About a week ago I posted an article about Danielle, a member of the current Zoom group studying the Ultimate CI Book 1. Danielle was facing a difficult middle-of-the-year observation process, made no less difficult by Covid as well as an entrenched way of teaching grammar in her building. Her pre-observation meeting didn’t go well, because of her tenacious devotion to CI instruction. But she nailed the observation! Below is a letter she chose to send to her principal after the observation but before the post -observation, which I will report on when that happens in the next few weeks. After all, if we are not diligent in communicating what we are doing in our language classes with our employer, then all the hard work we do in the classroom leaves us open to the words of others. To find other posts on this thread with Danielle, you can search her name here, or click on the “Observation Suggestions” and/or “When Observed” categories on the right of this page.
Dear [name of school principal]:
I thought that I would send you some reflections on our observation before we meet for the post-observation meeting.
Since I am required to teach the colors and other semantic groupings throughout the year to prepare the kids for next year, I hope you noticed how the kids learned their colors in rich contextual comprehensible input. They were not bored.
What I am trying to do in my teaching now is to move away from requiring my students to memorize words from lists, which they eventually forget, or fill-in-the-blanks activities/worksheets etc. The rich personalized context is what brings the interest. That is why I chose to talk about Lanie and her card.
Even though I am relatively new to this way of teaching, I feel it’s the best for my students, because it aligns with the standards and the research. For those of my students who are not good at memorizing lists, I want them to still feel and believe that they can gain fluency in Spanish one day.
Many students give up for good without being given enough encouragement when they are young, but it is my firm belief that anyone can learn a language, if they are only given the encouragement. As I continue to teach, each year I am learning more and more that teaching is mostly about instilling confidence in students that they can do it.
As I understand it, the new paradigm in language instruction is about providing students with interesting and compelling input (vs. memorization). I’m not an expert on Dr. Krashen and the other language researchers, although I’m working on it, but I do know that the research indicates the need for interesting and compelling input to happen in a language classroom before we can expect quality speech and writing to emerge in our students.
The thing about all this is that the standard is Communication, and so I feel obliged to try to teach that way. I went looking through the ACTFL web pages a few weeks ago and didn’t find the word grammar in there, not even once. Maybe it’s there, but I didn’t see it.
I feel that down the road I’ll be able to get the mechanical kinks out of my comprehension-based instruction as I keep learning and practicing. The other big goal I have for my instruction is to make sure that I teach all the other stuff that the kids need for high school, obviously. To meet that goal, I have decided to set aside 2-3 days per week to align with what my colleagues expect my kids to have learned in my class.
I feel excited to be going down this road, especially since this way of teaching keeps screens on in online settings. I know that we didn’t have any online students for the class you observed, but the next time I met with that group I had most of the 16 kids who were at home, of the 22, engaged online as well. I think that by the end of class there was only one screen off, which I consider a success.
I even wrote a letter to the parents about that class, to share how exciting it was to see those screens on and the kids involved. I am attaching a copy of that letter FYI.
Thanks for coming to my class,
Danielle Palmiotto
Here is the letter I sent to the parents:
Dear Parents and Guardians of my Spanish 6 Class,
Today I had the pleasure of being with your children via Zoom. We spent an extraordinary 50 minutes together and I felt it was important to communicate that with you. Most of the students had their cameras on and for that I am so grateful. Interpersonal communication, one of ACTFL’s Three Modes of Communication and one of the philosophical underpinnings of the standard, is what builds our confidence and sense of community with each other.
I am hopeful that with time (sooner rather than later), all the students will feel comfortable enough to leave their cameras on for the entire time. I won’t go into the details about why our class was extraordinary today, but I do want to say how excited I am for these coming two semesters to have the chance to teach Spanish to your children. If they continue to communicate in the way that they did today, then we are going to have an excellent rest of the year.
Muchas Gracias,
Danielle Palmiotto