Hey guys Hope you’re having a great year!
Just an update of how things are going here in Oregon. Starting last year, I got my colleagues to show an authentic Spanish soap opera in some of our classes. I was movie talking the show and my students loved it but as the semester went on I sort of was not loving it.
This year started up and we are showing it again and I was starting to dread novela days. I went too slow for my colleagues last year and had to make some adjustments to keep up without losing 96% of my students along the way.
I have been sort of reminding my colleagues how slow we need to go with even level 3 and 4 kids and they understand but don’t really believe it. I was actually having a pretty bad year, but last month we all went to Mike Peto’s workshop and he explained how he does this and it confirmed everything I was doing before and surprisingly my colleagues were really open to making changes.
But that was right after the workshop… a little time has passed and they are struggling with it. One colleague told me it feels wrong to not just explain the dialogue or to stop the show every like 5-20 seconds. But today I did it exactly like Mike did, the way I had always understood movie talk to be done, and it was great!
My students really were engaged we got through one scene and we nailed it down. After that I stopped the show and we did a write and discuss. When I stopped it, one girl commented that she thought that we should just keep watching it. We all understand what’s going on, so we don’t need to write it all down. But I didn’t listen to that noise. The kids gave me so much to write that we only had time to w/d and then chorally translate.
After the bell rang that same girl came up to me and said that at first she didn’t want to do that and that when we were writing it she thought it was boring, but that she totally understood why we did it. She said all that writing and discussing and translating made it just “click” and she told me she felt like she was really learning! In the span of 10 minutes that girl was convinced. Write and Discuss for the win!
Thanks again for everything you have taught me!
Russ