ACTFL 2014: Year End Professional Learning Recap

After preparing the ENTIRE Thanksgiving dinner for a few guests and preparing over 100 gingerbread man cookies for the annual holiday decorating party that took place at my home this year, As you can imagine, I was delighted to be able to just hang out with friends and family for a couple of weeks.

Just before that holiday whirlwind, I attended the American Council on The Teaching of Foreign Languages' annual convention. This year, it took place in gorgeous San Antonio, Texas. How fortunate was I to get full funding from my school for this four-day professional learning experience! Not only did I attend many inspiring sessions, but I co-presented on phototelling (Click here to access our presentation and resources:  Phototelling on the Go: Using Instagram to Engage Students in Learning ) and supported fellow #langchat team members during our session on the chat.  Many thanks to my administrators for providing me with this opportunity!

In recent years, I've gotten in the habit of just tweeting the big (or just cool) ideas that I hear at professional learning events. Fortunately, I printed all of my tweets related to the ACTFL convention upon my return to school the following Monday since I knew I'd be thawing a turkey and entertaining over the next couple of weeks. So, after about six weeks, I am able to revisit my printed tweets and handouts in order to share my learning with you. Hope you find some inspiration in these notes.

-Annie Griffiths, the keynote speaker, kicked off the convention with a brilliant talk on her life as a photographer. Favorites from the keynote: 1. "People are nice if you try (to speak a language." 2. "When you are out in the world, have a smile on your face... Teach our kids to be fearless (in exploration and language study.")  3. "Get out of your comfort zone."  4.  "Photography has power unlike no other art form. All educators can show the world in images to their learners." 5. "When you come in with solutions, you have to listen to the people."

-On motivation:  Greta Lungaard (@gretafromtexas) led this session on what seemed to be a recurring theme this year --  and, boy, is it one that challenges us all!  She shared with us that content might need to be more about what the learners want then what we want in the level one course. She also talked about the need to facilitate experiences in which learners take ownership of their learning.

-On attrition:  Greg Duncan, a world language consultant, also spoke about motivation, and highly recommended John Keller's Theory of Motivation for professional reading. In Maria Nuzzo's research on attrition (2006,) she found that world language learners want to be able to speak in their language course.

Session participants sighed when Duncan shared that 75% of world language learners drop their language course when the requirement has been met. This is the national average, according to his research. Duncan suggested that educators create a quick and easy survey to ask learners to complete in order to find out what will make them stay.

He ended the session with a little discussion on that pesky grammar that seems to be such a controversial topic in world language educator circles.  He sums it up well:  "Grammar is not necessarily hard. It's the quantity that's hard. We are a fire hose of grammar."  He told us that we need to ask ourselves some questions when planning learning experiences: Which grammar? When do we bring it in? How much?

-On interpretive tasks:  Ken Stewart and another Spanish educator colleague whose name has escaped me led this session which was of particular interest to me.  I must say, it was a wise decision to show up for this one as it was informative.
    -Translation is not an interpretive task.
    -We remember 10% of what we read. (from research published in Cognitive Science, 1989)
    -When preparing for an interpretive task, make it a reading AND listening or speaking task. It                helps with the 10% reading retention issue.
    -Ask students to underline and annotate. Reading is always a writing task.
    -Intonation matters.
     -Task idea: Compose a title or headline for a text.
     -For novice-low learners, ask them to write two truths and one lie regarding a text they read.
            Use their work to discuss the text. (We will be trying this one out in the spring!)
     -Make a Wordle to show the key words to learners. Give them time to write what they think                 the text will be about.
      -Consider creating a table with poems and countries listed for each level you're teaching. It is                a great visual to reference when planning.
         
-On voice and choice: The session title and presenter's name have escaped me, but I'll edit this post with that information once I find it.
    -Voice and choice means that it is MY story and  I choose how to tell it.
    -In order to make small changes that empower learners, you could let them determine the order that      tasks will be done during a given class period or unit.
    -With the amount of tech tools at our fingertips, learners have a lot of choice as to how they share.         Our learners are NOT digital natives. They need our guidance for purposeful use of technology           for learning.
    - Concerning proficiency levels, ask learners to explain what levels of proficiency would look like         for an activity they love. I need to do this one at some point.

Voilà ! Hope you found something interesting to try in your classroom.
Have a great week!

Celebrating Learning : The Return to Campus & Community

Welcome back to school! Bonne rentrée !  If you haven't returned to school yet, I wish you a happy return to campus when you get there! In either scenario, I hope you will find some inspiration from this post.  Below are some thoughts I have on what we should include on the agenda during those first days with our learning community. Of course, the wonderful thing about life as an educator is that we can achieve these types of goals in numerous ways.

1. Determine what you want your learners to be able to do at the end of the course and create an opportunity to work towards that goal on Day One.

On the first day of school, my main objective is to engage my learners in a little bit of conversation in French since we speak the language 90% of the class period on most days. Even students who are brand new learners of French practiced greetings, small talk, and farewells first thing after the tardy bell rang. As a world language educator, I feel that the expectation regarding spoken language should be expressed through immediate use before we do anything else in the classroom. I want them to leave their French studies with a practical skill that can be transferred to real life.

2. Celebrate learning in an intentional way.

The day before students came through the threshold of my classroom, I got out three boxes of cake mix (I bought them on sale along with the icing!) and made two 13x9 and two 8x8 cakes in disposable foil pans. Then, I topped them with cream cheese icing and used a red one to write "Welcome Back!" in French. I hadn't baked box cakes since I was either a teenager or undergrad!  Anyhow, cursive writing came in handy when writing on the cake -- just a practical tip that I learned the hard way.

After we spoke to each other in French in groups for a while, it was time to celebrate the happy reunion (or first meeting) as well as the learning opportunities that we are going to have over the course of the year. At my school, we are free to incorporate food into our classroom experience as much as we like, and let me tell you how fortunate I feel because I know that there are hoops to go through or no-eating-allowed policies at many schools. If you can't, or don't want to, celebrate learning with cakes or other goodies, find another way to recognize the importance of what you will be doing together over the course of the semester or year.

3. Build community from the start through team-building tasks. 

This year, my dear friend, MaryAnn (@maryannsw,) advised me on maker faire ideas for my classroom.  In her role as a district technology learning specialist here in our city, she put together a maker faire for educator participants during one of their professional learning days. (Here's her blog post on it: http://lifeisamakerfaire.com/2014/08/18/mini-maker-faire-road-trip/ ) I loved what I saw and thought that I should call her up and see what she would suggest.  Side note: It is a good idea to seek inspiration from colleagues and friends who aren't members of your own department, and vise versa. We can learn so much from our friends in other disciplines! Thank you, MaryAnn!

It must be noted that this was not conducted in the target language on the second day of school, but I felt that it was a worthy team-building task that could not be done with deeper understanding if attempted entirely in French. Our national association recommends 90% target language on a daily basis with the other 10% being reserved for tasks that cannot be completed in the language. We certainly could have tried to do it in French in the upper-level classes, but it would have been more about language barriers than the real objective.

Back to the task at hand! MaryAnn suggested that my French learners build a Solo cup tower in small groups. I loved this idea because it's quick and I had a feeling that this would appeal to teenage groups. For the most part, I do not bring competitions (or games) to the classroom because it promotes behaviors that I like to leave out of the equation, but I thought it would be okay to have a little friendly competition in this case. In fact, I told each class that there would be a prize for the highest tower and that the winners could decide what they would do with the prize. I poured enough Jolly Ranchers for an entire class into a sandwich bag so that each student could have one if the winning team shared. Luckily, each group of champions gave candy to all of their peers. I mean, I would've forced them to do so if they hadn't. Hehe.

To get started, I projected brief directions on the Smart Board:
    TASK:
       1. Get in groups of 2 or 3.
       2. Build a tower with as many cups as you can. You have 100 of them.
       3. You have 5 minutes!
       4. The highest tower wins! A prize will be awarded.
       5. Keep your structure standing until a photo is taken at the end of the competition.

After the timer went off, I quickly went around the room to take a photo of each tower. Sometimes, students took photos of themselves standing by their work. Then, I asked them to stack their cups and place them in the jumbo zip-lock bags I gave them. Next, they had to talk about the following questions in their groups and record their answers, using markers and poster paper. When they finished, I taped their work on the white board so that we could see their responses for discussion.

Post Maker Task Questions:

1.  Were you risk takers? Or did you play it safe? Why?
2.  How did your communication with other group members help you build the tower? If it fell, why?
3.  What could you have done differently?

The overall discussion in each class was enlightening to some and interesting to all. If ALL teenage learners are listening and/or contributing to a discussion on the importance of collaboration, risk-taking, creativity, learning from failure, and the need to stand out among our peers, I call that a win-win!

Here's the highest tower of all of them throughout the day! I teach 9th through 12th grade students, and this was done by young ladies in the 9th grade. Impressive!

What do you do to both celebrate learning and build community during the first days of school?

Today's Share: My World Language Unit Planning Template

This is just a quick post in order to share the unit planning template I created for my world language classroom and explain a little bit about it.

1.  A thank-you and shout-out to Toni Theisen and ACTFL for their work on curriculum design! This template was inspired by both the one Toni prepared and published on her wiki and the one that can be found in the ACTFL publication, Implementing Integrated Performance Assessment.

                                                                                            Photo Credit: C. Vogel

2.  This template is also inspired by the Understanding by Design authors/gurus, Wiggins & McTighe.

3.  There's not much in this template that is different from what's out there. Mostly, I just changed up some of the wording.

4. As of 2013, South Carolina offers one World Language standard with a bunch of benchmarks under each mode/level of proficiency. Click here to view the document, if you're interested.

5.  To view the template, click here to go to my professional site. Once there, scroll down and click on the link to my Scribd account. Feel free to download the template and adapt it to suit your needs.

As always, comments are welcome!

Reflections on Year One : Standards-Based Learning

Over the past year, my classroom has been under transition from one where learning was assessed in a more traditional manner with deadlines, point penalties, and a certain amount of performance finality, to one that can be described as a hybrid standards-based system. Some readers might ask why I went with a blend of older and newer methods, so I'd like to go ahead and mention that we all need to embrace new concepts and ideas at our own pace, but with change happening. To that end, we must experiment and risk failure in the classroom in order to reach our learners where they stand. I prefer to take small steps rather than huge leaps when trying out new ideas, mostly because I believe in maintaining a balance between my personal life and work. Anyhow, as you read this post, I hope you will be inspired, whether it be to fully embrace the standards-based learning (SBL) model or to move a little bit in that direction. If you've already made changes in this regard, I hope that you will share your insights and tips in the comments below.

Our Learning Model

Essentially, learners have the opportunity to retake or redo most any task after a series of one-on-one visits with me outside of class time. Here's how it works:

• What type of task may I redo/retake?
• Most any task. (In year one, learners could not make up interpretive (listening, reading, viewing) tasks because I didn't take the time to create a new task. This year, students will have the opportunity to redo such tasks. Stay tuned for a decision on how I'll make this feasible.)

• When may I redo or retake something?
• I'm available at lunch or after school. (In year one, I was available during break, lunch, my study hall period, and after school. That may change this year, depending on my schedule.)
• You must schedule a series of one-on-one visits outside of class time in order to qualify for a redo/retake. Additionally, you will qualify for a redo/retake if and when you have demonstrated a better understanding of the concepts and/or skills in question.
• During the first visit, we will determine your areas of weakness and, then, practice together. During the second visit, I will informally quiz you to see if you're ready to redo a task or retake an assessment. During the third visit, you may redo/retake the task or assessment. 
• You may choose to have more than one visit before advancing to the step where I informally quiz you.You may also come back for me to informally quiz you more than once, if necessary.
• There can only be one visit per school day. The point of this type of learning is NOT for you to cram and forget the concepts/skills.  
•  You must complete at least one step before the last week of each quarter. 

• What happens if an assessment is near the end of a quarter?
• Unfortunately, you won't be able reassess if we run into the end of the nine weeks.

• What should I do to get the most out of standards-based learning opportunities?
• Keep any feedback you receive on tasks/assessments because it can guide us when we meet for a redo/retake.
• As soon as you know that you need more practice and want a chance to relearn any concepts/skills, take a proactive approach. See me before or after class to make an initial appointment. 
• Keep in mind that the grade is not the end goal. The end goal is learning. Grades will look more like you had hoped when the learning happens. 

Reflections on Year One

• The evidence of deeper learning is remarkable! 
• The learning doesn't stop after a grade is posted. 
• In the first year, it took students a while to understand how beneficial it was to relearn the material, not just in terms of their grade for a given assignment, but for (lasting) skill development. 
• Once I stopped allowing students to come in for two visits in one day, the learner desire to cram (and therefore defeat the purpose of SBL) was lessened.
• Initially, I was nervous about inviting students to redo/retake tasks/assessments for the possibility of full credit, but the ones who earned full credit the second time around deserved it. If students learn the material, with or without a ton of effort, they deserve the grade they earn because they demonstrated understanding. People have bad days or just need a second chance, ya know?
• Now that I don't take points off for late work, you would think that deadlines would have no meaning in my classroom, but the fact is most students complete their tasks on time. In most cases, the repeat, late offenders caught on quickly that they were only hurting themselves, especially since I don't continuously harass them to turn in work that I have not received. 
• As for behavior reporting, I must do a better job of it, moving forward. If I told a parent or wrote about a behavior on the report card, it was an extreme case. I'm going to try the TeacherKit app for the sole purpose of behavior reporting, but if I can't seem to keep up with it on the iPad, I'll just create a paper log and attach it to a clipboard, like I do for most data that needs to be tracked. 
• The redo/retake log of learner visits, as seen in the sample photo above, worked quite well, so I will continue to use that template. 
• The scheduled extra help sessions are much more meaningful now.  Sometimes, parents (or students) force extra help sessions because of low scores, but it didn't make much of a difference usually in the level of understanding. Now that students know that they are working towards something, that there's a possible pay off in both learning and the grade, the time together is very well spent. 
• My school days are longer than they were in the past, but I'm OK with that change because there is real learning going on. I usually leave campus around 4:30 p.m. if I have several students show up after school. (The last bell of the day is at 3:20 p.m.)
• Based on the interactions with and comments from learners regarding SBL, I could see, more than ever before, that they knew I was on their team. 
• The response from parents has been positive. In fact, there hasn't been a single negative comment about SBL...except by a colleague or two, but I'm not concerned about those opinions.
• Bottom Line: I will never go back to the old way of assessing learners. I will definitely revise this policy as I move along, but I have no intention of ever penalizing late work again. 

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So, what do you think? Do you have any ideas or comments to share? I'd love to hear from you!

             

Third Annual App List for the 1:1 iPad Classroom

Good afternoon!

Now that we're moving into year three as a 1:1 iPad school, it has become a tradition to write a post on the tools with which we will start the year. Over the past two years, students had access to the App Store and downloaded anything they liked. As of June, the administration has decided to put the purchasing/downloading in the hands of the IT department, therefore, teachers were tasked to turn in their list of required apps for each class. Our deadline was a couple of days ago, so I'd like to share with you the apps that the French community of learners will be using in 2014-15. This year, I wanted to mention that I'm adding Duolinguo and Memrise -- two language games -- because there won't be as much competition with Flappy Bird and other such favorites, at least not on the tablets. Ha!

2014-2015 Required Apps :

Fee-Based Apps:
Explain Everything (New)
Popplet
Quick Voice

Free Apps:
Blogger
Duolinguo (New)
Fotobabble
Google Docs
Google Drive
Haiku Deck (New)
Memrise (New)
Pic Collage
Shadow Puppet Edu (New)
Skype (New)
ThingLink (New)
WordReference Dictionary
YouTube

Course-Specific Apps:
StoryKit (French 2)
Twitter (French 2 and 3)
Pearson's eText (AP French)

Pre-Loaded Apps on All Devices:
DropBox
GoodNotes
Keynote
iMovie
Pages

What are your top tools for the classroom in 2014-15?

As always, I can have free apps pushed to the devices as I discover them over the course of the year, so please let me know if you use (a preferably versatile) one that is a must-have in your classroom.

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Appy July, by the way!  (Haha. I couldn't help myself.)

AP World Language & Culture: Pre-AP Summer Practice

Good afternoon!

After a two-month break from blogging, I'm back! It's important to maintain a balance between life and work, so that makes blogging a back burner item on the to-do list at times. While it's important to share what we do with other educators so that we can learn from each other, my learners' needs come before the blog. That said, I did write a post for an educator (@eddiekayshun ) in the UK recently. Here's the link if you'd like to see what I have to say about my duty to teach tolerance and global competency:  Who I Am 

Today, I'll share my latest plan for Pre-AP French Language and Culture summer practice. This can be adapted to any world language classroom, so please feel free to make it your own if it could work for your learners. 

Why summer practice? 

For the most part, my students are not required to complete any graded practice outside of the classroom, but they do have to study for assessments and finish tasks that weren't completed in the allotted class time. Even AP learners do most of the learning during class time, however, they do have more outside practice to do because of the looming exam expectations.  The summer before students take the AP course, I choose to require practice because my learners do not have the option to take a fourth year of French BEFORE the AP course. This summer practice simply adds a little extra time for preparation provided that learners pace themselves over the entire summer, of course. 

A Little History on Summer Practice

Over the past four summers, I have asked learners to read a novel (Oscar et la Dame Rose (1 time) and Le Petit Prince (3 times), take a quick quiz and complete various tasks related to the novel, and complete thirty minutes of practice per week over the course of the summer. Overall, students did two things: 1. Read the English version of the novel and/or didn't finish it; and 2. Completed the weekly practice (30mn) during the week before school resumed, therefore, fudging the time spent. At our school, students are already required to read a book for English class and two books for a summer reading group. I've decided to stop adding books to that list, especially since Novice High/Advanced Low language learners generally need immediate guidance when taking on a novel.

Focus on the Interpretive Texts

While all areas of the AP French exam, including the communicative performance sections, present challenges, the most difficult one for my learners has been the interpretive sections with multiple-choice questions. This year, I decided to focus the summer practice on that task and have done so with a personalized approach. As you'll see on the document, readers are asked to choose articles of interest from various news sources and complete the related task with answers in English. Students must seek the answer to the 5Ws while also considering cultural information. My hope is that it will become more automatic to seek out this type of information by the time we see each other again in August. If you're wondering why they are writing in English, it's because the goal is for students to interpret what they read -- not produce more language and possibly not interpret the material adequately due to the proficiency level or other factors.  

A Little More Practice

Learners are also asked to watch a French film for fun and be ready to discuss it in an informal manner.  The listening component of the exam is challenging, to say the least, so even if students read subtitles via Netflix's streaming movies, they are still listening to native speakers. In fact, students often tell me that they try to compare the subtitles to the spoken French. 

Lastly, I ask students to listen to French music on their phones, but it is an optional task. Fingers crossed that I will hear about some newly discovered, Francophone bands when we meet in the classroom again!

The Resource

EDIT: For some reason, it's not showing up at the link below, so click here to be take directly to the page.
Click here to go to the "My Digital Footprint" page of my professional website. Once there, scroll down to the link to my (rather new) Scribd account and click on it. You'll have access to my downloads there. 

Final Questions for Readers

If you teach, or are preparing to teach, an AP world language course, what type of summer practice do your pre-APs complete? Which task proves to be the most helpful?

Please share your ideas and thoughts in the comments section of this post. Let's help each other improve our craft!

Stop, Collaborate, Create, & Listen! Or How to Bring Creativity to the Classroom With Stop-Motion Animation Videos

Hello!

If you're a nineties music lover, you might have understood the reference to Vanilla Ice's super hit, Ice Ice Baby, in this post's title. I'm not sure why that song came to mind, but it speaks to me as I think about the project my learners completed last week. By the way, if you aren't familiar with this song, you can listen to it here.

The first lines of Vanilla Ice's one-hit wonder remind me of the general routine steps that are taken to begin a new, collaborative task in the classroom. So, here we go:  Students have to stop for a minute and learn more about the task, collaborate with a classmate to design an agreed upon product, create with their chosen tools, and listen to each other and folks outside of their team as they work. (Let's see, how can we add 'Shave cool designs in your eyebrows for the ultimate Vanilla Ice look?'  OK, I think I'm getting carried away. Moving on.)

All of the talk that has been going on about bringing creativity back to schools and fostering a spirit of innovation has been of particular interest to me. This would not be the first time I've asked students to create, for sure, but I'm challenging myself to bring new life to the projects we do and allow for more hands-on creativity while actively using the target language. Therefore, I decided to introduce the stop-motion animation technique and learn alongside my students of the French language and cultures. 

As a world language educator, I must mention the fact that we have a special challenge when trying to engage our students in tasks that students in other content areas are more linguistically prepared to complete.  In fact, one of our most important responsibilities is to facilitate authentic experiences that push our students to higher levels of proficiency while preparing them for the realities of today's world. This is no small task, especially when working with novices who can only communicate at low levels. What does this all mean? World language educators, like me, can make room for creativity in the classroom, but it might just look a little different from what learners are doing in another classroom.

So, here's a breakdown of how this project unfolded in French class last week :

Project duration:
We spent three days on this project. Some students have to finish upon our return from Spring Break due to absent team members.

Reason for this project at this point in the year:
It was the week before spring break. Sophomores were out on college trip for much of the week, and the juniors left for Costa Rica that Friday. I did not want to start a new unit, but wanted to experiment with an opportunity for creative expression while using the target language.Students who were absent are not required to make up this project unless they want to do it.

Project Resources:
The directions were posted on slides and displayed on the SmartBoard. The document was also uploaded to DropBox. The work will be assessed with a modified presentational speaking rubric (original doc came from Toni Theisen and her district colleagues) -- one for novice high and one for intermediate low learners. (See below for the link to the downloadable documents.)

Outcomes:
-This task allowed students with various strengths to develop their team-building skills in small groups.
-Learners thought intentionally about ways to have a global impact through the small organization they envisioned.
-Groups worked together to write the commercial in French. They learned new vocabulary that was particular to their product.
-Along with the language component, students became creators. Although these organizations/commercials were imaginary, this type of task could inspire learners to take more risks and consider not only the needs of the local community, but that of villages in remote areas of the world.
-ALL students actively contributed to the project. In fact, learners in other classes expressed interest in doing a similar project in the near future. Yay!

Reflections:
-This task requires more than three 50-minute days. Students could have used some guided small group pronunciation practice.
-Spend time doing a demo on any new apps and basic stop-motion animation techniques before beginning the creation stage of the project.
-Stress that the background is important, therefore, desktops might not be very appealing.
-Stress that photos need to be taken in the Camera Roll rather than the stop-motion app for best results. (Can move to iMovie and add music, etc that way.)
-Include time for tool (re)exploration, even if students already have experience with the tool. We all (re)learned some iMovie editing tricks that we hadn't really needed or explored before that point.

Looking to the Future:
Since our young learners are not always thinking about what lies ahead, it's a good idea to remind them to think about how projects and other learning experiences in the classroom could add value to their resume. While circulating and helping each group, I explained that they could share this stop-motion design experience with college admissions reps or potential employers. There are always ways to make oneself stand out in a crowd! Of course, this tip to keep track of interesting classroom tasks doesn't have anything to do with their mission to become proficient speakers of French, but it does prepare them for the future. That's part of my job, too.

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Educator Materials for Download:
Click here for access to the directions, rubrics, and sample student products. Stay tuned for more videos later this week.

Further Discussion:
How might you use stop-motion animation in your classroom?
If you're a world language educator, how might you use this technique while making the target language an integral part of the task?

Please share your feedback and ideas in the comments.

Hope you enjoyed this post! At the very least, I hope you were inspired to listen to some nineties fun music. Vanilla Ice will rock the mic like a vandal!