I know I have been nowhere near as diligent about blogging as I had hoped - busy semester!! - but I recently attended a meeting of my county's World Language Advisory Council and came away with a fabulous idea that I want to implement in my classroom as soon as possible. In the spirit of giving, I would like to share it all with you!
Assigning meaningful homework that is conducive to learning a foreign language has been the Achilles heel of many a World Language teacher - including us new teachers! We're relatively limited to workbook exercises and/or worksheets and maybe the occasional presentation or project. Unfortunately, the vast majority of my high school students pursue one of the following options:
1. Google Translate
2. Copying another student's homework in the hallway before class, during lunch, etc.
3. Filling in some completely rubbish answer that demonstrates no knowledge or skill whatsoever because they know I grade based on completion.
Woe.
And this, my friends, is where The Choice Board comes into play. The credit for this concept goes to one of my colleagues in the Rochester School District, though she says she got the idea from someone else at a conference or professional development session.
Click here to view a sample of a French 1 Choice Board
Here is how it works: I divide up the assignments into three categories - vocabulary, grammar, and culture. The students can pick whatever assignments they would like to do, so long as they create a "tic, tac, toe" formation on their board - which means they do one assignment from each category. When they finish the assignment and show it to me, I stamp the box - but only if it is completed satisfactorily.
Below the choice board, I have a list of "can-do" statements that mirror the new Can-Do statements put forward by ACTFL, as a means to clearly identify a student's level of proficiency in any of the categories (presentational, interpersonal, interpretive). The students, whenever they feel they are ready, must come to me to demonstrate that they are able to do the given task - there are four tasks for vocabulary, four tasks for grammar, two for culture and two tasks that are review from previous units. Again, when they demonstrate the task, I stamp the box. At the end of the unit, they turn in their choice boards to me and I assign the points based on how many items they have completed. You can determine whatever sort of grading system works best for you.
Since the due date isn't until the very end of the unit, some teachers brought up the concern that students would procrastinate and then wind up swamped with French or Spanish class homework, to which my response was, well - too bad. Effective time management is a skill that students absolutely need to learn - usually all it takes is one bad experience, and the student won't make that procrastination mistake again (we hope). Likewise, my colleague mentioned that if a student loses his or her choice board, he or she must re-do the activities, even if they had previously gotten them stamped for completion.
Creating the choice board itself was much less time consuming than I had initially thought it would be. Ideally, assessing student work via this method would take just as much time as checking in a worksheet and going over the answers in class, so no time is lost there. In fact, there may be time gained, as not all students will turn in their assignments on the same day - which means I can put more time towards in-class practice and providing my kids with the repetitions and comprehensible input they need to acquire the language!
If you have any questions or comments about what homework strategies work best in your classroom, leave a comment below!
Monday, December 9, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Month One
We're in the fourth week of school now; nearly a month done and things are going extremely well. I cannot even begin to explain how much easier it is to start the school year in September than it is to try and come into the classroom in February after four teachers and many months of discord. Cue a giant sigh of relief.
On the TPRS/CI front, things are progressing nicely. I'm still so new at these techniques and have so much to learn, but as they say - even a bad day of TPRS is better than a good day of teaching grammar style. It is so true.
My French 2s are the primary recipients of my TPRS techniques, but French 3 is progressing more and more into it this week and French 1 will get there in short order. I have three sections of French 2, and only one each of 1 and 3, and right now I can say confidently that my French 2s can already outproduce my 3s. It's really amazing - for the past week we've been working on a story that I adapted and translated from Martina Bex's website, called Les filles ne jouent pas au football américain. It highlights the structures jouer à, avoir envie de and the verb + infinitive construction. Their level of comprehension is just incredible - we're still working on refining output (writing and speaking) but it's only week 4 an I am excited to see how they progress throughout the semester and the year.
In French 2 today, we did a Horizontal Conjugation based on a reading that we completed in class yesterday. One student in particular, who has had a lot of difficulty with French in the past, was struggling to conjugate être (to be) with je (I) to say "I am." I pointed out the error to him as I monitored, and asked him what the correct version would be, and he could not tell me. Then I went to back to our stories and rephrased the question, asking instead, "What would you say if I asked you, [Are you sad]?" He was immediately able to answer "I am..." in French, without even thinking about it. Wow! Even he was amazed.
All in all, though there have been a few hiccups and I'm trying to adjust to the learning curve that comes with a new method of teaching, things have been going smashingly well in the first month of school. Let's hope the progress can continue upward!
On the TPRS/CI front, things are progressing nicely. I'm still so new at these techniques and have so much to learn, but as they say - even a bad day of TPRS is better than a good day of teaching grammar style. It is so true.
My French 2s are the primary recipients of my TPRS techniques, but French 3 is progressing more and more into it this week and French 1 will get there in short order. I have three sections of French 2, and only one each of 1 and 3, and right now I can say confidently that my French 2s can already outproduce my 3s. It's really amazing - for the past week we've been working on a story that I adapted and translated from Martina Bex's website, called Les filles ne jouent pas au football américain. It highlights the structures jouer à, avoir envie de and the verb + infinitive construction. Their level of comprehension is just incredible - we're still working on refining output (writing and speaking) but it's only week 4 an I am excited to see how they progress throughout the semester and the year.
In French 2 today, we did a Horizontal Conjugation based on a reading that we completed in class yesterday. One student in particular, who has had a lot of difficulty with French in the past, was struggling to conjugate être (to be) with je (I) to say "I am." I pointed out the error to him as I monitored, and asked him what the correct version would be, and he could not tell me. Then I went to back to our stories and rephrased the question, asking instead, "What would you say if I asked you, [Are you sad]?" He was immediately able to answer "I am..." in French, without even thinking about it. Wow! Even he was amazed.
All in all, though there have been a few hiccups and I'm trying to adjust to the learning curve that comes with a new method of teaching, things have been going smashingly well in the first month of school. Let's hope the progress can continue upward!
Monday, August 19, 2013
new year, new methods
At the time of my last post, I was halfway through my student teaching experience, which transformed into a long-term substitute teaching experience, and I was also being headhunted by another school district in desperate need of a permanent French teacher. Happily, I was offered the job and began teaching there at the end of January and the craziness of the ensuing semester left little time for anything else but planning, planning, planning.
I would like to say that the semester was a smashing success, that the kids were enthusiastic and willing to participate, that they produced comprehensible output, that I stayed in the target language 90% of the time and that my activities were authentic, contextualized, and well-received by an enthusiastic mass of students just waiting to speak French!
Unfortunately, none of that would be true.
While I had great students, I was not the best teacher I could be. I could chalk this up to a variety of factors - the crappy start to the year the kids had (I was the 3rd teacher of that year); the culture established by my predecessors; the lack of time I had to assess the students' ability and prepare accordingly - and they would all be true. But ultimately, the real problem came down to the way I was teaching - it wasn't working.
I left college with a wealth of knowledge about "best practice" and a binder full of resources and what I encountered in the classroom was students who were not motivated, unable to produce and unwilling to participate, and who couldn't retain information from one chapter to the next. They flipped out anytime I spoke French and I couldn't understand it - I was providing input + 1! I was giving them time to "practice" the grammar point I just explained in English! We analyzed, compared and contrasted, made graphic organizers, listened to music - you name it, I tried it, and none of it lasted.
Why? Because "teaching" grammar, analyzing vocabulary and sentence structure, comparing and contrasting, and making graphic organizers - that is not how we acquire language.
Our mothers don't speak to us for the first year of life in exclusively the present tense; she doesn't present us with a list of 30 new vocabulary words, say them once or twice, and expect that to stick. Mom doesn't sit down for a daily grammar lesson and explain the difference between the past tense and the imperfect; future and the conditional, hand us a worksheet and say, "go for it!" No! What do our parents do? They talk to us.
A mother shows a baby a ball, and it goes something like this: "Can you say ball? Ball? Do you see the ball? Do you want the ball? Can you say ball? Look at the ball! Ball! Say 'ball', sweetie! Ball! Give Mommy the ball! Oh, did you give Daddy the ball instead?" And then something miraculous happens: the baby says ball.
Duh, Mademoiselle. In my brain, I knew all of that to be true but making that concept jive with the methods I learned in college seemed impossible. Impossible, that is, until I attended a TPRS workshop in July. 'TPRS' stands for Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling and it's a method of teaching that most closely mimics the way human beings naturally acquire language. You provide students with input that is comprehensible, clear, repetitive, and you don't force them to speak until they're ready to produce. You make it personal and, therefore, interesting. You don't shelter them from grammar - this means using past tense and present tense concurrently - and any explanations of grammar remain short and tell students only what they need to know for clarity.
It's hard to explain all the ins and outs of this method in a single paragraph, but my experience at the workshop was transformative. I spoke full sentences in Chinese, in German, in Spanish - after just a mere hour or two of instruction in each of those languages. After those three days, I can't imagine going back to how I had been teaching, and I'm thankful that I discovered this method now, and not after 15 or 20 years.
It's new. It's scary. It'll take time and practice to get used to, but I think it will be so worth it if I can just stick to my guns. I'll be chronicling the ups and downs of my forays into this new method here on this blog - stay tuned!
I would like to say that the semester was a smashing success, that the kids were enthusiastic and willing to participate, that they produced comprehensible output, that I stayed in the target language 90% of the time and that my activities were authentic, contextualized, and well-received by an enthusiastic mass of students just waiting to speak French!
Unfortunately, none of that would be true.
While I had great students, I was not the best teacher I could be. I could chalk this up to a variety of factors - the crappy start to the year the kids had (I was the 3rd teacher of that year); the culture established by my predecessors; the lack of time I had to assess the students' ability and prepare accordingly - and they would all be true. But ultimately, the real problem came down to the way I was teaching - it wasn't working.
I left college with a wealth of knowledge about "best practice" and a binder full of resources and what I encountered in the classroom was students who were not motivated, unable to produce and unwilling to participate, and who couldn't retain information from one chapter to the next. They flipped out anytime I spoke French and I couldn't understand it - I was providing input + 1! I was giving them time to "practice" the grammar point I just explained in English! We analyzed, compared and contrasted, made graphic organizers, listened to music - you name it, I tried it, and none of it lasted.
Why? Because "teaching" grammar, analyzing vocabulary and sentence structure, comparing and contrasting, and making graphic organizers - that is not how we acquire language.
Our mothers don't speak to us for the first year of life in exclusively the present tense; she doesn't present us with a list of 30 new vocabulary words, say them once or twice, and expect that to stick. Mom doesn't sit down for a daily grammar lesson and explain the difference between the past tense and the imperfect; future and the conditional, hand us a worksheet and say, "go for it!" No! What do our parents do? They talk to us.
A mother shows a baby a ball, and it goes something like this: "Can you say ball? Ball? Do you see the ball? Do you want the ball? Can you say ball? Look at the ball! Ball! Say 'ball', sweetie! Ball! Give Mommy the ball! Oh, did you give Daddy the ball instead?" And then something miraculous happens: the baby says ball.
Duh, Mademoiselle. In my brain, I knew all of that to be true but making that concept jive with the methods I learned in college seemed impossible. Impossible, that is, until I attended a TPRS workshop in July. 'TPRS' stands for Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling and it's a method of teaching that most closely mimics the way human beings naturally acquire language. You provide students with input that is comprehensible, clear, repetitive, and you don't force them to speak until they're ready to produce. You make it personal and, therefore, interesting. You don't shelter them from grammar - this means using past tense and present tense concurrently - and any explanations of grammar remain short and tell students only what they need to know for clarity.
It's hard to explain all the ins and outs of this method in a single paragraph, but my experience at the workshop was transformative. I spoke full sentences in Chinese, in German, in Spanish - after just a mere hour or two of instruction in each of those languages. After those three days, I can't imagine going back to how I had been teaching, and I'm thankful that I discovered this method now, and not after 15 or 20 years.
It's new. It's scary. It'll take time and practice to get used to, but I think it will be so worth it if I can just stick to my guns. I'll be chronicling the ups and downs of my forays into this new method here on this blog - stay tuned!
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