True Confessions

As I often do before I present at a conference, I am sitting in my hotel room and gathering my thoughts. I am here outside of Pittsburgh, at the Flipped Class Conference, and trying to decide what questions I want to try to find the answers to in my own classroom. I feel like I have really been neglecting my personal reflections and really want to take this time to recommit to my original ideas and goals from my first Flipped Class Conference 4 years ago:

• I want my students to increase their fluency in class.
• I want students to WANT to learn not just the language, but more about the people and culture of the world. 
• I want to facilitate my students' learning, not dictate it.
• I want to love my job every day, no matter what other things are going on in my school.

In so many ways, these four things sound so simple, and yet they are often difficult to achieve. I have fallen into the trap of tweaking minimally and not really trying to continually improve my curriculum to adapt to the needs of my students. I work hard for my students, always have, always will. However, I think I need to turn the focus back on their thoughts and ideas. How can I continue to move to the more student centered classroom? How can I help them to love learning and build on their abilities and interests to keep them learning beyond the requirements?

I don't have the answers to these questions.....which is ok. But, I think I haven't been continuing to search for them, which is not ok. 

I am very fortunate to have such a great PLN to turn to for advice and encouragement and so many of them are here with me at this conference. I need to focus not just on the social side of this conference, but try to look at the sessions and speakers through the eyes of the teacher new to flipping trying to find the path that will help students achieve success.

I want to move to more creative assignments, inspired by me, but created by my students. Shall I give more choice boards to show the students their capabilities and help them understand how to express their knowledge on their own? Should I reject all grammar practice and have students instead approach everything from a cultural perspective? Should I model some of my colleagues and find the right way to have online portfolios and true student interaction online?

I sit here tonight full of questions that I have no answers to. It is the search for the answers that helps me see things from my students' eyes and helps me be a better teacher. Join me on this journey.

Essential question projects evaluated

As I described in an earlier blog post, I decided to have my students complete a project based on the Essential Question session presented by the ACTFL teacher of the year Yo Azama. However instead of having the students follow my content, I let them work in groups and choose their own topics. Students found their own readings and listenings based on their chosen topic. They they made presentations to the class in a formal and fun way.

So now that all of the projects are completed and graded, I have had a chance to reflect on what worked and what didn't. Overall, the projects were a great success. The feedback from the students was very positive. Since they had chosen their topics, they were all interested in their material. Many of them listened to extra selections and videos and read more than the required articles to find just the right one that met their needs. Of course I had a few doing the very bare minimum, but overall, they worked harder than I think they ever had, and best of all they were focused on real world target language activities. Additionally, since they had to do presentations as a group, so they were evaluating each other's work as well.

A recurring problem for me is how to keep the kids in the target language when they are working on projects like these. They work together with the content, often do more than required, and are peer editing each others work, but al oat always switch to English when they are talking about the project. This is a problem that I have to fix and is at the top of my list for goals next year.

The overall structure of the project worked well. Each student needed to have a summary of a reading and a listening, as well as a written letter. Their summaries were in Spanish, but I only reared bullet points. As a group, they needed the presentations as well as a vocabulary list of new words and a bibliography. However, I didn't really do anything with this information for the class overall. Next time, I need to find a way to incorporate the vocabulary and other elements into an assignment for the entire class to ensure that they truly learn from each others work. I still had the feeling that many of the students weren't gaining all they could from the presentations.

The factual presentations were all done well. I think I have finally convinced the students that a good Power Point has mostly visuals with a few key words. Although they were nervous they all presented well because they were really familiar with the information. However, the part of the presentation I was most excited about, the fun/interactive presentations were another story. I had hoped that these would be the best part of the project, however, for the majority of the students, they were the worst. The idea was for them to do something fun to involve the entire class in the presentation. Maybe my directions were faulty, but I needed their entire group to participate in giving that presentation as well. Some thought that they didn't have to participate in the presentation. Some thought that if they served a food they discussed in their factual presentation that was good enough.

Next time, I think instead of making them two presentation, I will just make it one. Hopefully that will eliminate some of the confusion. The big reason I made it two was really just to be able to fit the presentations better into the class time, so changing that isn't a really big deal.

One of the most surprising facets of the project was how the groups worked so well together. They were groups that were formed based on their topic choice, not by me or the students themselves. They were some of the most unusual groups with good mixes of high and low students, outgoing and quiet students, and many groups with students that had never worked together before.

A not so happy surprise was how much computer the the students needed to get this project completed. We spent almost two weeks either in the library or with the laptop cart in the classroom. So, if you are tech challenged at your school, this would be really hard to do.

I am excited about continuing to use this project in class. Next year, I will base all of my units on this format, and then lead up to the choice project that we just completed. I am still unsure about using it for a final exam, but the students were all in favor of it being a final. I will have to keep it in mind while working with my students next year.

Flipping my classroom, why??

I wanted to start writing down my experience with the flipped classroom because I am learning so many new things everyday and I wanted to have a place to document what I have done, right and wrong, so that as I go forward I can continue to improve. I also want to share what I have done with others who are thinking about flipping, hopefully this will provide some help/support.

For anyone who finds this who wonders what flipping a classroom is all about, it is basically creating videos of your classroom lectures for students to watch at home and do what is traditionally thought of as homework during classtime.

When I first heard about this, I was intrigued because I knew that I needed to spend more time working on conversation and speaking with my students, but we spent so much time on grammar, I could never give it the attention it deserved. Also, I was giving my lectures using Power Point, and I felt like we wasted so much time waiting for some students to take notes. I had really had enough of "don't change it yet" and "I am still writing it down" and "go back" which of course was a small number of my students, but enough to hold up the rest of the class.

Last year, I also had to teach AP Spanish for the first time, and after going to the training to learn about the test, I realized that our students were in trouble. It wasn't that we hadn't been teaching them enough in AP, or even III, but that they hadn't been doing enough from day 1 in Spanish class.

This training was also eye opening because I realized that there were so many ways that the curriculum needed to improve. There were so many topics that were on the AP exam that we never even really got to in class, and there wasn't enough time to cover all of them during the AP class.

So, as I made my way through last year, I started looking for a new way to do things to optomize my classtime and include all of the topics and concepts that would help my students be able to be more successful on the AP exam if they decided to go that far.

So, at the CCFLT (foreign language) conference in 2010, my favorite German teacher and I attended some sessions together that led us to the idea that we should have thematic units instead of following our text to cover all the topics we knew we needed to get to. As we worked on that, I still searched for more, because being the teacher that loves technology, I knew that there had to be a way to get more done in a way that would appeal to the kids and me.

After much wasted time on the Internet, I stumbled upon the flipped class idea.

I started to think that this might work, an when I discussed the idea, I discovered that my dad, a science teacher, and a Chemistry teacher at my school were also considering the flip.

Luckily, Aaron and Jon, whose website we found, were having a conference last summer not far from home, so my favorite Chem teacher and I made the trek, and I don't think we have looked back yet!