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5 thoughts on “Next Year”
Love these suggestions, particularly in training kids to do the reading groups themselves and going back to the basics. One of the things that has helped me the most this year is having an exploratory 7th grade class that I teach for 9 weeks. Each group, I’ve tightened up on how much English I don’t speak and how tightly I enforce the rules (fist in palm, focus from actors, have them police me for English, SLOW, etc.). This seventh grade experiment in repeated beginnings has really shown me that I can establish a great relationship with students without needing English to do it.
To be brutally honest, my reliance on English hasn’t been so much out of laziness, but as a need to prop up my own image of myself as a clever, insightful and often wise-cracking teacher who “gets” it. To a degree I’ve been a taskmaster in German and softened that by being a cool guy in English. So yes, my overuse of English hasn’t been so much a laziness issue as an identity issue. The big gift my seventh graders have given me (and my German Is that I stubbornly refused to “give-in” as much as I did my IIs, IIIs and IVs) is that I can see how to develop strong relationships while staying in the target language (plenty of snark and wise-cracking and bad jokes to go around in the course of the stories).
So basically, my main goal is to make the rules my own by believing enough in them from Day 1 to enforce them and live them.
With that baseline established, my other major goal for next year is to really knuckle down and develop a plan that I’m happy with for my III/IV combined class. Often this year my focus was getting my TPRS feet under me, and while that played well to my Is and IIs, the different tastes of my III/IV students really got neglected. With my upper level classes, the buy-in to TPRS was a long time coming not just because of the well-documented growing pains for grammar-dominated groups, but also because I was a bit tone-deaf to the content that they prefer as well.
My lower level classes are happy with goofy and stylin’ imaginative stories, but my upper level classes crave something more “real.” Our best extended successes this year came out of situations where I was developing and reacting to things that really happened: Springboarding off of “The Big Picture” series to talk about world events and getting them interested in what happens internationally really was a lifeline because my upper level classes enjoy having their worldview pushed, challenged and expanded; I translated a few funny “stupid criminal” police reports and then we had a couple week extended riff on creating our own (great way to do passive voice, by the way); taking news articles written by actual German high-school aged students in a major german newspaper (Jugend Schreibt series in the FAZ) and simplifying the language to their accessibility level (time consuming, but nice payoff). In a nutshell, my upper level students are starting to see themselves as participants in the larger world out there, and I need to do a better job fostering that interest.
Unfortunately, my current III/IV group didn’t have the German skills to really meaningfully discusss the ideas I was giving them in any depth, but the interest was definitely there and I can’t wait to have these conversations more in German as my TPRS higher-proficiency students move up through the pipeline.
Nathan said:
“To be brutally honest, my reliance on English hasn’t been so much out of laziness, but as a need to prop up my own image of myself as a clever, insightful and often wise-cracking teacher who “gets” it.”
Oh boy does the truth cut. That’s me for over three decades as well, Nathan, but I could never quite say/admit it. Thanks! Now that I’m outed on that, I’m gonna have to deep six the ego games and get about the business of going from 90% to like 97 or 98% French.
Great post Nathan. Nice use of the word snark, especially.
Michele I wanted to add a thought to the assessment discussion in the above. I found out that by turning the last huge embedded reading of the year into the actual final exam, in which we spend the last few classes before the year getting deep via repetition into the (50% new) embedded stuff and then doing a (5 point each) 20 question T/F test as the actual final (using the first 55 of the 70 minutes to go over the text and discuss it yet again), I found that they HAD to pay attention or risk flunking the final. Now, in addition to the short quiz dominant way of assessing I described above, I think it will be possible at the end of each grading period to replicate what I did with the above. I can report back on that around November, when I’ve had a chance to see how ending each grading period with six or so embedded readings and then a big T/F test to end the grading period has worked. I think it will work well because, if you notice what I describe above with using the first ten minutes of class as a grade and now using a big embedded reading, grown from a story, as a big kind of final assessment for each grading period (ours are six week periods), what I am REALLY doing is tying assessment to their behavior, in the case of the quizzes their attendance and tardiness (a big problem in our huge urban school – largest in CO), and to their simply paying attention in class, which the embedded reading tests require. I don’t really need to test them in the old sense of “finding out what they know” because I talk to them in French every day and see them write and we translate readings based on stories together and so now I can see that I have morphed into an assessment policy that uses quizzes/tests as described above to keep their asses in line and focused in class, during the term by being ready to go from the beginning of class and not skipping class without a grade penalty, and by having a huge test loom at the end of each term. If we weren’t in a school, we wouldn’t even need to assess anyway, so blending assessment with discipline works for me.
I’m so glad I did a final in the way that (I think) a few of you described doing this year. I typed up a nice long story with changeable details and all, and just started telling the story and circling (not much though), asking for a detail here or there where I could be flexible. Then, a 10 question listening quiz over that story. Then they get the reading (with a few different details than the story), with 10 questions (in English) at the end. This makes sense, since this is how we did class all year. I know the kids preferred it too, because they felt comfortable with it.
I also did a writing sample, not to grade, but just to have. I copied a page out of Blaine’s LICT without the text, and had them write a story with as much detail and richness of language as they could in 15-20 minutes.
I will comment on my thoughts for next year later…
In 4th quarter, I think I made some significant gains in decreasing my use of English in the classroom – particularly with my “newbie” exploratory classes. My resolution for next year is to continue to decrease English usage and increase TL usage. Below are a couple of things that have been working for me to help reach that goal. I would love to hear if anyone else has some concrete ideas for using less English…
-consider directions that I want students to be able to follow (look at me, put your pencil down, read along with me silently…) and TPR those phrases, plus build stories around them
-tight scripts which I HAVE WORKED THROUGH BEFORE CLASS based off of student SGS’s = personalization + advance planning (Sadly, it’s taken me a while to see that the free-wheeling of Circling with Balls/Props or making up a story on the spot doesn’t work super-well for me – I feel (at least for now) that I am left way too open to adding too much new vocabulary when I try to TPRS that way)
-Having students write their (English) ideas on paper has helped to limit VERBAL English in the classroom; however, I would really like to move toward not using even that much English. So, what to do? Tighter scripts? Vocab lists to expand students’ TL vocab (say, 5 nouns/week with visuals posted on the front bulletin board)? Cognate lists to expand students’ TL vocab?
I’d love to hear some concrete ideas from others who have limited or are working at limiting English usage in the FL classroom! Thanks!
Talking about next year. WE NEED A TPRS TEACHER to replace Diane Grieman.
7th and 8th grade Spanish + one very small bilingual class (6th grade) + some other non-teaching stuff. Diane has posted the job announcement on both of the tprs listserves.
If you know of anyone really qualified for the position, experienced at and willing to use comprehensible input methods, with middle-school experience , willing to work in a very fast-paced private-school environment in San Francisco, with native-like fluency in Spanish and excellent English-speaking and writing skills, please contact one of us. (I teach 4th, 5th, and 6th, and work very closely with the 7/8 teacher since we are such a tiny department.)
This is happening so late in the year (with fewer than two weeks left of school). We need to fill the position ASAP. Please spread the news to those you believe are truly ready/qualified for the job. At this place, you have come in for a landing, running at about 140 mph. Parts of the job are easier than you may have experienced before. Others are very difficult. I’d really love to work with someone who is as committed as I am to the principles we talk about daily on this blog.
jnoble@sfds.net
dgrieman@sfds.net