The only thing certain is change

Note: This blog has always been for my own reflection. I needed to get all of this out, but will understand if you don't want to read it. 

 I feel as though I have been struggling through the wilderness of my career. After 12 years at Elizabeth High School in Colorado, I have moved on. As I look back on it now, I should have done it sooner. I would not trade my time there for anything, but as I reflect, I now see things more clearly and hope others can relate. If my reflection resonates, please let me know.

1. The year before I left I was angry, actually ANGRY. Although I was one of the more senior staff members, it was made clear that I wasn't ever going to be considered for a leadership role. I had written curriculum, maintained the department standards as there was turnover and we dwindled to two staff members, and always volunteered to help with anything and everything. (Well, not the teacher vs. student volleyball game...I am NOT athletic). However, I FINALLY realized that nothing I did was going to move me to the leadership table. I could not even be named Department Chair. All I wanted was for my title to reflect the work that I had done and was still doing. 

2. My anger was my fault. I did not get into teaching for recognition. I knew what the school and district I was teaching in was like from the beginning. I knew that sometimes my mouth gets me into trouble (anyone who knows me can attest). It is a small district, and opportunities for advancement as a teacher were few and far between.  I was able to ask questions and give feedback and my principal had my back. I know that these are things that not everyone is lucky enough to have. If I felt unappreciated by the school or district, all I had to do was look at my students and parents and I would quickly see how much I was valued. I was looking in the wrong place for validation.

3. The longer you stay the harder it is to leave. Truer words have never been spoken. This is especially true in a small community where you can teach ALL the brothers and sisters. I had taught my two oldest children and got to hand them their diploma. Leaving is HARD. However, I think I had reached the point where I was looking for more from my career and my district wasn't able to provide it. I should have realized that sooner. 

So in the end we moved from Colorado in January of 2019. As it turned out, I was able to teach my students remotely for the remainder of the school year (which has come in handy now!). I left not for higher pursuits, but because my husband got a new job in Atlanta. We were happy because we wanted to be able to be closer to our older children who were at Auburn University, my brother in South Carolina and my parents in Florida. It is a move that has been good for everyone....bet you can't guess who has had the hardest time???

People, transitioning to a new school is hard! I spent the majority of the year feeling like a new teacher again. I moved from a district that handed me a book and said good luck to a district that has a curriculum map and common assessments. It has been a bit of a culture shock. I work in a department of 5 and my coworkers are all talented teachers. Just as I felt like I was hitting my stride, we shut everything down. 

Now I have decided to go back to what works for me. I am going back to the flip and I have plans of using it to require mastery (but of course, COVID again) but those plans will have to wait for another year. 

I am teaching Spanish 1, Spanish 1 Honors, and Spanish 2. I am recommitting to using the flip to help my students learn at a pace more comfortable for them and being able to better challenge my advanced students. 

2020 - The Year of Change. Let's do this. 

Thematic Units

One of the things I have often struggled with when working on thematic units is how to make them build upon one another. Too often, I feel as though the class really gets one theme and then all is abandoned as we move on to the next one. This has a variety of impacts, but the largest one is that students perceive that they know longer need the knowledge and vocabulary that they have acquired as we move to new material.

One of my goals for my Spanish two class this year was to try to improve the flow between units while still covering the necessary material. I love the flipped elements of my class and being able to know that the majority of the "why?" is covered before students come to class. I have needed to improve on the activities that go on during class time. Although I still have plans to implement PBL, it has not happened yet and my class activities and practice have become stale and aren't as interesting to the students as they once were. And, as we all know, when students don't find the material presented interesting, they lose the interest in the class and it goes back to something they have to "check off" their list.

In my Spanish 2 classes, I have revised the thematic units and it seems to be working. I have also found a class schedule that is working more efficiently and helping change things up often enough to keep students engaged. Here is what I have done this semester:

Review unit - Self and Family

Each year I begin with a review unit. This gives me the opportunity to asses the students as a group and begin to assess them individually. We use a familiar topic - self and family. I include activities in each of the communication areas - listening, reading, speaking, writing and a little bit of culture.

Can do statements for this unit include
I can describe myself and my family (orally and written).
I can tell someone what my family and I like to do.
I can ask someone about their family.

Grammar concepts reviewed/practiced
Present tense
Word order
Agreement

Culture
Appropriate addresses (formal v informal)

Assessments
Who am I writing
My family presentational
Speed dating - describing myself and family
Reading - Piratas by Mira Canion - Orally in class and in small groups

Unit 1 - Where I live

Can do statements for this unit include:
I can talk about where I live.
I can describe my house.
I can ask questions about someone's home.
I can compare my home with someone else's

Grammar concepts introduced/reviewed/practiced
Comparisons
Present tense (focus on irregulars and stem changers)
Word order
More complex sentences using cuando

Culture
Spain webquest
Euro v dollar - conversion
Comparing home types in US and Spain - House Hunters International
Comparing home listings in US and Spain - Internet search

Assessments
House plan creation and written description
Selling my house presentation
Comparing my house to yours - conversation
Listening to house descriptions and drawing floor plan
Reading in small groups (aloud) - Mi propio auto, Problemas en paraiso, Fiesta fatal

Unit 2 - My neighborhood and how to get around

Can do statements for this unit include:
I can describe places and services in my neighborhood.
I can give directions to someplace in my neighborhood using a map.
I can listen to directions to get to a destination on a map.
I can compare my neighborhood to someone else's

Grammar concepts introduced/reviewed/practiced
Informal commands
Present tense
Asking questions
Comparisons

Culture
How to move between tourist attractions in Spain on map
When to use formal v informal commands
Structure of towns - plaza, church

Assessments
Using student created neighborhoods students- give and follow directions, make comparisons between neighborhoods.
Reading in small groups (aloud and silently) with comprehension checks

Unit 3 - What I do in my neighborhood/free time

(This is a unit covered basically in Sp 1, but my students are struggling with vocabulary. Therefore I went back to this theme using more advanced vocabulary and high frequency verbs)

Can do statements include:
I can talk about what I like to do in my free time
I can have a conversation with my peers about what I did last weekend
I can talk about places I like to go
I can write about a favorite event in my past

Grammar concepts introduced/reviewed practiced
Difference between preterite and imperfect
Beginning use of past tenses
Asking questions

Culture
Cuba webquest
Music and leisure activities in Cuba
Cuba and US relations

Assessments
Conversation with peers about free time activities
Movie/ book review written
Reading in small groups (aloud and silently) with comprehension checks

Final exam
Listening, reading, writing, culture

Class schedule
In my school we have 90 minute blocks, and structuring them for success is an ever changing puzzle. This year, my students work best with a short warm up activity to practice unit vocab and concepts, then 20-30 minutes of reading in small groups. Then, they work on some written practice as well as conversation and listening practice in class. As always, grammar is done for homework by watching videos and students taking notes.

Student do work independently for the majority of class. I am facilitating learning and helping the struggling students individually. I have many more students on IEPs this year and it has made class more challenging to help those students with accommodations and keep the rest of class moving at a good pace.

Reading is still my favorite way to differentiate in class and I love when I get students grouped correctly so that they can work with their peers and continue their learning process. Giving students that opportunity is what makes the class more engaging to them. I try to give as much choice as possible with the assessments as well so students can personalize their learning. In every u to students must find personalized vocabulary which they must use successfully in assessments. This allows me to keep the required vocabulary lists short and the students to be able to invest in their own learning. It is also a great way for me to get to know my students better through the vocabulary that they choose. I have also expanded my own vocabulary learning the words and ideas that are important to my students.

Out of this world flipping in Mars and other PD

As FlipCon14 draws near, the excitement is building. As I have mentioned before, this is my favorite There is still time to register, and even if you can't make it, virtual attendance is a great option. If you are already registered, plan on attending all the great networking events through the conference. It will give you a great opportunity to meet the "Stars" at FlipCon and learn from the best as well as meet other people beginning to flip. Growing your PLN is a HUGE part of this conference. We all need support and someone to turn to who really "gets"  the flipped class.

I am excited about the opportunity to presenting "Planning for Flipped Class Success" which is geared toward all beginning flippers. This session is Wednesday, June 25th at 8:30 so get your coffee early and join me! We will be discussing getting support, choosing curriculum and teaching students to be successful. Here is the link to the pre-session homework since this session (and the whole conference) is flipped. Additionally I am going to be part of the panel of authors for Flipping 2.0 which will be Tuesday, June 24th at 2:15 here is the pre-session homework. Finally I will be moderating the content area session for World Language which is Tuesday, June 24th at 10:45.

If you have not starting planning your schedule, or if you are looking to register here is the link for FlipCon14. If you are unable to attend, I will post a recap of the sessions that I attend and my thoughts and ideas, so stay tuned!

If you are looking for some other WL PD to keep yourselves busy, how about LangCamp? Click the link to complete the form and be a part of this great sharing ideas. Want all the details? Check out Sra Spanglish's blog.

As far as some other cool innovative educator conferences and PD, Lisa Nielsen has compiled a great list of upcoming conferences for this year. You can see them on her blog post.

If you know of other great WL PD, please comment and add all the pertinent information. I will add as well as I see more come my way!

Flipped out Spanish 3 new approach

This year, I have struggled with my Spanish 3 class. For some reason, this group of students really struggles with the idea that they need to do their own work. They don't want to read, which is always a big part of my curriculum. They certainly don't want to do any kind of homework. So, for the new semester, I am trying a new approach.

Our first activity was based on the letter they had to write on their final exam. I passed them out and gave students the point breakdown that I used and then had them grade a letter. Not surprisingly, the grades that they gave the letters were quote low. We then had a discussion about why that was. Thankfully, most of them caught on to where I was heading and we discussed (not for the first time) about how to be successful in my class.  You MUST do your own work. You MUST review, student and practice for assessments. You MUST begin your unit assessments early to have time to do your best work.

Then, with that reestablished, we got to work.  I put them in ability groups for reading and managed to be able to do this and keep the friends in separate groups as well. (A minor miracle!) Then they got down to reading. I didn't give them any other work for the first week. So I could monitor the reading and they could get through the first chapters and get interested in the story, we ended class by playing scategories, which the students absolutely loved. One of my classes said we should do it every day for their warm up, and a few students were suggesting other categories.

I also came to a curriculum decision. Usually in this unit, I begin teaching the subjunctive, however since these students couldn't even talk to me and tell me about their vacation in the past tense when we did conversation on the first day, I decided another review of the preterite and the imperfect was more appropriate. I was glad to see so many students really taking advantage of this and finally taking the time to watch the video, take notes, and apply their knowledge. I also assigned one of my favorite projects, the skit/song/game. Students are charged with coming up with a skit, song, or game and accompanying practice activity. I decided that I could not do a full court press with them to try to force them to improve their use of the last tenses because they would shut down on me. So a better idea was to have them review and then teach themselves. I believe that being able to use the past tense is a crucial skill for communication, and in can't let them leave my class without being able to communicate in the past. Hopefully if this goes well, we can cover the subjunctive in the next unit.

I am hopeful that this new/different approach will help the students to finally realize that I want to help them, but I can only do so much. If they want to learn, they have to put them time and effort in themselves.

ACTFL 2013 - My reflections on the Friday sessions

I am at ACTFL in Orlando, Florida this weekend, and it has been such a great experience. Not only have I attended some great sessions, but I was able to meet so many of the people I interact with online in person. It feels like meeting a rock star to have the opportunity to talk face-to-face with Joe Dale, Laura Sexton, Garmet Hillman, Pam Benton, just to name a few. If you are not familiar with these people, who ARE World Language rock stars, you should be. Get on twitter, follow their blogs, read the articles that they have written.

Since I have been doing so much socializing, I haven't been able to get all my thoughts together about the sessions as quickly as usual. However, there have been great sessions at ACTFL and I want to share them with everyone.If you are here, please share any other sessions that you went to because it is so hard to choose which sessions to attend and I want to hear about all of them.

So, this first post will cover the sessions that I attended Friday, and a subsequent post will discuss the Saturday sessions.

Google, mural.ly and Google maps

Mural.ly is a virtual cork board tool, which is similar to Glogster, Padlet, and Wallwisher. Mural.ly directly interfaces with Google, so students can login with their Google emails, and can easily incorporate their Google Docs and YouTube videos into their "board". Students can work collaboratively on their board, and teachers receive notification when students make changes or updates to the board.

In the sessions, a suggested use from this tool was for students to create a photo story visual tour of a city or country. It could include an apartment, furnishings, stores, restaurants, food, etc. Students could then present to the class using only the pictures as their guide. Students could then plot the points that they selected on a Google map, which is also a collaborative project. Then, when the students have added their country/city information on Google Maps, you can import the information into Google Earth and go on a virtual tour of all of the places that students investigated.

There was quite a bit of discussion about how students need to be exposed to more geography in our classes since many schools seem to be eliminating this course, and students still need to acquire this valuable information. In an AATSP session this summer, they also discussed using Google Earth in the classroom, but when I tried to do some things with it,  I found it a little persnickety. I also worry about the bandwidth needed to really make a Google Earth tour work. (This is a big concern at my school.) However. I really think that I need to spend some time figuring out Google Earth and finding ways to incorporate it into the classroom effectively. There is too much great information that students can use both geographical and cultural, to let the tech get in the way.

PBL in the TL

I should begin first by saying this session was led by none other than Laura Sexton (@SraSpanglish for all you Twitter people). Here is the link to the live binder from her presentation. She referenced quite a few things from her blog as well, which is here. If you are not following her blog, you should be!

After a quick explanation of PBL (which is well defined at the BIE website.), we dove right into how to create driving questions for a PBL project. Now, the biggest thing about PBL is that you need to have an issue that students are fired  about and an audience. The audience has always been where I have struggled with it. Who is a good audience for what my Spanish students are doing? There were some great suggestions made, which include: parents, other schools in other countries, other schools in our country, historical societies, competitions, ESL classes, and many more.

There is a ton of information intone Live Binder and her blog, which explains everything much better than I can. I am excited to really continue to investigate and plan some of here PBL projects because I do believe that when the language learning has a purpose, the kids will be much more invested in the outcome.

One of the great pieces of knowledge shared that was not totally PBL was Laura's advice to,her students about how to work on listening comprehension. She suggests to her students that when listening to a selection for the first time, they should just listen and let it wash over them. The second time they should write down any words that they knew from the listening, the the third time, use the words they wrote down to help them determine the meaning of he selection. I really like this method, and I am always on the lookout for new ways to help my students increase their listening comprehension.

20% projects for the World Language classroom

20% projects and/orThe Genius hour are a great way to let students incorporate what they are interested in with the target language. Students are given broad strokes for an explanation, they need to use the target language, talk to native speakers and "save the world". Basically students can do any type of project in any format that interests them. The key, much like in PBL is to have contact with native speakers of the target language.

As the presenters were quick to point out sometimes the students try to contact people in the TL but don't receive a message back. This can be disheartening for the kids, but is a possibility they (and teachers) should be prepared for.

Students use blogging for teachers to be able to monitor their progress. The assessment of these blogs seemed to be secondary, it was just a place for students to be writing in the TL about what they are working on. It also gives teachers a place to give students feedback about their progress.

When students present, the class needs to be taking detailed notes and they are required to ask deep, probing questions about the presentation. These need to be directly related to the content. For assessment of these projects, the presenters had students self assess and then had conferences with the students about how they thought they did. Students should be able to justify why they have given themselves the grade that they did. I think students also need to do a reflection piece for this project detailing what worked, what didn't, and what they could do differently in the future.

One of the presenters had their class work on the project throughout the class, and another gave a set period of time. I am going to implement a 20% project next semester and I want to have a specific day allocated for students to work on these projects. Because my school is on an alternating block schedule, I think I would have Fridays dedicated to working on this project. So, that is one 90 minute class every other week. My plan would be for students to present their projects as they completed them, but they must be done sometime around the beginning on April (depending on testing schedules).

The best of SCOLT - The Flipped Foreign Language Classroom

This was, of course, a presentation I could not pass up. I love to see what other flippers are doing, and it was my chance to meet some other flippers that I had been following on Twitter for a while.

This was a great presentation, and a great illustration of how there is no one right way to flip, teachers have to find what works best for themselves and their students. These three great teachers began their flipped journey by doing a book study of "Flip Your Class" by Jon Bergman and Aaron Sams. They met every week and read and discussed chapters and how they could implement the ideas in the World language classroom.

They decided to incorporate the videos that were already out there and to require that their students use Cornell notes There were some great examples of Cornell notes (which I have to admit, I have heard of, but never seen). My favorite part of these notes is that after students write down whatever the content notes are, they are REQUIRED to write a summary of the notes which includes how they can use what they just learned. I think that is a fantastic idea. I think I may have to wait until next year to incorporate that into my classroom.

The best part of the presentation for me was how these teachers worked together to find ways to make the changes that they thought were needed in their classroom to help their students learn. It is so much easier to do something new if you have a great support group. These ladies have co it used to meet to hash out problems, tech issues, and just give each other much needed support. I a excited to have met them and am glad that now we are in each other's PLN. :)

More about the Saturday sessions later.....

If you were at the conference and attended a great session, please add comments and share!