journey and make a cinematic and political connection. I decided that Ernesto Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries journey would be a fun way to explore South America, and make some cultural connections. Within that process, we learned the vocabulary and language functions based on the geography, weather, clothing, and activities that are actually necessary to travel in each country. We were able to compare then and now, and naturally integrate the movement between preterit and present tense as required by our local curriculum at this level. As we moved from Argentina to Chile to Peru and finally to Venezuela, we reinforced the content by investigating the geography, weather, and special features of each new place. As you can see, in this moment, Chile was our travel location.

The way I set it up was that the students had gone to Chile over the summer and had just gotten back their photo books from Smilebox. To everyone’s horror, none of their information had been saved on pictures, except for the first and last lines. All of the actual information about Chile was completely erased. They were then required to investigate each picture, knowing that it was taken somewhere in Chile, and then “rewrite” and narrate their travel journals. Their narrative had to include the specific place they visited, what they did in each place, and one additional detail. The detail could be clothing required, weather in the place, food they ate, or any other type of information they wanted to include.

This was a pretty daunting project for some of my level 2 students, not just because it was requiring them to work for the information about the images, but also because it was going to require a significant amount of writing and speaking. I posted the PowerPoint with the slides to my class website so they could download and work with it. For the students who didn’t have technology at home, I printed the slides in handouts, and told them to number them in the order they wanted, and I would rearrange the presentation for them. I also gave them the choice of recording their narrations directly onto the PowerPoint, recording separately, or presenting their slides live in front of the class.

I broke up the project into pieces so they wouldn’t completely freak out. First, they had to show me their research, which was the information they gathered about the specific places. Then they had to write their sentences about each slide. I gave them sentence starters, reviewed the structures we had learned in the unit, and showed them the minimal amount of language they could use to meet the requirement. That amount of scaffolding kept almost every student away from Google Translate. I told them they were free to personalize their presentation by looking up additional words with Word Reference that we had not learned, but they were not allowed to run whole sentences through any translator.

They were able to work in pairs to help each other with the research and I required them to have their partner check their rough draft sentences before they turned them in to me. I find it’s good for students to peer-edit because they can correct the majority of their issues in a low-stress situation. Turning in work to me for editing is often much more stressful! After their rough drafts were peer-edited and corrected by me, they were left to finalize their script, practice, and record. On presentation day, the students were to have already shared their presentations with me via Google Drive or were to have their cards ready to speak from. We played the presentations of the students who pre-recorded, and watched the presentations from the students who opted to present in class. After that, I assessed their Presentational Speaking and Writing on a rubric.

I wish I could properly express to you how happy I was with the results of this project. I won’t say I cried, but I did clap in an excessively excited fashion after each presentation and go in the hall just to make sure that no one was there who I could drag in to watch my kids present. The pictures you see in this post are a few of the slides they had to work with, and a picture of the presentation cards done by one of the kids who presented live. I was so happy with how it worked! I hope you have enough information here to give this a shot, and have success. I have included below the PowerPoint itself so you can play with it how you want to. Have fun!

Mis vacaciones en Chile

On their own path this week (01/23/16)

Reading teachers’ reflections on what works or doesn’t work in their classrooms is not only a favorite hobby of mine, but also an opportunity for professional growth. Last Saturday, I decided to start sharing some of my favorite posts each week. While a majority of the blogs I read are written by world language educators, I’ll also share some other general education posts as I come across them in my readings.

“How Am I Doing? I Know How!” Improving Formative Feedback

Japanese Teacher Colleen Lee-Hayes continues her series of posts that focus on the power of involving students in the feedback loop. She shares several ideas that will make a big a difference in helping students move from compliant students to engaged learners and will help her “ensure that students don’t wait for me to tell them how they are doing – but rather that they will know and be able to articulate for themselves.” Read Colleen’s post –>
Let AuthRes Take the Lead ~ Step 1

It’s highly unlikely that anyone missed this post, but I’m including this latest gem from the Creative Language Class. Kara is starting a series on the role of authentic resources, which seems to be one of the biggest roadblocks for many teachers in moving from textbook coverage to thematic unit design. I can’t even count the number of times I get asked “Where do I find the resources for this?” In this post, Kara is proposing the turn the game on its head and use an authentic resource to design the unit instead of spending countless hours searching the web trying to find an authentic resource to support your unit. Read Kara’s post –>
Dream Team

Finding a new blogger is always exciting. Finding a new world language teacher blogger is even more exciting. Finding a world language teacher blogger who I admire for their courage in trying to go down that Path to Proficiency has me jumping for joy. So, of course I was excited then to see a new blog from Spanish high school teacher Jaime Basham right here on P2P. Her first post serves as a good reminder that we can do this teaching thing alone. You have to surround yourself with an incredible team. Read Jaime’s post –>
Can we produce innovative students with teachers chained to a script?

This newspaper response written by University of Georgia professor Peter Smagorinsky is not as easy to read and reminded me of the realities of teachers. While passionate about teacher effectiveness and student learning, I sometimes wonder: Are we asking the impossible of teachers, given the current system” ” Read Peter’s post –>
Why Don’t We Differentiate Professional Development?

I’ll try not to provide an answer to that question here, because that would be a blog post to itself. Anyone that knows me, also knows how interested I am in changing the way professional development is happening. In this Edutopia post, Pauline Zdonek is asking the tough question: “Isn’t it about time that we practice what we preach?” Read Pauline’s post –>

Make it a great week and keep posting and sharing. I can’t wait to see what next week’s blogging will bring us.

Dream Team

If there is one thing I would want a new(er) teacher to take away from my blog, and especially this post, it would be to create your Dream Team. Do you remember the 1992 Olympics with the Dream Team? This was such a big deal for the United States. The team was comprised of some of the best basketball players; Michael Jordan, Carl Malone, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Scottie Pippen, John Stockton, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, David Robinson, and Charles Barkley. Sports Illustrated coined “Dream Team” and our lives were forever changed. As a teacher, you need to create your “Dream Team.” I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful mentor, a colleague across the hall, and that teacher’s student teacher. We began referring to ourselves as the “P.O.A.” or “Pocket of Awesome.” Our “P.O.A.” was a unique system of collaboration, encouragement and betterment. There were days when we would talk about things that didn’t seem relevant at the time, but later revealed themselves to be useful in everyday life or the classroom. Our group of collaboration over time, turned into more of a familial dynamic that fostered the growth needed to be a reflective practitioner. Since the induction of our “P.O.A.” my beloved colleagues have moved on to new and exciting career changes, but because our bond was so strong, we still meet and collaborate with each other through technology. I think our “Dream Team” is successful because of the following pieces at play:

We are humble. Our group accepts that we are not perfect, nor will we ever be. We are trying to be a better person and teacher than yesterday. Somedays that goal is accomplished and others, not even close. We start with a fresh slate each and every day. We are human and are doing our very best.
We always have our sense of humor about us. We are hilarious. Most of our hilarity is directly related to cat videos*, but for the most part we take the time to enjoy the little things. As a teacher (or human in general) you can’t take yourself too seriously. Life is too short for that.
We genuinely love and encourage one another. There is no room for jealousy, big egos or pettiness. Ain’t got time for that. Rather, we have created a sisterhood and bond that is so strong that we genuinely want what is best for our friend. I find that many groups fail because they lack this attribute. Without it, your “Dream Team” will be doomed. Pettiness and jealousy are gangrenous and need to be cut out immediately. Each member brings something unique to the table and highlighting those strengths only make your group for the better.
We talk about non teachery things. See cat videos* above. Other topics up for grabs are movies, television, books, music, kids who farted in class that day, recipes, board games, etc. We are teachers, not dead. We have to have fun things happening in our everyday lives too.
We troubleshoot. Let me paint you a picture, as a teacher you invest so much time into your lesson plans and you have the perfect one for Monday. You’re excited. These kids don’t know it yet, but they’re about to have a whole lot of awesomeness come their way and their world will be rocked! You give your lesson and you’re teaching your heart out. You feel like you are on top of the world! You look into your students’ eyes and see that they have glazed over. Too. Much. Awesomeness. At the end, you’re bummed. Your lesson plan expectation versus reality did not match and you are at a loss for where it all started to unravel. Your “Dream Team” can help you flush out what went wrong, when it started to unravel and how you can be better next time. You’ll enter into a “no judgement” zone and they will help guide you back from the dark side.

All and all, as a teacher, find your “Dream Team.” It has helped me with my resiliency and improved my quality of teaching and life. No one can do it alone, it takes a team to be successful and to help you be your best.

Huge shout out to Brandee, Amber, Liisaan, Renee, Chelsea, and Deneen for being part of my “Dream Team.” To the original “P.O.A.,” you are my rock!

*Cat videos can be substituted with other cute furry animal videos.

On their own path this week (01/16/2016)

It’s not a secret that reading blogs is one of my favorite hobbies and many mornings my Feedbin (RSS Reader) is the first thing I open when getting online. Over the years, I have been able to create the ultimate curated newspaper for myself through hundreds of subscriptions to a wide variety of blogs. Everything from politics, food, TV, education, silly cat videos, Apple products and so much more. My favorite folder however are the world language blogs. Every day someone is keeping me on my toes by sharing ideas, a resource, or just their musings on why life as a language teacher has been hard, rewarding or crazy on that particular day. It’s my hope to start this series of posts where I can share some of my favorite posts from the previous week.

What if I’m just fed up with my students’ attitudes about language?

Spanish high school teacher Carrie Toth summarizes her very own path to proficiency sharing results from her classroom and the many sometimes painful steps it took. Her post is such an inspiration for others who might be afraid to start on this journey, she keeps repeating one important message that is so important to hear: it takes time! Ready Carrie’s post –>
Template Shopping: Pick Yourself a Winnter

French middle school teacher Rebecca Blouwolff critiques curriculum templates from three world language educators that have shaped my own thinking so much, so it’s nice to have a comparison all in one place. Rebecca provides links to curriculum templates from Laura Terrill, Greg Duncan, and Helena Curtain. Anyone thinking about curriculum planning this summer should definitely bookmark this link. Read Rebecca’s post –>
My Evolving Gradebook: From Numbers to Descriptors…

It’s so exciting to see teachers who are on the proficiency journey beginning to realize the fallacy of grades. Japanese teacher Colleen Lee-Hayes, one of my favorite “brave” bloggers, gives her attempt at moving away from grades and towards true feedback. After all that’s the real purpose of assessment. And while she reflects and says: “it started with removing all numbers from my rubrics. Big step. Removing the ‘calculation’ from the task” she also shows us how to satisfy the need for traditional grades that still exists in school. Read Colleen’s post –>
Final IPA Performance Data, round 2

Another interesting assessment post this week came from North Carolina this week. Laura Sexton, Spanish at an early college high school, shared the results from her final IPA’s from last semester. Seeing her students’ growth represented visually is just inspiring for me as a reader, but I can only imagine what it means for her as a teacher and as she closes her post what it means for her students: “My students grew significantly in one semester, and I think it’s because they knew where they were headed.” Read Laura’s post –>
Blogs to Watch 2016

One of the first world language teacher blogs I’ve ever read is the the now widely-read Musicuentos blog from world language educator Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell, so it’s nice to see her share her passion for blogging. I won’t lie, but I was kind of excited to see her include Path2Proficiency on her list of blogs to watch for in 2016. Thank you! We’ll take that as a challenge for the coming year. Read Sara-Elizabeth’ post –>

It’s my goal to share with you these kind of summaries of interesting blog posts each week. What did you read this week that made you pause, reflect and perhaps even do something different with your students?

Taking ownership of their proficiency path

Coming back to school after the winter break was a fulfilling time for me this year! We revisited the proficiency guidelines, and students reflected on their progress on the path to proficiency infographic. What more could they do now that they couldn’t in October or even in August? As I teach students in Spanish 3, 4 and AP, they already knew a lot, but what they kept telling me was they felt more equipped to put their knowledge into getting their message across. I had students talk about how they needed a task to help them reach Intermediate High, so they could talk about events that happened outside of their daily lives.

“I feel like I can’t reach Intermediate High if I don’t have tasks that push me to that level.”

To that end, we took a couple of days to brainstorm ideas on what they would want to study, and out of that, my students created their own task plan. They had three options for a graphic organizer they could use–a bubble map, a pyramid map, and a preparation plan–in order to process their task plan from the overarching objective to the specific task they want to do. Their focus was the specific proficiency target they selected using the AAPPL proficiency rubrics.
Here’s the process I took my students through:

The first thing they did was determine the objective they wanted to accomplish. This was the generic “I can…” statement, which would determine how they would proceed.
Next, I had them determine what the outcome would be. Would they have a conversation or write a paper or read and discuss something? Their outcome, then, became the way they would demonstrate what they’d worked on.
After they determined the outcome, they designed their task that matched their outcome and objective. How were they specifically going to accomplish what they set out to accomplish?
They searched resources that would give them the information they needed to accomplish their task.
After creating the plan and revising it based on conferencing with me, each group devised a timeline on what they were going to do each day to make progress on their project. They’re blogging about their progress and what they’ve learned at each step in this process.

I’m excited for my students’ action plans and task presentations at the end of this cycle. What I’m most excited about, though, is how they’ve been excited about learning more and improving their proficiency levels. I’m circulating through the groups and giving feedback, but I’m impressed at how they’re rising to this challenge.

It’s not About You – Or Is It?

Most of you will agree that the Planning piece of any lesson is absolutely key to the lesson’s success and, therefore, to helping students increase their proficiency. Most will agree, as well, that it is probably the most difficult piece for any number of reasons.

I was recently asked to observe a dual language immersion team as they planned together for the coming grading period. The meeting began, and I breathed a sigh of relief. These folks really had it together. The team leader brought copies of relevant parts of the curriculum, and a quick skim read told me that it was solidly couched in state and national standards. A glance at the lesson plan form showed there was a place to write the performance targets for each activity. A more careful look showed me that it was beautifully set up for backward design planning. Out to the side was space to write how one language could reinforce the work that was being done in the other. It was ideal for the needs of a dual language immersion program. What a great team! I was going to sit back and listen and hopefully learn a little more about collaboration in the immersion classroom. What a cushy job!

Then, as is often the case, the ideal came face to face with the day-to-day. The team pulled out their teacher editions and several supplementary resources they had brought to the meeting. Each team member was assigned several time slots in the coming grading period, and each one began to list activities for the time slot to which they were assigned. Little attention was given to the standards being addressed, ways to allow students to perform tasks and receive feedback, student interest, choice, and goal setting, or any of the other elements that are so important to quality planning. Teachers listed activities for their time slots, along with the materials and supplies needed to execute them, and passed their lists to the team leader who apparently intended to make copies of everything that was being generated and distribute them to the team members. Team members were clearly uncomfortable and irritated by the need to complete their task. And then, before I could blink, the planning session was over, and the team members were on the way back to their classrooms.

As soon as I could, I cornered the principal and put my questions to her as delicately as I could and still find out where the disconnect was between that beautifully designed lesson plan form and the work that really was getting done. Did the team understand that they needed to plan with the targeted standard firmly in mind? Had they been trained on how to do backward design lesson planning? Did they know they needed evidence to show whether or not students had reached the lesson targets? Had they heard the research about student choice and found out their students’ interests? Did they understand how to integrate two disciplines such that one supported the other? And to every question I asked, the answer was, “Yes.”

My head was spinning. I knew this program was this district’s pride and joy. They had hired the best, were giving them the best possible training, along with the best resources and the best schedule with the most planning time. This team had everything going for them, and yet things had settled back into the mediocre middle. I decided to ask the only question I had left.

“So Ms. ________________, why don’t we see all the training they’ve used in their team planning?”

She sighed and said, “The team members really don’t like each other. They can hardly stand to be in the same room with one another, so they do the bare minimum, and that’s it.”

Hardly knowing what to say, I pulled out a convenient cliché. “But it’s not about them; it’s about the kids. They have to realize that and do their jobs.”

“That’s why you’re here.” So much for my cushy job.

It wasn’t long before I began to regret my flip comment, “It’s not about them…” More importantly, I began to question the veracity of the statement. Was it really not about them? Could the team be expected to put all differences aside on behalf of the students and function as the well-oiled machine I had imagined them to be? Additional reflection brought to mind other situations with which I was familiar. One district provides a significant amount of time for secondary teachers to form professional learning communities. Yet at least one school had had to suspend its PLC’s because the teachers simply could not get along. In another school a teacher who desperately needed the help of the more experienced members of the team found himself isolated from those who could best help him because the team could not get along with each other. Yes, it was about the team, and until attention was given to team relationships, it would never be about the students.

One thing I knew—I was expected to go back to that school armed with something that had some potential of addressing the reason I was there, some possibility of creating an atmosphere for collaboration. I jotted down some “givens” about teachers.

The vast majority of teachers love their students, are passionate about their subject matter, and are happy with their choice to spend their careers in the teaching profession.

This love and passion cause teachers to want to do the very best possible job, and they work endless hours to bring the very best they have to the classroom.

The desire to be successful and the huge investment of time and effort creates in teachers a strong sense of ownership regarding what they do on a daily basis.

The instructional decisions teachers make are rooted in deeply-held beliefs about what is best for their students. Teachers may not even know where these beliefs came from or have a rationale to explain them, but the beliefs lie deep within them, and they are not easily changed.

That was it! The ability of this team to function collaboratively and thereby do deeper, more enhanced planning that takes into account every student’s need to acquire content and increase language proficiency would depend on their ability to find out what parts of their beliefs systems they shared and capitalize on them. Team members likely knew where their beliefs differed from the rest of the team, and this would explain why they planned side by side rather than together and for as short an amount of time as possible. But did they know what they had in common, what deeply-held beliefs about children and about educational practice provided common ground where they could meet to collaborate on their students’ behalf.

One thing was abundantly clear – the group was in for some fierce conversations. I put together a few guiding questions to help them on their way.

What are the non-negotiables? What are the things that are required of us by the school or the district? We can just accept those, as they are out of our control. (I knew from their schedules that the team was expected to spend a certain amount of time planning together, and I knew they were expected to use the district curriculum and the backward design lesson planning form. I suspected there were expectations regarding grading, as well. That was a significant beginning if they could just agree to accept the non-negotiables and let them serve as the first piece of common ground.)
What do I believe about students?
What do I believe about classroom systems and procedures (handling materials, dividing into groups, turning in work, transitioning to the next learning experience, behavioral expectations and consequence)?
What do I believe about homework?
What do I believe about the integration of one discipline with another?
What do I believe about vocabulary support from discipline to discipline and language to language?

It was a start. I would recommend that, regarding numbers 2-6, each team member answer the questions privately. The team leader would collect the information and study it carefully with the principal before proceeding with any discussion. Then, bit by bit, the team would discuss each of the topics listed and any others they found to be important. Like I said, fierce conversations with the goal of building relationships on common ground.

The bottom line? Teachers are people with beliefs that really matter to them, and they need to be able to contribute to any collaborative situation out of the depths of those beliefs. A team needs to hear each other and develop a common philosophy of work before doing any unit or lesson planning. It’s a part of building relationships, and when teachers are comfortable in their team relationships, they are able to rest in the fact that they have taken care of what is about them so that it can now be about the students.

This year, I will be a …

It’s that time of year, where news and social media will be flooded with articles both for and against setting goals for the new year. If you are like most people you may have set a couple of resolutions yourself for the new year. What was it? Loosing some weight? Becoming more active? Reading more? Spending more time with family? In a few weeks, we have likely all forgotten what we set out to do and returned to our comfort zone. Teaching is very much the same and each school year we start with the best intentions that this will be the year for proficiency, but then by the end of the September your class roster has changed more times than you can count, there is a new assistant principal, you took on that extra club advisory responsibility, and the resources you ordered at the end of last year never made it in. We get a couple of shots of professionalism in the arm in the fall through professional development, attending a conference (it was great to meet so many teachers at ACTFL this year), or participating in the ever popular #langchat. But making changes on a Tuesday in November is hard. Our classrooms are filled with so many (intentional and unintentional) procedures, then you don’t just walk in one day and announce: “Guess what? Starting today I will speak to you in the language 95% of the time.” And is that really what you should be focusing on right now? Setting goals for yourself has to be based on a realistic assessment of your current abilities, both in your personal life as well as your life as a language teacher. If you can’t jog around a block in your neighborhood, then setting a goal to run a marathon in March doesn’t seem like a realistic goal. Certainly the start of the new year, perhaps the start of a new semester and if you are on block schedule a brand new group of students perhaps, allows us to think about setting some new goals for ourselves and our students.

You are not a bad teacher!

Start by admitting that you are not a bad teacher. All the public focus on teacher effectiveness and teacher evaluation has given teaching a bad name. Add to that so many teachers sharing via blogs, twitter, or other means these days, it’s easy to think you are not good enough. Don’t fall into that trap. Say it with me: I’m a good teacher! I’m a good teacher! I’m a good teacher! Yes, every teacher is on their own journey. You are the teacher today, because your experiences have led you to this place. Your experiences as a language learner in high school or college. Your experiences studying abroad if you had the opportunity. Your experiences in college or as student teacher. Your experiences teaching every single day for the past …. years. All of these experiences have made you a TEACHER! A teacher with strengths and a teacher with room for growth. So don’t compare yourself to other teachers, although other teachers can certainly be an inspiration for your own growth, but compare yourself to YOU. Where are you today and where do you want to be by the end of this school year?

TELL me who I am

Finding out what kind of language teacher you are is easier said than done. You could probably show a group of teachers a video of language classroom and every person in that group would have a different opinion on how effective that teacher was. That’s where the TELL Project can come in really handy, because it’s a framework that provides some common language and definition of what an effective language teacher does. If you take one of the TELL self-assessments, you can figure out who you are as a teacher. There are several options. You could take one of the seven domain self-assessments. Perhaps your school has already identified a specific focus for this year and taking the Performance & Feedback domain self-assessment makes most sense for you. Or if you already have an idea of what you are struggling with and would like to improve upon, you could take one of the more strategy-focused Feedback Tool Self-Assessments. It doesn’t matter which one you complete, just remember, you are not supposed to do all of the things that are on the assessment. That is not the goal. You are a good teacher! Remember? When you go to the doctor’s office for your annual physical and do a blood test, they will likely test it for everything too. That doesn’t mean they are hoping to find everything. While you are taking these self-assessments you have to be honest with yourself.

Setting the Right Goal

Once you have completed your self-assessment(s), it’s time to figure out how to set goals. Wait! Don’t go checking all the things that you are not doing now and turn them into a goal. That’s the teacher trap. So many of us are perfectionists and want to do it all; and do it all the right way, right away. This is where realistic goal setting comes in. Remember that marathon reference from earlier? Go back to your self-assessment and pick out several criteria that you think you might want to work as the new year starts. Pick a couple from the areas that you are doing sometimes or most of the times and then pick a couple from the areas that you don’t do yet at all. Are you seeing any logical connections between a couple of the criteria? Ideally you can pick a TELL statement that you are already doing sometimes or most of the time as a goal (so that you will keep doing it and get even better at it) and combine it with something that you aren’t doing yet. This way, you can use something you already know something about to help you grow and learn even more about. Allow your strengths to help you grow. Perhaps you are already “using a variety of strategies (e.g. visuals, concrete objects, hands-on experiences) to make language comprehensible” (LE4c) most of the time, but you realize that you are not “frequently check for understanding in a variety of ways throughout the lesson” (LE4e). Combine the two to make it a realistic goal for yourself. Try to find one or two of these combination goals and make those your goals for the new year. The point here is to actually grow as teacher and improve our practice, not to check off every single criterion on the self-assessment. If you limit your goals to one or two, you chances of actually meeting them will be much higher.

You can be EPIC in 2016

Ok, so now you have set a couple of realistic goals for yourself for the rest of the school year! Before you start planning those first lessons for 2016, let’s go back to the dangers of new year’s resolution again for a moment. There is a reason why so many people stop working on them and often forget about their resolution all together come spring time. In order for you to be successful in meeting your goals and make some true changes in your teacher practice, you will want to become an EPIC teacher. EPIC is a growth plan model developed for the TELL Project. You have already completed parts of it by Envisioning your goals and establishing the focus of your professional goals. Now we just have to work on the other three letters. Let’s start with Planning your route to success. How will you achieve your goals and what resources will you need. Start by identifying journal articles, workshops, webinars, conference sessions, YouTube videos that you might want to us on your growth journey this year. While you are identifying those resources, be sure to set a timeline to Implement your plan. Without a deadline, due date, or even just a check-in milestone, none of this is going to happen. Finish your plan by Collecting evidence of your growth. Will you have a colleague come to observe you multiple times and see your growth? Will you take a video of yourself and complete another self-assessment? Will you ask an administrator or professional learning coach to give you feedback? You will want to identify the type of evidence you want to collect that allows you to demonstrate your growth. Just reading an article or participating in a workshop isn’t enough. Classroom evidence is what you are after, because in following this growth plan will allow you to be EPIC in your classroom in 2016!

… one more thing. One of the reasons companies and communities are successful in helping people reach their fitness or weight-loss goals, is the public sharing of goals. How about joining hundreds of other language teachers and share your goal for 2016 by posting it at www.EPICteachers.org. Just one more way to help yourself to not just make a resolution but actually meeting your professional goals.

Art Quest: Content Through Culture

I’m an artsy person. I love anything related to art, or music, so you’d think that I would be the first one having my kids read and write about every artist in the history of Spanish art. The reality is, however, I teach Novice-Intermediate learners how to use the Spanish language. Don’t get me wrong, I love that. I LOVE that I am the content area where we can color because I can make it an appropriately leveled interpretive reading task. Some days, though, I feel like I just teach colors and numbers to 17 year-olds (32 kids at a time). Since I do not teach AP Spanish Lit, and because I refuse to do a lesson in English to teach them about something cool and cultural, my opportunities to incorporate real culture and art were few and far between. Why I’m writing this though, is that this year I had a breakthrough in my brain about HOW to teach content through culture. I know we’re supposed to do that, but the HOW of it is often not explained as well as we would probably like, right? So, this is what I did, in one small area related to Art, colors and numbers. I hope it helps.

Art Quest

It was the beginning of the year and I needed to teach (wait for it) COLORS AND NUMBERS to my Level 1 kids. They don’t necessarily need colors right off the bat, but the easiest way to describe anything for me is with color and size, and it gives you that easy lead in to showing how adjectives work in the language without lecturing on adjective agreement (which is boring and they don’t remember it anyway). They had a colors sheet with images and Spanish words, and a numbers sheet already, so it wasn’t about teaching the colors or numbers as much as actually using them for something cool.

So anyway, a long time ago I had collected a bunch of art posters and had looked online for famous Hispanic artwork and made it into a slideshow for a rainy day. I had no idea how I was going to use it in the target language, which is why it was just taking up space on my flash drive. Cool cultural art, but I don’t want to lecture them on Picasso because that probably wouldn’t fall under “comprehensible input”, so…?

Then it hit me…Picasso’s beautiful Hands with Flowers has very clear colors, things we can count (flowers, hands, petals, fingers), and gives me a brief moment to show Picasso to my kids!

I made up a story in super simple Spanish (lots of acting out and terrible whiteboard drawing took place at that point) about driving past a park, seeing this sidewalk art show and wanting to buy things, but all I could remember were the images. And then I knelt down and said something like “PLEASE HELP ME!” in Spanish, and flipped the slide.

On my redesigned Hispanic Artwork slides were 4 questions in Spanish: Who is the artist? What is the piece called? What colors do you see? How many ____ are there?” Later on I added “Do you like it? Why/Why not?”as a 5th question.

Let me tell you, they flipped out. “Ms. Rhodes, how are we supposed to know who it is? How should I know what it’s called? I don’t know what the word in the blank means!!!” My response in Spanish was “Calm down. You have technology in your backpack. Search. Good luck!”

What happened next was incredible to me. They started speaking to each other (in English, but it’s what they have in Level 1), saying things like “Well, it’s gotta be someone Spanish and famous, or she wouldn’t pick it, so…” and “There’s flowers and hands, so…” and “Actually, there’s 2 hands, be specific”. “Google it! Google, famous Spanish painting two hands holding flowers.” And then the best thing… “OMG, MS. RHODES!!!! THAT’S IT! IT’S PICASSO!!”

At that point, everybody shared everything they figured out, artist, title, and “flores is probably flowers” and the answers to the other things on the slide. The coolest part? They wanted to do another one! Of course, I just happened to have another one…but this time it has even MORE FLORES!

Now, this is NOT something you can do as a death march through art history. I did 3 slides that day. I did a few the next time they came in, and waited a few days for the ones after that. The point is, it was fun! They were investigating something they never would have looked at on their own, and we were doing it IN SPANISH!!!

I had so much success with that class, that I used the 12 Art Quest slides, printed as 6 to-a-page handouts, as the paired activity another one of my classes worked on while I was doing 1-on-1 Interpersonal Speaking assessments. I don’t have color copying or anything, but they got the general idea and the color obviously showed on their phones when they Googled it.

So, after that Art Quest experience, my classroom became a mini art gallery. I have 4 art posters up in my room, currently, and I decided to make them interactive for my other classes who didn’t do the Art Quest. I took 3×5 cards and wrote a bunch of different questions my novice kids could understand, related to the painting, and put them all around the painting.

When kids space out in my room, which happens sometimes, they start looking at the posters and can’t help but read the questions. Also, I use them as quick warm ups and brain breaks. In Spanish, either in writing or spoken, I say, “Take a post it note to a painting and answer 2 questions of your choice.” I don’t do anything but read their answers later. It’s not evaluative. I’m just interested to see what they can do.

Side note about Post Its: I use them a lot for exit tickets and reflections, and I always have them write their name on the back. I tell them they have to own their words, so if they’re going to express an opinion (positive or negative), they should be bold enough to have their name on it.

Ok, back to art. I realize that this one activity and redecoration of my room is not a huge thing, but I can tell you that it flipped a switch in my brain on how to look at content through culture in a way I never had before…

If you would like to try it, here are the slides I used for the original Art Quest.

Art Quest

I hope you have similar success!