Last week I taught my students a call and response routine for choral response to my questions. There is something really pleasurable about this routine. Before asking the question, I call out “¿Claaaaaaase?” in an especially goofy voice. They respond with equally goofy sounding “¿Síííííí?”. We practiced doing the call & response with goofy, exagerated voices. Whenever I get a particularly weak response, I stop and ask for a mad-scientist response. Then I repeat with a mad-scientist voice: “¿¡CLASE?!” We still have not tired of this routine.
I love the silly moments in class. In some ways, I am a more relaxed teacher willing to go with the flow than I was 8 years ago. However, one big difference that I’ve noticed between my current teaching and the former Señor Peto from California is that I am now quicker to explain why we do what we do in class. Perhaps I have given so many workshops that it feels natural to include a metacognitive narration: “I am repeating myself because I want you to process the language quicker and quicker, to become as quick as a native speaker”. Californian Peto would have never explained that in class, and I now wonder if my former students were asking themselves, “who is this fool asking me the same question again and again?”
I’ve caught myself several times telling students in English that the hard work of this class is bringing their imaginations to the game. “I’ll take care of the Spanish. I need you to contribute ideas. Unexpected ideas”. They stare at me.
My students, like everyone’s students, are not yet falling over each other to contribute. At the start of this week, I used too much English to get the class on track. There have been droughts of ideas as I desperately ask for a detail, as well as sudden torrents of ideas, both of which pose a classroom management problem in a creative classroom. Part of the problem is that I was not clear in communicating my expectations.
Asking students to contribute “an unexpected idea” is too vague; of course they just stare at me!
Or there is a deluge of terribly problematic ideas without guardrails. This week students suggested that our blueberry waffle character might be a drug addict, or a teenage mother, or she is driven by a rage against her absent pancake father to murder pancakes. These ideas could be reframed as AP-worthy conversations, but I was not yet ready to take on any of these suggestions in a new school… during the 2nd week of Spanish 1.
So, I developed a routine.
In the future I’ll reframe trouble, like the raging waffle, by asking my students to take a moment to brainstorm ideas about controlling our anger. “What do we do”, I’ll ask in Spanish, “when we feel anger towards someone?” Then I’ll write the question on the board in both English & Spanish. “Write down a list of ideas in English”. Writing a short list is a fantastic way to redirect the energy of a class.
After a few minutes I’ll draw two boxes on the whiteboard, one labeled “Nos ayuda (it helps us)” and the other labeled “No nos ayuda (it doesn’t help us)”. After a few moments of quiet brainstorming, students will suggest ideas that I’ll write in a somewhat simplified Spanish. Even if this derails us so that we don’t get to the story-creation, I think this will be a good use of class time. It also establishes that our stories are not about murder and mayhem. That plot gets tiresome.
But, as I mentioned earlier, this week I developed a routine to deal with the “drought / deluge of story ideas” problem.
I had planned to show the video “¿Puedo ir al baño?” by Señor Wooly. I like good storytelling—and Wooly is great for learners of Spanish. Don’t hate me for this next observation, but I always feel discouraged by the way that Wooly’s videos can suck the creative air out of a classroom. To prevent that from happening, I like to start with a little creative re-imagining before we even see the video.
We have started our classes each day with three target phrases written on the board that students copy. The phrases are not really targets that I drill & kill each day; instead it is an illusion of structure so that students feel like there is an anchor to their learning. On that day I planned to ask students what Justin, the character in the video (that they had not yet seen), found waiting for him in the bathroom.
On the board I had written:
¿Puedo ir al baño? va al baño
Can I go to the bathroom goes to the bathroom
Hay ______ en el baño
There is ______ in the bathroom
Then I asked everyone to draw a quick sketch of something that you would NOT normally find in a school bathroom.
When we started the story creation process (before seeing the video) I told the class in Spanish: “Justin asks to go to the bathroom and the teacher says yes. He goes to the bathroom, and in the bathroom, there is something. What is there in the bathroom?“
Since everyone had already made a sketch of something unexpected, I just asked several students what they drew. Sure, it is a bit like a game of mad libs, but now I was much more in control of the creative process while genuinely allowing students to contribute to the story. I called on students one by one—nobody shouted out—and everyone was held accountable for doing the “imagination work”. I still got some disappointing responses: one girl said “poop” and then the next boy smirked and said, “a big poop”. Another student suggested that Justin found a girl waiting for him in the bathroom. Eh, I’m not interested in that story line either. But then! The next student suggested a crab.
“A crab?!”, I asked the class in English, writing the word in both languages on the board so that even the kids rooting for poop would see where the story is going. Calling on one specific student, I asked: “Is it a big crab, or a small crab?” A big one. Then turning to another student I asked: “Is there only one big crab, or more?” “Five”, he said in Spanish. “¡CINCO!”, I repeated, holding up five fingers. “What are the crabs doing?”, I asked as I pointed to the “hace = does” poster.
And that was how we oiled the machinery of our creative classroom.
We ended up with a mental image of Justin entering the school bathroom and finding five huge, dancing crabs that insisted on dancing with Justin. He couldn’t go pee, nor could he return to Spanish class. He was stuck in a circle of dancing crabs. Trying not to pee his pants while dancing!
The mental image we created together is not the stuff of great literature. Yet, we all agreed that (for us) the circle of dancing crabs was so much more interesting than the video (once we finally watched it) BECAUSE WE HAD CREATED IT.
I was proud that “¿Puedo ir al baño?” was something of a “meh” experience for my students because they were so hyped about what we had just created. They were waiting to see what Justin would find in the bathroom in the video!
The idea of an initial sketch has now become part of our daily routine.
The next day we were about to watch my “Maravilla” presentation about the Costa Rican woman who has housed over 1000 former street dogs in her ranch in the mountains. I started class with three target phrases and asked them to sketch one thing that would be incredibly ridiculous to have 1000 of them. After a moment of sketching, answers included: cell phones, shoes, houses… and then someone suggested “elephants”.
That tickled my fancy. We imagined someone living up in the mountains with 1000 elephants, which made us laugh. Everything was flattened by these elephants. They sat on the car. It is now as flat as a pancake. Creating the mental image of all of these elephants also brought in a lot of the vocabulary I needed to introduce before watching the video.
So, the great discovery this week was a quick drawing prompt that prepares every student to contribute when called on.
It gives me permission to call on everyone, not just the vocal ones.
Everyone is held accountable for contributing to the “imagination work”.
And we all leave class feeling like our creativity is the best part of our time together.
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 —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.
Mike
p.s.- I still love you Señor Wooly!