Unpacking My Old Classroom Practices

This fall, I’m returning to the high school classroom after being away from teaching students for five years.   During this time, I made an effort to remain professionally active and connected, and I learned more than I would have if I had been working full-time, thanks to social media, professional organization, podcasts, and conferences.   Since the day I opened the door to my new classroom, I have been in a period of deep reflection.  Frankly – I’m unpacking.  Unpacking how I used to teach and my old approaches to language learning and teaching.  I’m keeping some treasured practices and items, and getting rid of a lot.  I need to move forward to a new way of teaching, focused on proficiency.

Hello, bins!  What to keep and what to get rid of?
What am I keeping from my “old” classroom?

I am keeping some of my old beliefs.  I believe that:

  • Connections are central to student success, and that I need to empower and engage learners.
  • Each learner is a unique individual with unique skill sets and experiences.
  • The use of the target language is key to student success.
  • Teaching should reflect how the brain learns.
  • Good unit and curriculum design, and reflective planning are critical.
  • Assessment is integral to the cycle of teaching and learning.

I am holding on to some classroom practices, such as:

And of course, stuff!  I’m keeping some of my old classroom materials.  These include:

  • Authentic materials, such as posters from bus stations, phone cards, metro maps, and more.
  • Toy cars, dice, stuffed animals, different colored Popsicle sticks, and other assorted “props” to encourage engagement, creativity, and fun (these include my two favorites: Giant glasses and a baton with streamers, to use as a pointer).
  • Prior student projects, like the “Bonhomme Carnaval.”
Now, onto the fun part.  What am I getting rid of?   Here are some of the beliefs or practices that I am unpacking and discarding, as well as the rationale for that change. 

What I’m getting rid of…and why.

  • I will not start units with vocabulary lists because I have learned the importance of comprehensible input for language acquisition.
  • I will no longer expect students to produce “paragraphs” at lower levels because I have learned more about proficiency, and realized my expectations for student performance were not aligned with their proficiency levels.
  • Memorized skits…because in terms of communication, memorized skits and other similar activities do not prepare students to communicate in authentic contexts.
  • Vocabulary quizzes and the typical “unit tests,” with reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar, vocabulary, and culture components because:  When in the real world will students need to fill in the blanks with vocabulary words or create a verb chart?
  • Thematic vocabulary that is neither interesting or relevant to students…because:  Why would all students need to learn about car parts?
  • The traditional model of grammar with too many verb charts because grammar is only important in that it forwards communication.

Most importantly:  Where do I begin? 

Here is my new classroom: it’s a blank slate of possibilities.

I’ve shared my what I’m keeping from my prior years in the classroom and also what I’m discarding.  Now, I’m getting ready to plan. Where do I begin?  First, I’ve been thinking about what has changed for both my students and me the past five years.  For example, students are now attached to their smart phones, which impacts their learning and their social needs, so I am working to find ways to harness technology meaningfully in the classroom to transform learning.  The field of world language teaching is also now more connected than ever, with many resources available online, which I will use to decrease my time spent creating materials.

As I’ve started designing units and lessons, I’ve decided to lead with input, and have worked to find meaningful, authentic resources to use with students.  I’ve also begun using my favorite unit planning template, from Clementi and Terrill (find a number of resources from Laura Terrill here).  I can’t wait to get started.

This first year back to the classroom, I will be sure to share my journey with teaching for proficiency.  And you – what of your own beliefs are you unpacking this year?

One last thing – here are some of my own favorite resources from the last few years.  I hope they will be as useful to you as they are to me.

Learning Language Through Cultural Products and Practices – Part 1: Racing Dragonboats

It’s important to confess right here at the beginning that I am a firm believer in learning and playing being one and the same—specifically every step along the way from Novice Zero to “survival language” Intermediate Mid-ish. So, the lessons, materials and activities I present and discuss here are firmly rooted in the idea that students need to be doing things (and HAVING FUN) to acquire language in the short term and stick it out long term.

I should preface the rest of this blog post with a quick “About me”. The truly curious can take a peak at my bio, but for now I will briefly say that my name is Matt, I am 23 years old and currently pursuing my M.A. in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland. I have been a Spanish teacher since the age of 16, and a Chinese teacher since the age of 19. As a full time student, I don’t have much time to teach during the school year, but I currently still teach Chinese every summer at a STARTALK program. For those who are not already aware, STARTALK is a federally funded grant program that trains language teachers and provides language learning programs starting at the complete novice level for 11 critical languages in the U.S.

Our STARTALK program’s focus this year was “Family, Food and Festivals on the Silk Road”. Over the three weeks, my topics were Beijing Opera (京剧), the Chinese Tea Ceremony (中国茶道), and the Dragonboat Festival (端午节). Spoiler alert—I am not an expert in ANY of these areas. I am not an opera enthusiast, a tea master, or a festival guru, but I chose these topics for the rich language that could be acquired playing with cultural products and participating in cultural practices. I had to do some research and brush up on a few things, but it was totally worth it! My students ranged in proficiency from complete novice to intermediate mid+ (with a few intermediate highs lurking about), and I worked with each different proficiency group 1 day each week for 70 minutes per week over 3 weeks.

In this series of three posts, I will give you a window into how I tried to teach authentic language in the context of cultural products and practices: Novice Low + Dragonboat Festival, Novice High + Beijing Opera and Intermediate Mid-High + Chinese Tea.

I will conclude each post with a reflection of what worked well and what I would improve if I was going to teach this particular lesson again. Hopefully, that reflection will be some food for thought for you, the reader, as well! 

The Dragon Boat Festival – Novice Low

Student Profile:

  • 18 extremely energetic rising 6-8th-grade complete novices
  • Week 3 of the program (Day 14/15)
Novice Low (Goal Novice Mid/High) I Can Statements

A note about I Can Statements: I do my I Can Statements by learning episode–in other words, by activity. This way students have a clear idea from the very beginning where our lesson will start, where it will go, and where I expect them to arrive by the end. There are no surprises, and I make sure to leave about 2 minutes at the end of every lesson to go back through the I Can Statements and have them prove that they can, in fact, do them. I randomly select students to read the I Can statements aloud (in English) at the beginning of the lesson, and then I read them myself at the end. As I go through each one,  I select a student or two to prove that they can do it—whether this means holding something up, asking a classmate and reporting, or answering one of my questions individually or as a class. This also holds me accountable when I am planning for each learning episode, so that I am sure to include I do, We do and You do activities for each I Can statement. 

Task 1 (Interpersonal Speaking) 

What is the date for the following holidays? When is your birthday? When is your partner’s birthday? (Differentiation up: When are your family members’ birthdays? When is my birthday? Differentiation down: Is it January? February? etc. until student catches on).

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Task 2 (Interpretive Listening & “Interpretive Viewing”)

Authentic Resource Input – Watch the video a total of 3 times. The first time, just watch and listen. The second time, watch and look for the date. The third time, watch for any details–what are they doing?

Mini-Lesson on negotiating meaning from unfamiliar Chinese characters.

This is by far my favorite part of learning and teaching Chinese–Watching students learn to go from fearing blocks text riddled with unfamiliarity turn into puzzles just waiting to be solved. Here we looked at where the pictographic character “rice” came from (how it evolved as a pictograph into the current character we use). Many Chinese teachers fear that Chinese characters are “too much” for novices. I have found instead that they can be like a trail of candy for learners–give them just enough to keep them interested and moving forward–sorta like grains of rice?

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Task 3 (Interpretive Reading)

I told my students that I am vegan and gluten free and don’t eat any rice (which, in fact, could not be further from the truth, but we do what we have to for our students, right?). It was their job to keep my sensitive tummy safe from the many menacing grains–and they did it with the simplest language: The numbers 1-10 and 有 (it has)，没有 (it does not have)，上 (top) 下 (bottom) 左 (left)  右 (right). Can you find all of the rice?

The answers. I survived the “meal” with my students, would I have survived with you? Do you notice any more recurring components in those characters? Any possible patterns based on the pictures? (See how much you can know without even worrying about how to pronounce the character itself!?) Pieces of candy! [Hint: Look at all of the fruits]

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Task 4 (Interpretive Reading/Viewing & Presentational Writing)

In this next task, we reviewed the list of ingredients they had in front of them (intentionally without Pinyin at all). Those they knew already, the did not need the Pinyin for. Those they needed, we figured out together (they had to listen carefully for the tone).

Students looked at 4 pictures of 粽子 (zongzi) and decided whether or not each ingredient was present. They then copied the Chinese characters (no pinyin) from the ingredients sheet into this table. Finally, they told me “yes” or “no” and had to tell me where they saw the ingredient in the pictures from my PPT (again using the numbers 1-4 and top, bottom, left & right).

[rule type=”basic”]

Task 5

The Dragonboat Festival is, as you might have noticed in Task 2 above, comprised of 2 major practices & products–粽子 (sticky rice and other ingredients boiled or steamed in bamboo leaves) and 龙舟, Dragonboats (no kidding, right?). So, short of going to an actual lake and renting dragon boats to race, I decided to make a jeopardy game in which you get “meters” instead of dollars and move your boat along the river to save Quyuan (who is a drowning poet attempting to commit suicide after his country was conquered by future first emperor of China). Students competed in teams and had to answer every single question for points. The team that selected the question got 100% of the points if correct, and all other teams could get 50% of the points if correct. I learned this style of jeopardy from the wonderful Rosalyn Rhodes.

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My Reflections

What worked:
  • Group formation – I gave each student a card with a color on the front and a number on the back. The color corresponded to a dragonboat on the board (their new boat) and I used the numbers to call on a particular student from each group to answer each question. This way, every single student had to be ready to answer every single question
  • Limiting the prep time to 1 minute for everything but the hardest questions. For example, they were given 2 minutes to prepare to introduce everyone on their team and tell me 1 fact about each person besides their name.
  • Encouraging my Novice Lows to perform at Novice High by offering them a 1 point bonus for answering my questions in complete sentences. I included scaffolded response starters in each slide that I could click to reveal if they were struggling (but trying) to use a complete sentence.
  • Content – I pulled content from all of the topics they learned about over the three week program: Me (self introductions), My family (parents, siblings, etc.), Likes & Dislikes (mostly hobbies & the other culture activities they did), Eating & Drinking (Chinese food, what we saw on our field trip to a restaurant and market, etc.) and the Dragon Boat Festival (things we had just gone over in this lesson).
What didn’t work:
  • I did not think to put an icon on each question to show students what was expected of them–were they supposed to write things down (if so, in pinyin or Chinese characters?) or just say them aloud? At first, I thought writing everything down made the most sense, since that way it would be fair no matter which order I asked for answers in. The student with the number I called from each team would should be his or her whiteboard, and I would award points. In the future, I will need to be more intentional in how I ask them to answer questions–all I needed was an icon in the corner!
  • Not enough time! We (as I tend to do) got caught up learning and laughing in earlier tasks, so we were unfortunately only able to play this game for about 20 minutes. I adapted by doing a Final Jeopardy in which every team could get full points for the last round–these middle schoolers HAD to save Quyuan from drowning (and alter the course of history in the process!). In the future I would make these things two separate parts of 1 2-day lesson: Zongzi one day and then Dragonboats the following day.
My takeaways:
  • Our students are much more capable than we think—we are limiting them in so many ways. I found myself constantly surprised that low novice learners were able to understand and do so much.
  • Our students are not magical—they need guidance and scaffolding at all levels. They are, however, very smart and when you give them the patterns and the tools they need to mine for meaning, they will do it and blow your mind. This was especially true for me, I realized, when teaching students how to deal with unfamiliar Chinese characters (and avoid developing a reliance on pinyin–they only rely on that because we let them or make them!). 
  • Students need to be doing things—not just talking, not just reading about or watching videos about cultural products and practices, but actually “racing dragon boats” to “save Quyuan”. When they are having fun, they don’t even realize they are learning, and the enthusiasm when 70 minutes flies by and we review our I Can statements was truly incredible.

One student even told me “Gao Laoshi, we don’t really do any work in your class, I mean… it’s so easy! But I learn so much. You’re like, a wizard or something. Like the Chinese Dumbledore or something. By the way—can I have more tea?”

Hopefully, this has given you some insight into my classroom and some small nugget of an idea to take back to yours. Be on the lookout for part 2 and part 3, coming soon to theaters near you!

I’ve never met a rubric I liked.

Did I really just spend June and early July working on a series of performance rubrics (about 20 hours worth of my life) only to throw them all out in late July with a smile on my face? Well, sort of…

I’ve been creating rubrics for world languages for a long time. Back in the early 90s I taught at an Essential school where we were creating content-enriched units with backward design and performance-based assessment as part of our daily work. I even co-taught a lesson on chemical and mechanical digestion in French with a science teacher, but that’s a blog entry for another time. We got a lot of things wrong in those days: For example, my rubrics were basically checklists of task items. While we missed the mark on some things, we did get a lot of things right (We were focused on the message; we taught grammar in context, we embedded instruction in intrinsically interesting, cognitively engaging contexts). While I would never use one of my “rubrics” from 1993 today (and I cringe when I look at some of them in file drawers at home), getting things “wrong” was an important part of the journey and continues to be. I wouldn’t be where I am today without all of that trial and error. I’ve got to thank Mimi Met whose work I devoured in those days as I was writing a thesis in grad school.

In my current district, we’ve had a department rubric for over 10 years. However, whenever I talked to teachers about how they were using the rubric with students and as a learning/teaching tool, I consistently heard that there was disagreement about how to use it effectively —and most students barely even knew we had a rubric.

So, in June of this year, I began to create a new rubric, one that we could use the way rubrics should be used. Now, before I take credit for self-inspiration to do this work, I have to thank two people.  You see, I’d spent the last year or two convinced that if teachers created their own rubrics, they would become more skilled at understanding how to use them.  I need to thank WHS French teacher Christine for continuing to advocate for an updated department-wide rubric.  I also need to thank Greta Lundgaard, who helped to convince me of the benefits of revitalizing our department rubric rather than leaving it to teachers who were telling me that they didn’t have the skill set yet to do the work on their own (Sometimes it takes someone else to help you be a better listener).

Before beginning to rewrite anything, I knew it was important to have a good working definition of assessment: “…an ongoing process of setting clear goals for student learning and measuring progress toward those goals.” We used to think about assessment as something we do to kids after a few weeks of teaching “stuff.” We now know better: Assessment is part of the plan from the start, critically embedded in the instruction, not separate from it.

Assessment as a part of the instruction is where a good rubric comes in. The real purpose of a rubric is not for a teacher to assign a grade to student work, but for students and teachers to use it to engage in a feedback dialogue about student work. A rubric needs to help students and teachers see the student work in relation to the learning goal and to move student learning forward.

I set to work and created a seventeen-page rubric. Yes, you read correctly, seventeen pages! The series contained a separate rubric for each performance mode and each targeted sub level of proficiency for presentational writing and speaking. I hadn’t even gotten to interpersonal yet. Before writing anything, I reread several ACTFL publications, looked over the many pages I’d highlighted in Helena Curtain and Carol Ann Dahlberg’s Languages and Learners: Making the Match, and I scoured through my many Marzano and Reeves books, determined to come up with an amazing rubric. The draft rubrics I created (all seventeen pages) were beautiful to look at, but were they really practical for teachers or students? At first, I thought so, but not everyone else did. Thomas Sauer, at MaFLA Proficiency Academy, convinced me that while the rubrics were nice to look at, and aligned with ACTFL performance descriptors, they were not practical, and were not what we needed at that moment in our continued growth as language teachers.

So, I did what I thought was a pretty brave thing. I’d come to MaFLA Proficiency Academy with a team of 8 teachers from my middle school and high school —all dedicated, talented educators. I handed my seventeen-page baby over to them and gave them permission to rip it all to shreds as they set forth to spend a week working on rubric development. There was a part of me cringing inside, but the other part of me knew that despite all the rubrics I’d created and fallen in love with over the years, I always broke up with them after a few months or a year. (OK, one demerit for mixed metaphors of babies and breaking up, but you get the picture.) I knew exactly why I was in a cycle of non-stop recreating rubrics; the rubrics never quite did the job I wanted them to do.

My team of teachers at Proficiency Academy worked hard all week with their facilitator, Rita Oleksak, who reiterated to them my permission to throw out everything I’d given them. I appreciated their hesitancy to do so, but appreciated even more the fact that they really did throw out a lot —not everything, but a big chunk of what I’d done. What they ended up with is a presentational performance feedback form (our newly-adopted term, thanks to Thomas Sauer) that will reflect every kid’s work from novice-mid to advanced-low, all on one page. I think it’s a solid feedback form.

Our next step is to support teachers in using the rubric with kids as a teaching and learning tool, to provide the kind of feedback that Marzano (2007) tells us will help move their learning forward. We’ll need to spend an entire academic year calibrating our scoring practices and understanding/agreeing on distinctions between things like detail and elaboration. You see, the magic of a rubric depends on teachers being able to use it effectively, in their giving consistent feedback to students, in scoring student work consistently.

Marzano explains that effective feedback must be:
Goal-Related
Actionable
Specific
User friendly

I’m pretty happy with the new version of our feedback form and truly excited for all 25 of us to dig in and try it on. And…I know I’ll probably break up with this one too —because, after all, I’ve never met a rubric I liked.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year

Seriously.

While I love the winter holidays, I will confess that Back to School is really my favorite time of the year. I love the stores full of school supplies—row upon row of pens in varying colors and sizes, bins of notebooks and planners waiting to be filled and paperclips, post-It notes, pushpins, markers, construction paper and glitter reeling me in with the promise of creative expression.  I love the fresh, clean classroom, and the smell of newly waxed floors.  I get excited spending my BEP money and ordering materials for the new, engaging lessons that I am anxious to try after a summer spent collaborating at professional conferences.  But what really melts my butter is the idea that we get a fresh start.

Second chances.

Every season has a gift.  Kings bring cake, bunnies leave candy and elves fill stockings.  Back to School energizes teachers and students alike with the renewed, rejuvenated feeling that anything is possible. On the first day of school we stand at the door and welcome our students into the magical world of language acquisition, ready to lead them down the path to proficiency, and we begin that very first moment to tap into the limitless potential this season offers.

Education is one of the few jobs where we always get a second chance, a do-over, to be our best. I do not want to imply that what has gone before wasn’t good, but we all know there were lessons that fell short, students we failed to reach and language we failed to acquire.  But as teachers, we get the chance to try again.  Every new school year is a clean slate.  We get the chance, envied by many, to go back to the beginning and take the journey again.  We get to refine and refresh.

Responsibility.

They say that with much freedom comes much responsibility.  Such is the case with second chances.  They give us the freedom to break free of the past and look to form a better future.  Thus,we have the responsibility to use them, to maximize them, to make them count.  Just as we expect our students to perform better when we give them an opportunity to make-up an assignment, we must have the same expectation for ourselves.  We have to realize the great privilege  of the Back to School do-over and meet the challenge to make this year better than the last one.

Meeting the challenge.

The do-over isn’t always easy.  Easy is doing exactly the same thing we’ve done before.  How many times have we seen our colleagues choose the easy way, dismissing their second chance, and staying mired in the “way it’s always been”?  And then they wonder why nothing ever changes and they face the same frustrations year after year. As someone much wiser than me once said, doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity. And while we language teachers may have a reputation in our schools for being “crazy”, “eccentric”, “out -of –the-box” teachers, we are hardly insane. But are we wise enough to grasp the second chance before us and make a difference?

The year behind may have been a tough one to overcome. The one ahead may seem overwhelming.  We might have a new curriculum or new district mandates to implement.  Maybe we’ve decided to re-work every lesson to model prime-time research.  Perhaps we’ve hit a road block on our path to proficiency and have trouble paving the way forward.  We might have a large class of students who don’t particularly want to learn another language, or an administration that doesn’t fully support our language programs.  Whatever the challenge, we possess the skills to meet it.  We have an arsenal of best practices, collaborative colleagues, current research, as well as our own love of language and teaching, to turn the challenge into an opportunity.

They say hindsight is 20/20.  How many times have we said to ourselves, “if I’d only known”?  But as teachers we DO know. With all our years of teaching experience, we have the vision and clarity to see past the challenge. We’ve been down the road before, so we know the twists and turns that can derail the journey and we know where the potholes lurk, waiting to bump and jostle us out of our calm. Luckily, we have the experience and expertise to maneuver around any detours we may encounter. Each time we refine a lesson or rework a unit, each time we reach one more struggling student and convince one more administrator to invest in language, we understand the power of the second chance.

Seasons Greetings.

Back to School abounds with the frenzied anticipation of a new and exciting academic year.  So in the spirit of the season, my wish for all of us is the gift of second chances. I wish us all the courage to seize the possibilities of this new school year and the power to turn its challenges into opportunities.    May the season inspire us all to make this year the best one yet!

It really is the most wonderful time of the year! 

 

 

Becoming a better language advocate

This year, I am taking on a big goal, and it is to become more of a language advocate.  First, I had to admit that I had not really been a language advocate.  In some ways, I thought that I was already doing so.  I taught a language, and I believed that if students enjoyed my class they would see the benefit of learning a language and keep studying it.  However, I have realized that is not enough.  We all know how long it takes for a student to actually become proficient.  Two years of a foreign language will not give them a strong proficiency.  Also, students have many other passions that cause them to edge language out of their studies.  My one class in Middle School or Spanish 2 with them is not enough to motivate them to continue to study language.  I want to teach and reinforce the idea that learning a language is important, so they will continue their language studies a long time after they have been in my class.  This year, I plan on not only letting students know why they should study a language, but also how I became proficient myself and ways for them to keep up their proficiency.

An easy way to start showing students the importance of learning another language is to display some infographics throughout my room and our foreign language hallway to emphasize the importance of foreign language.  Middlebury Interactive Languages has already done the hard work of putting together some excellent posters to display for free!  You can just print, laminate (or not!) and hang them up all around your school.  You can also draw attention to the facts in the beginning of school including back to school night.  When I make a display, I can continue to post ideas about summer programs for students.  I want to add the deadlines on my class calendar as another reminder for students.

I want to continue to push language advocacy throughout the year in our school.  Last year, my department switched our focus away from the traditional games during National Foreign Language Week, and we interviewed alumnae from our school who were currently using language frequently for a video at our all school assembly.  One alum talked about how she still used her Latin in her studies and another alum had traveled extensively and talked about how much he valued his language class.  It was very effective to hear from someone other than your language teacher that languages are useful.  I also hope to have students speak about how they are using their foreign language when they come back for alumnae events.  If you do not have an alumnae network to use, you can check out these various videos under the different languages in the advocacy program Lead with Languages.

To continue my push of an overall language advocacy, the Lead with Languages campaign publicizes ideas for scholarships and a job board that requires applicants to speak a foreign language.  I am teaching more seniors this year, so it would be even more important for me to share this with them.  While our college counselors are great advocates of our foreign language program, I want to pass this information to them as well.  This would also be a great resource to explore when you have a substitute teacher who does not speak your language or when you have a few minutes left in class.  By bringing awareness of various programs, I hope to expose students to everything they can do with language.

This year, I also want to explain how long it took me to become proficient when I was studying Spanish- and many of my blunders along the way.  I have a few stories of when I did ridiculous things learning Spanish like assuming Bernanda Alba was a male when I was skimming La Casa de Bernarda Alba before writing a whole paper on male oppression in the book.  Or when it was my last year in my university program, and I emailed a professor thanking him and received an email back saying that I had confused my use of por and para.  I started learning Spanish when I was in Middle School like many of my students, and I continued onto get a major in Spanish in college and study abroad.  I was unable to learn Spanish in two, three or four quick years.  My story of becoming proficient can be my students’ as well, but they have to see where I failed to see that it can be achievable for them.

This year, I want to look more at reaching out to more native speakers and giving students a variety of outside homework.  I want to tweet to a few Spanish celebrities that we discuss in class, and I hope to encourage my own students to do so.  I also hope that by giving students outside homework that involves looking at what they like such as listening to music, listening to podcasts, reading or watching different clips of shows that they will be more motivated to continue to do this even if they are not in language classes.  I did a mini telenovela unit with my class one year, and a few of my students watched the whole series!  Many teachers call this choice homework, and I believe that it will show students how language fits into their lives outside of an academic setting.

I hope to inspire my students to continue to study language and tell others the importance of what they are doing.  I would love more help and ideas though!  How are you a language advocate?  What do you do to motivate students to keep studying your language?

The Reluctant Leader

As teachers, we often don’t see ourselves as leaders outside the realm of our classroom.  We are in charge of our students and our classrooms.  And we think that is it.  Generally, that is the way we like it.  It allows us to go into our domain, close the door and do our thing. Unbothered, uninterested and unchallenged.  However, what if I told you that you are a leader and that you possess incredible attributes for being a great leader?  Like it or not, you have leadership skills, albeit laden leadership skills, but you possess great potential to influence those around you.  Not just your students.  Not just your colleagues, but your administration, your district, your state and perhaps at the national level.  However, you have not realized that potential because like I was, you are considered a reluctant leader.  Someone who often was voluntold to do something and you just haven’t figured out how to say the word “no.”  So you reluctantly go about the task at hand and because you are a teacher (as we all know, they are die hard perfectionist – even if you don’t want to admit it) you want to do your very best job.  You know, the kind that reluctantly leads professional development for your colleagues or the kind that discovered some cool new technology feature and now you get to teach it to your entire staff because an administrator observed you using it in the classroom with your students.  If you’re a reluctant leader and you have some wonderful admin on your side, they see in you what you don’t quite see yourself…yet.  I was in this place when I was asked to attend LILL (The Leadership Initiative for Language Learning) not knowing fully what it was about or what I would do there.  They asked me in December and I thought “June is months away, ‘Future Jaime’ will figure it out.  Pretty soon June was upon me and I was reading books about leadership and wondering, “What am I doing!?”  While in Chicago, I realized that I needed to stop being so modest and humble (within reason, of course).  I realized that this like-minded group of people were all amazing leaders and I had this potential too.  I just had to take the time to think introspectively to unlock it.  Ryan Smith, a Spanish teacher from Nevada said, “We’re not allowed to say we’re ‘just classroom teachers’” and at this moment I had an epiphany and I realized why I was at LILL.  We are so much more than that.  It is time to stop being coy and to recognize your superpower and sphere of influence.  It is time to stop being a reluctant leader and really think introspectively how you can encourage and foster leadership in your new school year.  It is time to focus on how you can continue to grow yourself to be the best version that you have to offer because ultimately your students and colleagues deserve it.  You are an advocate and leader for language learning for your classroom, school, district, and perhaps even your state.  Your sphere of influence far exceeds what you give yourself credit for and it is time to be more methodical about how you use your leadership.  So, what have I done since returning from LILL and how have I used my sphere of influence to advocate for world language programs?  I searched high and low (with the help of many colleagues across the state) to find every secondary administrators’ email that has a world language program and I have composed an email to them highlighting the importance of encouraging their teachers to participate in our Wyoming Foreign Language Teachers’ Association.  I sought out all the emails of every world language educator in the state of Wyoming and have sent out an email that highlights why they would want to be part of our state organization and attend our annual conference.  And lastly, I am working on setting up meetings with all the stakeholders (along with the help of many colleagues) to get the Seal of Biliteracy up and running in our district and hopefully, statewide.  Being a leader means creating an action plan and identifying those around you that can help you get it done, basically you’re creating your own league of super heroes.  

So how can you move on the leadership spectrum from reluctant leader to becoming a more self-actualized leader?  Identify in yourself your strengths and weaknesses (we did this by reading and taking the quiz provided from Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath).  We also read Great Leaders Grow by Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller (2012) and on my own, I have read Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t by Simon Sinek (my building instructional facilitator encouraged me to read that one).  It isn’t going to happen overnight because Rome wasn’t built in a day. However, as long as you continue to established attainable SMART goals and keep working at it, you will see the fruits of your labor.  I think it is also important to realize that everybody’s fruit will be different, it is about the journey.  

So, what are you going to do this school year to hone your leadership skills?

Thanks, Coach!

One of my favorite on-screen coaches is Doc Hudson from the Cars movies. Doc Hudson wasn’t always the town repair-car and judge. He was once the Fabulous Hudson Hornet, three time winner of the Piston Cup race! No one could out-race him until one horrible crash sidelined him and he didn’t race again. From that point forward, he didn’t want anything to do with racing until Lightning McQueen happened upon his sleepy town, and Doc finally saw something in Lightning that made him coach him and teach him and pass along all he had learned. We find the same process in Cars 3 [spoiler alert] as Lightning has a crucial choice to make in his comeback season after his own big crash similar to Doc’s. What Lightning finds out is that through the coaching he received from Doc, he finds himself coaching his new trainer–someone who always dreamed of being a Piston Cup race car! Lightning McQueen took his valuable experiences from racing and being coached by Doc Hudson and transformed that to ultimately be able to coach and train others.

I actually shed a few tears at the end of the movie as I saw the connection from practicing teacher to teaching coach and how the pipeline of learning continues.

As a novice teacher, I refused to believe that others would look at me and accept that for the first 3-5 years I was going to be bad at my job. Thankfully, I had some great mentors at my first school who observed me and gave me pointers on how to improve my practice during those crucial first two years of teaching. Additionally, at each step of my career, I’ve had mentors who’ve coached me along the way in my teaching, and as I grew, so did the type of feedback they gave. Because I had such great coaches, I started looking back at new teachers on my team and seeing how I, in turn, could help them while I continued to learn.

Coaching new teachers not only helps them to start to solidify their own practice, but it also helps me reflect on my practice and the “Why?” behind my own strategies. It helps me refresh my learning on the teaching methods I’ve learned as I pass these things along to those new to my team. It also helps me innovate my own practice as I observe what others are doing and learn from them; the team is strengthened if there is a trust to share, and we’re all moving toward the same goal. I know it’s easy to sit back and armchair quarterback a football game, but as teaching coaches, there’s almost a mirror that we hold up to ourselves as we observe others. One key thing to remember is to strengthen the pipeline of teachers and leaders not because veteran teachers are so omniscient, but because we care about teacher growth and student growth. We care about the next generation.

It wasn’t easy for Lightning to step away from his last Piston Cup race, but he realized his impact if he shared his knowledge with Cruz and let her compete.

We’ve all had that one influential person without whom we wouldn’t still be teaching or wouldn’t be in the position we are today. Or those mentors who saw a spark in us and kept pushing us to do new things that seemed outside our comfort zone. Or those influential teachers we had as students that we wanted to emulate.

Thanks, Coach!

‘Tis The Season

Just like magic, standup comedy, sports, and talk shows, effective teaching can look organic and improvised to the naked eye. Experts in those fields, however, know the amount of preparation, precision, and rehearsal that those require. Effective teaching and learning are no different, and actually draws many uncanny parallels. Some elements are highly contextual in the moment; others, calculated, anticipated, and refined. During the school year, there isn’t necessarily time to research, think through, prepare, or organize for innovation — rather, the school year is the time to execute, it’s when we’re in season.

Many people who aren’t in education say things like, “I bet it’s great to have the summers off!” Teachers know that “off” should be in quotes and is always commensurate according to a number of personal factors; often we’re taking classes, continuing certification, traveling w/ students, attending PD, catching up on projects at home, spending time with family, and much more. Summer and other breaks are the offseason; they’re when we can rejuvenate and catch up, and rest itself is relative. Master athletes like LeBron James and Serena Williams know that off-season relaxation and preparation are key, and we as the general public know that. I often wonder why people don’t comment on athletes being lucky to get a “break” like they do to teachers or even any POTUS – for those jobs there are waves of action, sprints within marathons, and some down time is necessary for both. During said down time, without the crowd, without the class, we fine-tune, strengthen, learn, and much more. We don’t get aggravated at cherries for not being available year-round because that’s not how it works — teachers are the cherries. We need time. We, too, have a season.

High-performing athletes, high-performing teachers, and the farmers of the aforementioned cherries also know to trust certain processes, and that precise practice over time equals achievement. We must be measured, intentional, and determined. If they skip a day at the gym, or the field doesn’t get fertilized on time, they expect to feel it as a consequence. Equally, if we skip a day of planning or a critical training, we can expect to get behind. None of these jobs have a silver bullet, either — if I do X, I will get Y result. Progress will take time and effort; there is no shortcut. Thinking of shifting to proficiency? Get reading, familiarize yourself with indicators and frameworks, get processing. Thinking of wandering away from a textbook and using stories, or TCI/TPR, etc.? Watch YouTube videos, read blog posts, gather, gather, gather. We’re about to be in-season, and if Serena isn’t changing her backhand AND her forehand AND her serve AND her footwork right before tournaments rev back up, then it isn’t wise for us to change-up eight different things at the same time and expect them to go well, simultaneously. We can start with a solid, do-able foundation of goals, and then work on those things over time. Next year, we refine, scrap, and/or add a couple more, and soon, the systems will all be working with and for each other. When it comes to in-season, school-year goals, consider depth, not breadth, and don’t forget to factor in time and life. 

Here are some of my own past goals and how I’ve maintained them:

1. Reading more for pleasure

I joined Book of the Month Club and it was a great investment – instead of only watching TV at night, I now switch it up and read for a little while, right before bed.

2. Professional development anywhere

I wondered what all the buzz about #langchat was, so I joined Twitter (for professional use only) a few years ago. Every Thursday at 8pm (eastern), or 10am on Saturdays, I logged in, searched #langchat, and watched questions and answers populate. There’s a different topic each week, the same for both days, and the moderators organize each topic into five individual questions, the ‘discussion’ lasting about eight minutes each. The questions segue into each other and are designed to target a varied audience in terms of pedagogies, experience levels, demographics of students, etc.

3. Tightening management

I got into the habit of video recording class (and my teaching) twice a week. Yep. Gulp. Twice a week, every week. And then, I watched it back. Gulp #2. Of course, before doing that, you may want to put on your pajamas, have your feet up, and get a libation of choice. Watching ourselves is never easy, but I’ve never grown so much in one year as I did that year. Now, I record class all the time and use it for absent students (especially critical input!), other teachers to see certain activities, self-reflection, EdPuzzle.com homework videos, and more. That one resource can fuel a LOT – don’t be afraid to record yourself and see what’s really going on in your classroom. (PS We were smiling and laughing way more than I realized, and after many hard days, I had to really savor seeing those moments documented, because it didn’t feel like it, at all.)

4. Self-evaluating

The TELL framework and subsequent self-evaluation tools are invaluable here – seriously, an entire framework about effective, model language teaching. It won’t happen like this every day, all day, all season (remember, it’s not supposed to!), but it’s a great start and the indicators are fabulous. Developed by language teachers, for language teachers.

5. Stop reinventing the wheel for subs

Whether it’s buying from TeachersPayTeachers vendors, using OER, whatever – find a framework of tasks that works for any level at any point in the year. “Using your current, ___, use ___ to create ____ and turn in via ____,” etc. I like to find stories and other stand-alone reading activities that I can purchase, print, and leave for my sub with this frame holding the instructions on my desk AND at each group of desks. I do this once at the beginning of the year and don’t have to worry about updating my emergency sub plans, just the rosters, and can then plan for any sub I’ve scheduled for. I’m happy, my dept. head and admin. are very happy, and it’s OK if life happens and I have to be absent unexpectedly.

6. Not dreading Sunday due to procrastination

Man, this one was tough. REALLY tough. But, finally, finally, wonderfully, I don’t hate Sundays, and weekends aren’t necessarily a time to catch up; they’re a time to weekend (we can make ‘to weekend’ an infinitive, can’t we?). In staying merely a week or two completely ahead, within a pacing guide, of course, and putting in a little concentrated time on Saturday mornings (or wherever works for you), I’ve saved myself many, many evenings and late nights of work. Also, learning about myself that I’m a morning person has helped immensely. I would rather get to bed early knowing I can get up at 4, shower, put on my robe while my hair air dries, grab a cup of coffee (had the maker programmed to turn on also at 4), and snuggle back into bed with my computer to look over a few things for the day/week/whatever, in the early-morning quiet than be up until 10, 11, etc. Nope – good for some, not for me. I learned this by trying different routines for a couple of weeks – morning gym, afternoon gym, early morning work, staying up later – that was my conclusion. Mornings and some concerted time every other Saturday have made my life much less stressful. Also, I recommend dividing out your planning period by day and time chunk. For me, it’s easier to prioritize that way.

7. Putting myself first

I get a gel manicure every two or three weeks, and massages from time to time. Gel nail polish is amazing because it doesn’t screw up when you reach for your wallet or keys, and massages help my legs and back stay relaxed after standing all day, every day. I make these appointments when time and money allow, and purposefully at 4pm or a little before; then I have a reason to leave and enjoy something that’s only for me. Also, it’s a luxury, and it isn’t anyone else’s business – if something comes up, I simply say, “Shoot, I have an appointment. How’s [other day]?” and I don’t feel badly. Be careful in when feeling the need to explain or apologize for how you use your time. It would be too easy to reschedule and accommodate something or someone else instead of me, when I already had those plans made, and I personally now save those accommodations for emergencies only. (Same goes for e-mail!)

8. Get excited

Along the lines of number seven, get excited about something. At the time, my husband and I were new to a city, and we made it a mission to try several highly-reputed restaurants. I made the reservations early, so that we couldn’t get ‘busy‘ and cancel, and then we got excited about it. Something to look forward to is huge. My current department goes for margaritas and chitchat once a month, and I try to have friends over to just cook and hang out. Simple things like free events at the botanical gardens, a babysitter for the evening, a movie at one of those places that serves food and drinks – whatever it is, get something to look forward to. In October and February, seven and eight in this list are what sustain me, big time.

9. Get accountable

Find someone, preferably another WL teacher, with whom you can be vulnerable and honest — tell them your goals for the year, and set yourself a phone reminder or the like to chat or catch up about said goals, both of you. I can always trust Paul Jennemann and we’ll drop each other a text to check in, from 300 miles away. Keep it simple, but keep it purposeful. Vent, share, move forward. Once I’ve prioritized, I’ll post my own 2017-18 goals below in the comments so that you all can keep me accountable!

10. Teach toward proficiency

It’s been a long, wonderful journey, and I’m excited to continue it this year with some specific foci. It starts with versing one’s self on proficiency, and then introducing it to students. Teach them the jargon, keep yourself on target, and it takes on a life of its own.

Each time I’ve started a school year either overzealous or without a plan at all, I’ve burnt out early and been disappointed in what didn’t happen. Rather, I should’ve been seeing and celebrating the victories. At the same time, also realize that some things are unavoidable. Farmers aren’t getting 500% their usual rain to then be baffled as to why there wasn’t a bumper crop — it just wasn’t meant to be. Tiger Woods is still coming back from several injuries that are keeping him from peak performance and knows he won’t be ranked #1 right now. Serena herself is starting a family and making plans that allow herself rest and quality time before returning to competitive tennis. With a class of 40+, emergencies, family circumstances, unforeseen financial issues, or over-committing yourself and realizing too late, give yourself grace to have the best season you can, learn from it, and move on. Do not compare yourself, and do not look at everyone else’s highlight reel while only seeing your bloopers. Just like the rain, or missing Wimbledon or the NBA Finals, it wasn’t meant to be that season, and that’s OK. Seasons come and go. We wait for it to come back around, we plant the seeds, we train the team, we prep the lessons, we weather the storm(s), and we give it another shot.

Here’s to a GREAT 2017-18 school year!

Transitioning from a Traditional PK-12 World Language Program to an Oral Proficiency-based Program

Are you considering transitioning your world language program from a traditional one to an oral-proficiency based one? In this blog post, I will share the basic steps that we, the University School of Milwaukee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have taken to make such a shift in the last few years in our PK-12 World Language department.

Shifting to an Oral Proficiency-based program

First, since we knew the shift to an oral-proficiency program would not be an easy one, we hired a consultant to guide us through the process. If you can prioritize this in your budget, I highly recommend it. Department members may have more confidence in the process when an expert and outside consultant leads rather than a department chair who may have no particular expertise in developing an oral-proficiency based program.

With the help of our consultant, we became familiar with the basic terminology of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) proficiency guidelines. For example, we began to learn what defines Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced level speakers. Even though we were familiar with this terminology, it wasn’t until we were all deferring to an expert that we began to understand more fully what they meant with regard to the oral proficiency of our students. Our disparate teaching techniques began to align, and soon we found ourselves using the “same language” to describe our goals for the program.

Inviting a Consultant to Campus to Review Our Program

Our consultant then spent two days with us reviewing our current program. While we all thought of ourselves as experts in our fields with master’s degrees, we were surprised to learn that generally, we were not truly manifesting many signs of being an oral-proficiency based program. We had the opportunity to work with our consultant to learn what we might do to move toward the goal of shifting the focus of our program from textbook and grammar-based teaching to oral proficiency-based teaching.

Sponsoring a Modified Oral Proficiency Interview (MOPI) Workshop on Campus

Next, our whole department participated in a two-day MOPI training workshop through ACTFL on our own campus. We lined up 6-interviewees who were learning English so that we could all learn and practice the interviewing techniques used to determine our students’ oral proficiency level. When the trainer offered the opportunity for certification following the training sessions, we all agreed to prioritize seeking financial support from our administration to complete it. To have all of us tackling the certification process was our single best decision toward accomplishing our goal to become an oral-proficiency focused department. Each department member started on the road to mastering the oral proficiency interview as a means of setting targets for all students in our language program and learning how to assess them uniformly. We now had, not only a common goal, but common language and a method for assessing our students’ oral proficiency.

Designing Our Own Curriculum

With the help of our consultant, we began to consider the idea of abandoning our textbooks in order to begin creating a more engaging curriculum based on a set of themes that we might cover PK-12. Since we have an AP language program in French and Spanish, we chose the AP themes (Beauty and Aesthetics • Contemporary Life • Families and Communities • Global Challenges • Personal and Public Identities • Science and Technology). We found them general enough to allow for most any area of study we wanted to pursue with our students. After two years of curriculum writing, we can honestly say that it has been a somewhat chaotic and challenging process. With patience and perseverance, each year we are able to develop our units more thoroughly and sequentially, continuously improving the path to proficiency for our students.

At the recommendation of our consultant, we began testing all our students with a Standards-based Measurement of Proficiency (STAMP) test for the first two years and The ACTFL Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL) test this past year as one means of benchmarking our progress with building oral proficiency. These tests are far from perfect, but we are committed to having an objective way of assessing our students. After analyzing our AAPPL test results this year for each student and comparing them to our live individual MOPI interviews, we have found that the combined results best help us to pinpoint the oral proficiency level of our students.

Since our initial consultant advised us that the transition from a traditional textbook-based language program to an oral proficiency-based program would take three to five years, we are comfortable with the fact that we have more work to do. Next steps for us will include sharpening our teaching skills in developing oral proficiency (Fall 2017) and renaming our courses according to oral proficiency levels (Fall 2018).We have hired the ACTFL Teacher of the Year 2016, Katrina Griffin, to do a 2-day hands-on workshop this fall to give us more tools in developing our students’ oral proficiency levels. We, also, are researching the implications for college admissions in renaming our courses according to proficiency levels versus the typical nomenclature that indicates how many years a student has studied a language.

Stay tuned to my next blog post to learn more about our mind-blowing experience in Singapore. One of the most important things Cris Ewell, elementary language coordinator at SAS, said to us, was: “It is not only about the amount of time your students have in the classroom learning language; it is crucial what you do with that time toward building skills.” This is motivating us tremendously to seek best practices in our classrooms toward the end of helping students to develop their oral proficiency.

Moving to an oral-proficiency based program can be overwhelming and mind boggling, but we are excited about the skills that our students are developing as evidenced in our live oral interviews with them and their strong results on the AAPPL test.

In future blog posts, I will go into more depth about assessment, standardized testing, curriculum writing, grammar conundrums, and some of our major takeaways from the Singapore American School.

 

Understanding Interpersonal Mode at the Intermediate Level

I think the biggest benefit of blogging for teachers is that it increases their ability to be reflective and articulate about their practice.  Stray thoughts and half-awarenesses get fleshed out into full-fledged epiphanies as teachers figure out how to talk with their colleagues about what they do in the classroom.  Back in April, I ended a blog post with four target areas for growth in my practice, one of them being Interpersonal Mode at the Intermediate level:

“My Level 1 classes have a lively and robust environment that makes room for well-supported and scaffolded conversational interactions.  But in each subsequent level, I prioritize the interpersonal mode less and less, even as students are working towards pushing their proficiency ever further.  I need to take a hard look at my unit themes and objectives, and consider how I can make more space for interpersonal communication — the heart of why most people want to learn another language.”

Interpersonal communication comes naturally to a first-year language course.  The early Novice curriculum is teeming with questions: first memorized ones (“What’s your name? How old are you? Where are you from?”), then open-ended ones (“What do you like to do in your free time? What is your family/friend/teacher like?”), and follow-up questions serve as a natural tool for students with limited language to rely on (“You like video games? Me too.  What’s your favorite game?”).  As we enter Novice High, though, and the focus of topics broadens from “All About Me” to “The World Around Me”, sometimes interpersonal prompts can start to feel a little… forced.  If we’re learning about the cultural products, practices and perspectives related to Japanese homes, for example, we can certainly talk about our own homes — but is that something I actually want to talk about in the Target Language?

By the time my students are approaching Intermediate, it seems like the “interpersonal” questions we’re asking are really miniature presentational speaking tasks in disguise.  In one unit I taught this year called “How do we express love through food?”, we used Japanese obentou (packed lunches) as a cultural lens.  When I directed students to interview each other on their experience with obentou using questions such as “What is your ideal obentou like?” and “What kind of lunch did you take to school as a kid?”, I faced a dilemma.  Having kids charge into the conversation with no scaffolding resulted in weak, Novice-level answers.  Yet when I gave them the questions to think about beforehand, I could literally see the pained looks on my students’ faces as they worked to script out and then memorize answers in order to prepare for our “conversations”.  Interpersonal mode is supposed to be spontaneous and organic… but how to support Intermediate level conversations while still providing scaffolding and support?

Not two weeks after pondering these issues in my April blog post, I found myself attending the annual spring workshop hosted by my state’s Japanese teacher organization.  Our guest lecturer was Tomoko Takami of the University of Pennsylvania, who guided us through lessons from her textbook for Business Japanese classes, “Powering Up Your Japanese through Case Studies: Intermediate and Advanced Japanese”.  Being a “student” in Takami-sensei’s class made it instantly apparent what a master teacher she is, and I was delighted to discover those strategies for scaffolding interpersonal communication for Intermediate students I had been searching for just weeks ago!  Ask, and you shall receive.  Blog about what you’re struggling with in your practice — really articulate where the issues lie — and the solutions to your problems have a way of seeking you out, it seems like.

When I wrote that blog post, I was wondering if the themes I had chosen were my problems, and silently dreading the thought that I might yet again have to go build new units around brand new themes in order to better focus on interpersonal communication.  But Takami-sensei’s lecture made me realize that themes are just an ends to a means: making our students more proficient.   Takami-sensei’s Business Japanese course is built around case studies of various corporations in Japan, a topic I would have never gravitated towards or thought to be personally interesting.  Her course is not really focused on learning about Japanese companies, however, but simply using them as a springboard to inspire opinions and discussions on everyday life.

During Takami-sensei’s lecture, we worked through several activities she uses in a chapter from her textbook on Coca-Cola Japan.  The goldmine conversations weren’t around topics like “What is your favorite Coke product?” or “Does your family drink a lot of soda?”, but rather, tasks that required us to negotiate opinions with partners.  In one activity, we examined three different “only in Japan” beverage products, and were asked to decide as a group which one we’d recommend to start selling in the U.S.  You wouldn’t believe how passionate people got justifying their opinions!

Remember how I said earlier that as Novices shift to Intermediates, the topics seem to move from “All About Me” to the “The World Around Me”?  I think one of the secrets to interpersonal communication at the Intermediate level is that the questions no longer have to be exclusively about me/my experiences.  During Takami-sensei’s activity, the opportunity to scaffold was still there (we had a handout with pictures of the three products, and space to write our opinions on each product before the conversation), but the scope of the task was expanded.  Unlike what students had been doing in my own class, we were not merely asking for each other’s answers: we had to listen and respond to each other’s ideas, in order to reach a group consensus.  Perhaps it’s that built-in higher purpose — talk with each other and apply that information to a greater task — that seems to light the organic “spark” of interpersonal communication beyond the Novice level.

Upon returning to school after Takami-sensei’s lecture, I immediately began trying out some of the strategies she had shown us, and instantly noticed an improvement in the quality and spontaneity of my students’ interpersonal interactions.  In that same unit on obentou, I showed my students pictures of three different packed lunches, and asked them to decide which one would best accompany the article we were about to read, based solely on the title.  These kinds of open-ended interpersonal tasks (unlike those earlier questions about students’ experiences with packed lunches) lack a “true”/right answer, and I think it’s that sense of freedom that opens up more natural and authentic interpersonal communication.  Even when my students’ structures broke down or they resorted to using more Novice-level language we had learned in previous years, the fact that they had to connect evidence from an external source to build and give an opinion meant that they were connecting thoughts and sentences in a way that sounded more like Intermediate-level conversation.

Another activity we did in Takami-sensei’s lecture was a simple Jigsaw Reading that artfully connected the Interpretive and Interpersonal modes.  During the lecture, we were given just the first paragraph from a short article explaining the development of the Japanese beverage product “Qoo”, and read it together as a class.  Then, we divided into groups of 4, and each group member was assigned one of the remaining 4 paragraphs.  However, the paragraphs were NOT labeled with the correct order, meaning that our task was to a) silently read our own paragraph, and then take turns paraphrasing its content, without directly reading it aloud or letting anyone else see/read it, and b) decide the correct order of the paragraphs.  This proved to be no small task — only a third of the groups managed to come up with the correct order in the time limit!  But even the groups who didn’t get the right answer still engaged in a vigorous, task-oriented conversation.  The article was a stimulus, and a valuable source of input, but not the end goal of this ultimately interpersonal activity.

I never expected to walk away from a lecture on university Business Japanese courses with so many lessons learned on how to structure interpersonal communication in my own classes.  But the moral of the story is, great teaching is great teaching, and can always facilitate learning, no matter the topic.  Here are my Big Three Takeaways from Takami-sensei’s presentation, which I not only used to strengthen interpersonal discussions in my Intermediate class at the end of this year, but I’ll also reflect upon as I plan for my Novice level classes next year:

  • Interpersonal conversations don’t have to only be about me and my experiences.  At a certain point, it becomes “easier” to talk about an external stimulus, like a picture or article, than it is to narrate about myself.
  • Asking and responding to questions should not be the end-goal of an interpersonal interaction.  Quality interpersonal tasks often center around a larger problem or goal that necessitates eliciting information from others.
  • Though we teachers tend to get really excited about selecting and planning themes, they’re really subservient to our primary goal of moving students’ language ability forward.  Any theme can serve as fertile ground for interpersonal discourse, as long as the unit is not reduced to the mere dissemination of knowledge about a certain topic.