Thinking on your feet-Carol Gaab and Kristy Placido

I love watching these two together!  They are a laugh a minute!  Here's what I got:

• Circling is like salt: great for seasoning, but it shouldn't be the whole meal.
• Introduce each vocabulary item as excited as if you were bringing a favorite item to show and tell.  If you have to fake it, do it!  You are just trying to one-up the others.
• Use emotions to engage your students
• Look at twitter feeds of current events with your students (Carol's example was tweets about the winner of the Home Run Derby who was being criticized for not speaking English)
• Do things when they are timely-doesn't have to be the day they happen, but don't wait a week!
• Search "Just for Laughs" on youtube to get some great wordless videos to teach structures.
• Some structures don't lend themselves to PQA, so don't try to force it if it's not happening!
• Have kids ask questions about a story if you already have it planned.
• Use Poll Everywhere in your class (Carol's example was "If you found a wallet, would you return it?" and students texted in Yes, definitely!, Maybe, No way!)
• Use videos with different goals to increase novelty
• If the video has an utterance of the target structure, pause it and ask "What did s/he just say?"  You can also then rewind and hear it again.
• Count the number of (girls, times he misses something, objects she picks up, etc)
• Create a narrative to go with a silent film (you can also record the dialogue and put it with the movie using Movie Maker or Garage Band)
• Come up with one line of dialogue for the next 30 seconds of film
• Ask me a question about what you just saw and it can't be an "is" question.
• I need to find French mimes to bring some comedy to my class
• Use lingro.com to support students with authentic texts on websites
• If you have a musician in a story, don't just use Justin Bieber: ask your students at the door to give you the name of their favorite musicians.
• Respect your students and listen to them.  Even if it takes 5 minutes away from the TL...it validates them and your relationship with them.
• Use pictures of your students as visuals to support your stories (this reminds me of Betsy's visual story...)

Round table discussion

During the exhibitors fair, I sat down at a table with my roommate Crystal (holla Crystal!) and luckily, people just started joining us!  I like to think that it's because Crystal and I look really interesting, friendly, and beautiful, but it's probably because there were only two tables in the room.  Anyway, we started talking with people like Leah from Tennessee and Joyce (?) from the Netherlands and many others (I'm sorry I can't remember more names, but my brain is mush at this point, remember?).  We found a common thread: we are the outcasts in our departments, but we are doing the right thing and it makes sense to those who aren't language teachers drilled in the art of grammar worksheets.

Leah had inspiring stories about working in a rural district where students hate language and their parents support that view because those dang im'grints should just learn to speak 'mercan by gosh!  She is in a battle with her colleagues, who spend most of their day in the copy room, making worksheets or sitting at their desks while the kids watch movies.  She has tried to collaborate, but they aren't interested in sharing ideas.  How sad.  My experience with building-level collaboration has always been fantastic.  Even though I was usually the only teacher using TPRS, we worked together on so many things!  Just because I teach differently doesn't mean that we can't learn from each other.  Every teacher (even the worst) has good ideas, right?  So we rallied around Leah and encouraged her to do what she believes is right and to share when she's comfortable without using the word TPRS.  Say it's an activity that worked and just share it.  They'll either be open to it and it might work for them or they'll ignore you.  At least you tried!

Here is something that I took from Leah that I am going to try really hard to remember for next year.  She had her students at the end of the year write letters to the new students for next year.  So the 1st years who are just winding up their first year in class write what to expect/advice for next year's first year class to receive at the beginning of the year.  Then, Leah goes through, picks the ones that are most beneficial and photocopies them for the beginning of the next school year.  How great is that?

Teacher Talk with Scott Benedict

After all of the sessions, I felt like I still had a bunch of questions that needed answers (and I was actually trying to find the beautiful Laurie Clarcq), so I headed upstairs to the coaching/teacher talk room.  It looked as if I was out of luck when Scott Benedict walked in the door and said that he was supposed to be working!  Hooray!  An expert to answer all my questions in a no-holds-barred manner.

First, we talked about how to assess my new students, since I will be walking in blind.  I have no idea what they learned/acquired last year.  I asked if he uses a test and he said "Not if I can help it!"  He does what I did last year (good to know my instincts were right) and has them do a free-write as close to the first day of school as possible.  He does this for all levels (even level one) and keeps them in a file so that the students (and parents and administrators) can SEE their progress throughout the year.

Second, Scott gave me a good reason why my students are producing accurately in writing.  He said that all French needs to be given orally and visually AT THE SAME TIME so that students make those connections.  He said that this isn't as important with other languages with phonetic spelling, but in French, there are too many silent letters.  This makes grammar pop-ups so much easier.  Thank you Scott!  I thought I was a failure or that TPRS didn't work because my kids just couldn't spell some words in French.  But now that I think about it, it was those words that I didn't keep up for them to see.  They needed more time LOOKING at the word.  So exciting.

My next question was about creating curriculum/choosing what to teach.  For next year, my new colleagues and I spent a LONG time working on curriculum for French 1 and 2 (which I already feel pretty confident teaching) and virtually no time on 3-5, except to explain the IB test and give me the basic outline and the textbook.  So I am feeling overwhelmed with these two huge textbooks, plus the novels that we are supposed to teach each year.  So I asked Scott to guide me (again) through the basics of adapting a text for TPRS.  This is what he said:

1. Find a French frequency dictionary (luckily I have one already) and look through the vocabulary presented in the book.  If it is in the top 2000 words, the students should be expected to produce those words in speaking and writing in an upper level class.  If it is between 2001-5000, they should be able to recognize the word in context.  If it is any higher than that, it shouldn't be taught unless it is relevant to the students.  (I'm thinking of Carol Gaab teaching her students all the baseball terms.  Essential for her students, but not necessarily for mine)
2. Look at the grammar points and decide if it is something I would use daily.  (I have to admit that I struggle with this because I have never been able to produce those higher grammar structures.  I have always tried to work around them...  So I'll have to be tricky when figuring this part out.  I'll talk to my native friends)

And that was it!  Very super helpful information and I thank Scott so much for being willing to share all of his knowledge with us.  Awesome!  He is making ripples, I can tell you that!  One of my new colleagues even asked me if I had heard of SBG and said that she had heard of this guy Scott Benedict who has given presentation on SBG with WL, have I heard of him?  Great to be able to say that I've spoken to him face-to-face!

Reading in under an hour-Betsy Paskvan

I have to admit that I was so involved in learning Japanese, that I didn't take many notes in this session.  So I'll break down the process and then I'll put in my notes...

1. Select a culminating reading (this goes back to the idea of being intentional with what we are teaching)
2. Pull out structures that your students don't know, that are high frequency, and that are NOT cognates
3. Establish meaning of those structures and gesture (if you feel like it)
4. PQA
5. Break your story into pieces with visual support (I LOVED this idea, but I'm not sure how much time it will take...)
6. Read as a group (this is actually read and discuss: asking questions like who, what, how, where, etc)

Everything was pretty understandable, but I loved how Betsy had her story broken up on the PowerPoint.  Our story was about Tom, Gatsby, and Daisy from the Great Gatsby and the story was basically that Tom and Gatsby liked Daisy, who was beautiful, but she didn't like them.  So the first slide was a picture of Gatsby (Leo from the movie) with the text "There was Leo" next to a picture of Daisy with "There was Daisy" next to a picture of Tom "There was Tom"  The next slide was another picture of Daisy with the text "Daisy is beautiful" next to a picture of Mia Farrow as Daisy with text "Mia is also beautiful"  You get the idea.  For me, a super novice with Japanese, it was immensely helpful.  I'm sure it will be for my students as well.

Okay, here's where the awesome thing happened.  After we read through the picture, we read the boring old text with no pictures.  She had us get with a partner.  One partner looked at the text and tried to help the other partner (with back to text) re-tell the story.  Here's the genius part:  the practice was not for the person trying to re-tell the story because they are just struggling like crazy.  The person who is actually getting the help and the repetitions is the partner helping the re-teller because they are reading the story AGAIN without realizing it!  Amazing, right?  Then, here's what little-miss-smarty-pants Betsy did next.  She asked for a volunteer partnership to model for the class.  And then the WHOLE class was reading the story AGAIN without realizing it!!!  That Betsy, she's sneaky :)

Like I said, I didn't take a ton of notes because the Japanese was just too fascinating.  Great session!

Upper level Strategies-Pt 2

Our Monday lunch presentation with Stephen Krashen was a little strange, so I'll blog about all of that later, after I get a chance to see the man in person later tonight...

So back to the upper level strategies.  I have to admit that my brain is turning to mush from so much input, so I'm hoping to get it all down here now before I have to learn more.  One day later, and I'm already having difficulties decoding my notes.

We started with Reading strategies.  The ladies recommend PQA and a story before giving students the story in print.  While you are reading your text, you are pointing out (or asking them to find) structures that have just been taught, linguistics, translations for meaning or for money (as described in the previous blog), ambiguous words that might exist in the TL (ex. to, two, and too in English), and finally, word families.  I had no idea what a word family is, but it's taking a noun, like hair (bad example), and finding the adverb, adjective, or verb that goes with that word.  If you know of a better example, please put it in the comments, because I know they exist, but I can't for the life of me think of any right now.  Mushy brain!

Next, we went back to the weekend activity to move it more into writing.  I touched on this yesterday, but here are some more ideas from Carmen and Lynnette.  First, have students write about their weekends instead of doing it as an oral task.  Lynnette says that the first time she does this with classes, she checks in with them afterwards.  "What was hard about this?  What did you want to say that you didn't know how to say?" and she answers the questions, writing needed structures on the board.  Then, she has them do the writing a second time (without looking at their first writing), with the aid of the board.  After this, she has them exchange papers with a partner and the partner finds one really good thing in the paper and corrects one mistake.  They give back the papers, teacher answers any new questions, and they do the writing a third time (still without looking at the previous writing).  After this one, Lynnette collects the papers and grades them.  I love this idea of scaffolding the writing so that the students are engaged in writing and EVERY student makes progress.  If they started with one sentence, I'm betting that they are writing more than that the third time.  It's genius because it allows each student to focus on what THEY can do better the next time.  If they aren't ready to check for agreement between subject and past participle, they don't work on that yet. (I think Bryce gave me that word on moreTPRS a few weeks ago).  Great stuff.

Now, when grading writing, both Carmen and Lynnette say that they don't usually correct for errors.  IF they do, they say to only correct 10 errors because that way each student is equal.  They start by focusing on the errors that hinder comprehension and that should be internalized and then move to smaller errors if they still "need" more errors to get to ten.

In this session, there was a lot of encouragement of metacognition by the students.  Carmen uses a reflection sheet so that each student reflects on what they are putting into class, how that is reflected by what they are learning, and what the student can do in the future to get better.  I am definitely going to be doing some sort of reflection in the future.

The last two nuggets that I got from this session don't really fit with the title, but I will put them here:

• Lynnette had a brilliant insight.  She asks students to imagine themselves at 35 with the life they want.  Then she asks, "When you are there, what would you pay to have someone teach you?"  Think about this.  As an adult, I would never choose to learn calculus.  I would never pay for a biology class for entertainment.  But I will pay for cooking classes, language classes, and the arts classes.  It's amazing that we are the bottom of the totem pole at school when you think of things like that.
• Also, I found out about the Badass Teacher group on facebook.  This is for teachers who don't believe that schools are failing, who don't believe that today's kids are horrible, and who don't believe that teachers are only in it for the summers off.  These are teachers with a fire in their hearts for students and who take offense to being the butts of jokes and the scapegoat for an invisible problem.  So I joined.  If you consider yourself a Badass Teacher, I invite you to join too!

Upper Level Strategies (pt 1) by Lynnette St George & Carmen (in Vegas baby!) Andrews

With my new teaching position next year, I knew that I needed some information on how to make TPRS work for the upper levels.  I have a new colleague who has told me that TPRS just does not work with high schoolers.  Now, I should say that I think she uses a lot of CI techniques and is probably using TPRS in a narrow scope to mean telling silly stories about cats.  When I say TPRS, I mean all of the exciting things that I can bring into my classroom that came to be because of Blaine’s initial spark of telling stories to teach a language.  But I digress…

The main point (as I understood it), is to start any lesson with a goal and to be intentional with what and how we teach.  It seems common sense, but we really need to look at a structure or a grammar point and decide what we want students to be able to do with that structure.  Do we want them to be able to produce it correctly in writing? Speaking?  Or do we just need them to recognize it if they hear or read it?  Depending on our answer to that question, we need to adjust our teaching.  If we want them to produce it, they will need many more repetitions and practice with the structure than if we simply need them to recognize it. 

The main example Lynnette used as a model was an essay that she has her students write on their favorite movie.  In order to complete this assessment, they need to have a good knowledge of movie vocabulary, like horror movie, director, actor and they need to know how to make comparisons (I liked Jason Sudeikis better in Horrible Bosses than I did in Hall Pass).  So, Lynnette starts a LONG time before she actually asks the students to even think about writing anything.  The first step would be the introduction of talking about movies in the Monday weekend talk.  “Who saw a movie this weekend?  Did you like it?  Where did you see it?  Do you prefer seeing movies at home or in a theatre? Etc.” 

One thing that Lynnette said that stood out in my mind was the idea of avoiding one word answers by telling students they have to start their utterance with the word “I” (or he/she if they are answering the question about a classmate).  So simple, yet soooooo effective. 

Once the students have had enough practice with that, you start asking discussion questions on the topic.  In this example, some questions were “What is the title of an exceptional film?  Who is the principle actor?  What is the genre of this movie?  What kind of music did they use in the film?” And then ask some opinion questions about the film.  You wouldn’t ask these questions one after the other, but rather sprinkle them over multiple days or even weeks.  Then, when you actually ask the students to write the essay, they are already very comfortable with the vocabulary and have a good idea of what they want to say. 

We then talked about assessing speaking and writing in a quick, dipstick assessment vs a summative assessment.  On the dipstick, Carmen uses three grades: exceeds (can independently answer the task), meets (can answer the task, but needs some guidance), or below (can’t do it, even with help).  For a summative assessment, these change to A-above instruction level, B-meets instruction level, C-sometimes meets, D-below, F-far below.  The great thing about this is that YOU decide what the instruction level is.  If you aren’t worried too much about tense at that point in the year because you haven’t focused on it enough, DON’T GRADE IT!  They also suggested having anchor samples for yourself or your department so that everyone can remember what a B or an A looks like at the end of first quarter.  I love this idea!

Here is another HUGE take-away from this workshop: make your goal intentional by asking students at the end of each class/week/unit what they’ve accomplished in the last 50 minutes, using an “I can…” statement.  This helps students with metacognition and takes away some of the “All we do in French class is sing and tell stories” because students are constantly thinking of how much they’ve learned.  You can also ask “What’s hard about this?” and “What’s going to make it easier?”  I love this idea so much and I can’t wait to use it in the classroom!

When we started talking about listening, Carmen had a great idea that I have used in the past, but that I want to really focus on for next year.  In the past, I have told my students that “Je m’appelle” means “I call myself” but I don’t force them to read it like that when we do oral translations.  I did have a class that insisted on translating it that way, and I loved it, but I didn’t force it.  I will from now on because Carmen pointed out that, in the beginning, it puts focus on the meaning in a way that prevents silly slip-ups like saying “Je m’appelle est” because that would just be ridiculous!  She calls it translating literally versus translating for pay.  If someone were paying you, you would make it sound as natural as possible, but when you are translating literally, you read each word.  LOVE IT!  I also got a great natural use of the subjunctive in a daily class way.  Carmen says “I want that you take out your books” instead of using the imperative.  I’m thinking…maybe imperative for French 1 and 2 and then switch to subjunctive in 3 and up??

NTPRS 2013 arrival!

Well, here I am in Dallas in the hotel room that I am sharing with two strangers (at least they were strangers before last night!).  Thanks to the NTPRS website, I found two wonderful women to share a room with and to share insights into the conference and the life of a TPRSer.  I am hoping to be able to blog daily about each session and workshop, but the wifi slows down in the evenings when everyone is in their rooms working…  So we shall see!  It was so good to see familiar faces this morning and get my hug from Blaine!  LOVE these people!