Revealing student feedback

As promised, I began all my classes with a discussion about last semester and how to improve this semester. Sadly many of my students just stared at me when I asked them for feedback, but some of my level 3s had some good thoughts as to what they need to work on. Many of them carefully avoided eye contact as we talked about how copying the beginning practice work of a unit didn't help the, when it came time to apply their knowledge. Many now understand that by doing that, they end up struggling on the benchmark assessments, summative assessments and the final.

However, as testament to our poor start, many said direct object pronouns are confusing, or I still struggle with the past tense, rather than the application of that knowledge. I was hoping to hear....I still really need to work on improving listening skills, or I still struggle expressing myself while speaking. This mindset is something I have to change. There is still too much focus on grammar. I feel like we spend more than 2/3 of each unit working on application of knowledge but with this feedback, there is still too much emphasis on it.

With that in mind, I have created a weekly calendar of our focus for each day. I have tried this before, but it I such a struggle with the alternating block. It is even more of a struggle in the Spring semester with days off, testing, etc. but I am determined to make it work and have enlisted the help of the students. (I know they love to tell me when we get off task.) I have written the weekly schedule on the board - Monday-writing, Tuesday-conversation, Wednesday-Conversation, Thursday-reading, Friday-listening. So the plan is to begin each class with activities with the appropriate focus. Then students will move on to their assigned work, which also includes these activities.

I also am going to do more one-on-one feedback with the students with their homework phone calls and journals. When I grade them, I almost always give comments to the students, but I know the majority of them don't really look at it. So, every week, I am going to have a mini conference with the students about these activities. My plan is to divide the class into groups of 5 or 6 so I can get to everyone once a month. With the 3s phone calls, I am thinking that after our initial feedback session, I am going to email them their audio and have them evaluate their own speaking first, and then we can go over it together.

Hopefully these things will help the students focus more on the communication, and less on the grammatical portion of speaking Spanish.

Listening Training

Sorry I haven't updated in a while, but it is hard to keep up with the family, class, and the blog. I will try to do better going forward.

We are two weeks into Unit 1. The students are finally understanding the process of the class, (although I did have a student ask me yesterday if class was going to be like this every day). Now, students are learning not about the flip, but about working to my expectations. Since I allow students to work at their own pace through the material, they can do activities when it works for them, and as many times as necessary.

Nowhere is this as apparent as the listening activities. Listening is an area where students struggle. It is something I struggle with as a teacher. How do I help the students progress and improve their listening without them getting discouraged?  I have spent much of the last two days explaining to students that they have to "train" to listen. Just like a kid isn't going to become a star football player without practice, they aren't going to become good listeners without practice.

Today students are working on a listening where two girls are describing their daily routines to each other. It is a slightly longer listening, about 2 minutes, and a little faster than what we have done before. So many of the students listened two or three times, threw their hands up, and just wrote whatever on the comprehension worksheet. As I was checking work, many of them were shocked that I wouldn't give them credit unless they went back and tried again.

It just reminds me of why I love the flip. In previous years, we would listen two, maybe three times, and their either got it or they didn't. I never really got a good handle on who understood what, and some were lost forever. Now, they are able to take a listening, listen to it in little chunks, discuss it with their classmates, and then move on. Obviously listening to conversations fifteen words at a time isn't ideal, but baby steps must come before they can run!

Teaching Listening Follow Up

So in my earlier post Is it possible to teach listening? I talked about some problems I was having with my students listening, and more importantly my teaching of listening.

So, I went back to the two listenings and gave the students the scripts from the listenings to follow along with while we listened. As we did each one, when we got to the questions, I encouraged the students to feel free to change their answer if they felt it was now incorrect. The first listening was very short, about a minute and a half. There were really no unknown words in the listening. In the listening the narrator talked about how fast paced life was now and how she just longed for the slow life. This was the listening that had one of the answers as "we should return to prehistoric times." After a gave the students the answers, we went over them, and I was amazed that there were still about 40% that still had that answer chosen. (Now that is in my regular 3 classes. In my PreAP, they all had it correct.) When I talked to them about it, I even had some students try to argue with me and pointed in the script to where is said that. They totally missed the "no" in the sentence. Out of the three questions in this listening, most had 2 out of 3 correct.

In the second listening, which is about 2 and a half minutes, a guy is looking for something talking to a friend and she is commenting on how dark and disorganized his place was. They talk about the problem, he explains the problem, and then the friend offers to come over and help him organize. Now in this listening , there is a small amount of new vocabulary. Between that and the longer length, I did not expect the students to do quite as well. However, after following the same process as above, I was very surprised that the majority only got 2 of five questions correct.

I am hoping that you Spanish (or any other foreign language teachers out there) might be able to help. I am not sure what else to try. Clearly, it is too late for me to make changes this year, but I want to improve for next year. How can I better present the listenings? How can I best utilize my time in the flipped class to help the students improve this vital skill?

Is it possible to teach listening?

One of my main reasons for flipping my classroom was to have more time to work on listening comprehension with my students. We have done tons more listening, with CDs, videos, movies and Google Voice. My students have improved their listening skills close to 30% more than my students last year. Much of that has to do with how much more practice these students are getting, and I am doing a better job choosing level appropriate listening selections.

However, there are still so many struggles. For our latest listenings, we did two selections that accompany the story, Rosa, that we read. This is nice because now the students are familiar with quite a bit of new vocabulary found in the selections. This is a tougher listening, and does require the students to understand the listening, not just listen for key words. Although on the whole the students did well, I was amazed by one of the questions where the students obviously grabbed on to a phrase they heard rather than use their brains. The question asks something along the lines of "what did the narrator want to do with technology". Most of my kids chose the answer "return to prehistoric times" when the answer was really "slow down the speed to be able to enjoy life". When the first two or three I checked had that answer, I chuckled a little, but when I realized it was the majority of them, I started thinking about how to fix the issue.

Now, if I had come up with an answer, I would have quickly sold it to the highest bidder. I did look back through my notes from past CCFLT and ACTFL conferences and tried to find some possible solutions. One presenter that I saw about a year ago discussed how we teach everything, but throw the students in the deep end when it comes to listening. I thought I had been doing a better job, but realized that I am focusing so much on the listening, that maybe I forgot about the THINKING! I encourage my AP students to think about the answers they are choosing and do they make any sense. I obviously forgot to teach that lesson with my 3's. Reverting to prehistoric times is not what any person in their right mind would want to do, so they should have been able to eliminate that answer right away.

So, the big question, what to do now? I decided I am going to give them the answers again and look at just the answers. Which ones seem to make no sense? Is there an answer (or two) that seem to go together and are closely related? Is there an answer that seems very far fetched or implausible?

Then we are going to do the listening again and see what answers they choose. (They did the listening the first time about 2 weeks ago, so I doubt they will remember their answers!) Hopefully they will do a better job. We might also look at the transcript and listen to it again to see where things are going wrong.

Listening is in my mind, the MOST important part of communication, why is there so little time dedicated to HOW to teach this most valuable skill? Maybe because it is so very hard to teach......ideas? .....suggestions?