Student centered class through flipping

With the class time I have gained since switching to the flipped class, I am able to better meet the needs of all of my students. Before the flipped class, I would stand at the front of the class and lecture, then have students practice, then go over work and lecture some more. What I found was that I had three types of students in my class - the "Got It" which was about 30%, the "Almost There" which usually was about 50%, and the "Never going to get it" which was about 20%. 

Each of these groups present their own problems when lecturing to an entire class. The "Got It" kids often get bored and tune out as you try to help the "Almost There" group understand the material. The "Never going to get it" kids then start to feel hopeless because now you have explained a concept multiple times and they still don't understand. So this group will pretend to understand so they don't have to ask questions and put themselves on the spot. I just wasn't able to find a way to meet the needs of all of the students without some students being bored or frustrated. That is why I wanted to try flipped class - I needed to find a way to reach all of my students.

When I flipped my class, I was able to move the majority of the "lecture" to video. This way students could take as long as they needed to take notes. No one missed something because we had moved on and they were afraid to ask to go back or have something repeated. This meant that each student ended up with the same base of knowledge to work from when we started applying the lecture to the classroom activities.

Then, by changing the structure of my class time to allow every student an opportunity to work on assignments in a more self-paced manner over the course of a week, I found that students worked at different paces on different types of assignments. Some students were great readers, but struggled with listening. Others could write with ease, but couldn't put a sentence together in a conversation. So, by making classwork assignments assigned in a weekly time frame, rather than on a day-by-day basis, students were able to allocate their time across all of the activities and amazingly were finishing the week pretty much all in the same place. Students that needed to read a passage five times to gain the comprehension necessary could do so because they only had to do a listening selection one time to get the gist. This structure gave students a bit more freedom with their class time and I really saw an improvement in their comprehension of all of the modes of communication for all of the students. 

When the students could work individually (or in small groups) on tasks, I was able to better monitor students as they worked which enabled me to be able to see errors students make BEFORE they had made the same errors repeatedly. This also allowed me to do mini-lessons on an ongoing basis to address students needs, as well as able to give students the consistent encouragement that they need to be able to have to confidence needed to keep trying. 

Additionally, I have been able to use reading to be able to help students of different abilities all continue to improve. I love being able to work with students as they read and the make the connections with everything we have been learning and continue to make gains not only in their language proficiency but in their self-confidence. 

This year I am working on incorporating more Google Forms to help students get the additional help they need when working on classroom tasks so I can better meet the needs of each and every student. With Google Forms, I am able to give remedial instruction right away to students as they are working on formative classwork which (so far) allows them to more quickly realize and correct mistakes. I have just begun to work with this, but so far the results have been promising. 

Overall the flipped class enables me to focus on the individual students. Although I still struggle to find the time to have the individual conferences I would like to have with students on a quarterly basis, I have found more and more ways to help reach each student at their level and keep them engaged in class and language learning. Best of all, I see way more smiles now than the frustrated sighs I saw when I began teaching. ;)

Individualizing Curriculum

I have been looking for a way to excite my students this year. They have worked through all of the given material, and even in the units that have been fun in the past, many have acted as though it was all a chore. So, I hit upon an idea. Probably a crazy one, but what else is new!

In their Google Voice prompt last week, I asked them all what they wanted to learn. After all, they are approaching the end of Spanish III, and for many of them, it could be the end of their journey learning Spanish. They should get a chance to learn what they had hoped someone would teach them in their Spanish classes.

First let me begin by saying that the first flaw in my plan was thinking that everyone would actually do their weekly phone call. Every week, I hope that they will all do them, but inevitably, there are some that do not. Well, this really hampers my custom curriculum plan. But, if you chose not to participate, you lost you voice to complain about where you end up. I will however choose carefully where I put these kids....I am almost thinking about a group of their own....hmmmm.

Second, although many of the students gave me some great things that they would like to learn, there were those few, you all know them, that told me what they thought I wanted to hear. No way do I believe that I have ten students just dying to spend more time practicing conjugating verbs in all the tenses. I did get some good topics, such as: more real world conversation, insults and pickup lines, food and culture, sports, animals, space, science and technology, travel phrases and art.

So, here is what I have decided to do. I have grouped the students by their interests, and those who did not call, or express a specific interest are grouped together. I am going to do my Spanish Civil War unit, which will encompass the first half of the unit (and some additional movies and movie clips). For the second half of the unit, students will be working in the groups I have put them in based on their interests. I will expect them to sit together and work together on the readings, vocab, etc that I assign. I will expect each group to come up with a vocabulary list that they will be tested on (approximately 40-50 words). Additionally, they will use these themes in their conflict projects that I assign at the end of this unit. They will get to determine how that will happen.  But basically I will be looking for a cultural connection of what they have learned. So, for example, they can do two sports teams. They can give the background for each team and explain who would win if they met. They could also do food from two countries, and do an Iron Chef type battle of which food is better. (Of course they would have to explain each).

I am hopeful that this will help engage them in this crazy time of Spring and soften the unit of the Spanish Civil War. I also hope this will be a good lead in to the final exam where I let them do their own cultural presentations. I will probably have to tweak that assignment as well.....more to come.

In other news, I am working on the finishing touches for my CCFLT presentation in two weeks, and I am really excited to be presenting at AATSP in San Antonio in July. I am hoping that I will be chosen to speak at ACTFL in Orlando in November...fingers crossed. If you know of any other conference where they might welcome my flip presentation, let me know. I love networking and meeting all of my fellow WL teachers face-to-face!

Also, for Spanish teachers out there......Have you seen the new Blancanieves movie coming out? It is releasing March 15th and is in Spanish with English subtitles and is rated PG-13. It is a different version of Snow White where she is a bullfighter! Can you say FIELD TRIP??? Check out the preview! There are other trailers at Fandango.

Reading, reading and reading

I can't believe it has been a month since I last wrote. Where is the time going?

In the classroom, I have been very busy. At the end of last semester, I decided that the kids needed a planned focused activity to kick off class. So, I chose readers for the kids to work on at the beginning of every class. Now, to do this, I had to depart from the thematic units because it is pretty hard to find something on the kids level for the Spanish Civil war. So, I chose some level 2 Santillana readers for most of my level 3s and a level 3 reader for my super smarty PreAPs. As I talked about in my last post I also started Google Voice at the beginning of the semester.

So, the students have been a little resistant to the change....imagine that. I require them to read for at least the first 20 minutes of every class (we have 90 minute blocks), with the deadline of the end of the unit for them to finish the book. Now, for the first unit, I decreased some of the workload for my regular III classes because I was unsure about how long the reading would actually take.

I knew that the reading would be doable, but challenging, it was a little more challenging for the students than I had though. Even though I have been using short stories from a variety of sources; the textbook, cultural readers, and the Album book, short stories are so much easier to fake your way through. I told the students that they should keep a running summary of what they were reading, and I put the kids in reading groups. I decided not to give the kids comprehension questions for each chapter until they finished the book. One of my biggest issues with the short stories has always been that the kids read only for the answers to the questions.

So, the nuts and bolts- I have four different readers and about 20 kids in every class. I put the kids in groups of 4 by ability. Every group had a different reader.

First, the groups were too big. Only my super-super smarties worked well together. Every group pretty much had one kid read, one kid look up words, and two followers. No matter how I tried, I could not convince the students not to look up every word that they didn't know and to use context clues instead. However, I also couldn't convince them to keep a running list of words that they looked up, especially when they kept looking up the same words over and over.

Second, since I didn't require them to keep the summaries, almost everyone decided not to do it. Therefore, when they went back to describe characters and answer some more specific comprehension questions, they were stuck searching through the book for answers.

Overall, the reading was a success. The students did learn new vocabulary and stopped freaking out when they hit the vosotros form (the books are Spanish). The students were engaged at the beginning of the class period and got right to work.

For the second book, the one in the unit I just started, I have made some adjustments. I am requiring the running summary. I am also requiring that at the midway point of the book, they do some predictions and write down at least 15 new words that they have learned. I had the kids choose their own partner to work with. I am about a week in to the new unit, and I have to say, all of the kids are engaged in the reading. Many did not choose their partners wisely, but some partnerships that I would have thought would have been a disaster seem to be working. This second book is from the Lola Lago detective series, and I think that they are a little easier. There is definitely more action from the beginning, which is making the students interested in the story a little faster. I am hoping that with these adjustments, this book should go better than the first.