I am back in the classroom. Last Monday I started a new job; after eight years of giving workshops and developing CI Master Class resources, I have returned to the classroom for what I hope to be my best teaching yet.
We have about 120 hours together during the Spring semester. Classes in my new school are semester-long, 90 minute block classes, meaning this new starting point for me is also a brand new start for all of my students. Essentially they are all level 1 students, with some heritage language students mixed in. We are a small rural school in Eastern North Carolina where I am the only World Language teacher. I have been given total freedom to develop the program of my dreams.
I dream of a program that honors childhood, a program full of joy and laughter. Through the path of joy I hope that my students will love language acquisition. This is not a sugar-coated platitude. I honestly can’t see them growing to love language learning any other way. That is something to remind myself: I am undermining my own program when I am not exuding love and joy in class.
On Monday we made class characters, or “One Word Images”. I wanted to start the course with a whole language activity to demonstrate how we will acquire language together through community conversations. This is such a charming activity. My plan is, on every Monday, to start class by making a new class character through which we will explore the themes of the week. I love that the class characters become tangible metaphors that we can use to talk about all sorts of things that might be uncomfortable.
Many years ago when I first started teaching, I made the mistake of directly asking students about their personal hygiene to introduce the chapter vocabulary. “Do you”, I asked in Spanish, “bathe in the morning or the evening?”, underlining the translations on the whiteboard so that everyone understood. “EWWW!”, cried out one immaculate girl, “BOTH, of course”. I could see a wave of reactions around the room as students recoiled, intimidated, knowing that if they had answered first, then they may have labeled themselves as the dirty one. Immediately all conversation stopped. No student wanted to offer answers.
With a character, we can easily establish that our class character does not brush his teeth. That does not intimidate anyone. We can explore that idea, using the language repetitively so that students acquire it. The next day I can ask the class in the target language, “Does our class character have brothers?”, knowing that I am not unwittingly putting anyone on the spot. Adolescents are surprisingly tender. Our class characters allow students to reveal themselves if they choose, while maintaining a plausible fiction.
In my last period class our class character was an orange cactus named “Pickles” with lots of money stuck onto her thorns but she was very sad because she was alone. “Does she have family?”, I asked. The class hesitated. I underlined the word “Family” where I had written it in Spanish & English. “Of course she has family, but they are not with her. I can promise you this: by the end of this week we will have solved Pickles’ problems. Pickles will be a happy cactus, I promise you that”, I told them in English. And then I turned back to Spanish, pointing at the high-frequency verbs and question words: “Where is Pickles?”
Over the course of the week I guided them through my own family tree, we created a family tree for Pickles, we did a picture talk in which one of the students volunteered that the two boys in the picture are “hermanos” (brothers), a few students volunteered information about their own families without being coerced so that we could incorporate that information into impromptu stories (one girl’s father plays soccer in the park with a group of “old men”, so he showed up in one of our stories), and we imagined the family of a character in a video that we movie-talked.
But there was a lot more going on in our class stories. I introduced three new high-frequency verbs each day and we created gestures for each verb. Each day we made at least one vivid scene containing the class character and the verbs we had learned, sometimes two or three scenes. Sometimes our scene had action, but sometimes it was simply a “tableau vivant”, or a static image showing our characters posed in the middle of a scene. Typically, I would say, “ok, we have three new verbs; let’s create a scene with these three new verbs and see if it goes somewhere. The first verb is ‘sabe’, or ‘knows’.” And then in Spanish I would continue: “Who (pointing at the word poster) knows something? (writing the word ‘something on the board’).” Then once we fish a few answers and discover that it is Pickles’ mother who knows something, I continue asking questions. “Where”, I ask in Spanish, “is Pickles’ mother?”
Our story about Pickles emerged through various activities. At one point a student asked to go to the bathroom. Before she left, I whispered to her that the answer to the question that I’ll ask her when she returns is “Yes”.
Looking at the verbs, I announced in Spanish that the mother of Pickles is in the girl’s bathroom. Yes, Pickles’ mother is giving our classmate something, but what? I pointed to the phrase “gives to her” and led a brainstorming session. “What”, I asked in Spanish, “does she give her?”
By the time our classmate returned, we had established that the mother cactus gave a letter to our student to give to Pickles. As the student came into the class I turned to her and asked in fairly rapid Spanish: “Did Pickles’ mother give you letter?” and the student responded, somewhat perplexed, “Yes”. The class burst into applause.
Not every activity during the week was Pickles! We learned a song (Quizás, quizás, quizás performed by Gaby Moreno) and every day we practiced our listening skills through the listen and match activities in the Master Class. Independently, students read Adam Geidd’s first “Comprehensible Reader” titled “Benito quiere un amigo” (Benito wants a friend). I loved watching their surprised reactions at the ending. We did two movie talk activities, a card talk, a picture talk and an impromptu map talk introducing the geography of Mexico and the SW of the USA. We talked very briefly about language acquisition, and I introduced two of Krashen’s hypotheses in student-friendly language (the Affective Hypothesis was introduced the first time someone said something unkind in class, and I described the Learning-Acquisition Hypothesis to help them understand why our class has so much repetition but no vocabulary lists). Ultimately, they will be able to describe all six hypotheses in their own words so that they will know how to continue the language acquisition journey on their own, but this will be fed to them slowly over the next several months.
Every day we created at least two Write & Discuss texts to summarize our class discussions. Below you can see a picture of our last class summary, created on Friday afternoon. It was a bittersweet ending to the Pickles saga. She eventually travelled to Baja California to reconnect with her long-lost sister cactus (that was the secret in the letter) but, unable to hug each other due to the cactus spines that would prickle each other, her sister gave Pickles an enormous marshmallow to hug instead. Oh, the creativity of adolescents. I praised them for the deep themes embedded in the story that were worthy of exploration. “Love can be so difficult. Reminds me of Shakespeare”, I said, which amused several students.
I planned four Master Class activities for each 90-minute class session, but I found that I only needed three as long as I created the Write & Discuss texts, and we completed the daily exit quizzes.
As for accountability– the main thing is to give an exit quiz EVERY SINGLE DAY. In fact, I teach 90 minute blocks and I often give a four question quiz midway through as well as another at the end of the class. They are very quick to grade, and allow me to react the very next day by changing seats and teaching directly to the students who need to have me watching closely. The best part is that the kids who can manage to wear hoodies & subtly chat with their friends are off my radar IF they can get a 100% on the daily exit quizzes, so I really am focusing on the students whose behavior is preventing them from learning. Here is a link to the essay about the daily exit quizzes.
If you are interested in the activities that I describe, they are all presented in detail with video demonstrations inside the CI Master Class (um, which is on sale during February—50% off!!). This is virtually a zero-prep approach to creating a conversational language class that reacts to and develops the creativity of your students.
I’ll try to write updates about my classes every Saturday, describing the magical moments that happen while fine-tuning the approach so that my students acquire with confidence and joy.
Best wishes,
Mike