This essay, originally published in Spring of 2024 as “Students Front & Center”, has been rewritten to bring the main ideas forward.
I spent several years working with weekly writing groups of enthusiastic, like-minded teachers. In those groups we wrote many stories. I focused on writing mini stories that could be digested by students within a single class period.
Telling stories is a powerful part of my teaching. But I have to remind myself that getting through a story is not necessarily the most important thing we accomplish in class.
Sometimes, while I am moving us toward a prepared text, a student offers something I could never have prepared: an experience, a memory, a little piece of their life. I want to recognize those moments and follow them. A good story can open a conversation, but I don’t want my commitment to the story to keep me from hearing what students have to say. In fact, I want to become more attuned to those moments when a student’s experience can lead the conversation.
We now have a handful of comic books designed for language learners, as well as collections of illustrated stories and, of course, the collections of “tiny daily readings”. In my level 1 class we have already read all of the stories in Un gato puede ser un gorro. Soon we will start the first Esme graphic novel.
Paul Nation is a researcher I often reference when I am thinking about second language vocabulary development. One important strand of his work concerns extensive reading. Beginning language learners need to encounter the highest-frequency words frequently, in a wide variety of contexts. Encountering the same high-frequency words in many contexts helps students develop an instinctive grasp of how those words are used in the target language.
I also keep returning to a related point: there is value in encountering the same text more than once, with time between readings. Reading widely gives students new contexts; returning to a familiar story gives them another opportunity to understand and remember its language.
On Friday I started class by asking students to do a quick-write in their notebooks about a story we had read together on Wednesday. After five minutes of an independent “brain dump,” we wrote what we remembered on the board through a Write & Discuss community-writing activity. Most of the information was offered by students in Spanish. Nice! Afterwards, students opened the book and reread the story on their own before taking an unannounced, 10-question comprehension quiz I had prepared.
All of the stories in Un gato puede ser un gorro have bilingual language support in the margins so that the text is extremely transparent. Students do not have to guess what the Spanish means. Our conversations about the text were mostly in Spanish.
The Write & Discuss activity and the final assessment did not have bilingual support. Seeing students use and understand the language without those supports reassured me that the margin notes had served their purpose. They had helped students understand. Providing English in the margins does not automatically mean that students will avoid processing the Spanish. In this class, that support helped make our subsequent conversations in Spanish possible.
I care about these materials, and I care about how we use them. There are good reasons to plan a lesson around a story.
But a lesson also needs room for the students who are reading it.
Educators who follow The Two Conversations Classroom recognize that what we are doing is not a firm set of packaged lesson plans. Central to every class session is the student voice. Students are fundamental to the curriculum, even when my plans include reading a story written years ago.
That is easy to say. It is a little harder to practice when I have a good story ready, questions prepared, and a clear idea of where I want the class to go. If I invite students to share their experiences, their answers should influence what happens next. Otherwise, I am only inviting them to momentarily interrupt my lesson. They can sense the difference.
I used to introduce themes and vocabulary by simply asking pre-reading questions to the entire class. They would stare at me until someone mercifully answered. Lately I have been starting classes with student interviews, with questions designed to prepare us for the readings to come.
I invite two students to sit on stools in opposite corners of the front of the classroom. I interview both students before occasionally turning to the rest of the class. I ask the question to the student on the right, and I receive a response. No awkward silence. Then I turn and ask the same question to the student on the left. And again, I receive a response! I can compare and contrast their responses, ask follow-up questions, or turn to the rest of the class.
And here is the surprising piece: after listening to two classmates, the other students are now eager to share! They have something to add. The student interview is a pretty genius way to get higher-quality engagement.
I planned these interviews so that the vocabulary and themes introduce ideas from the reading. But once we began talking, preparing for the reading was only one reason to continue. I wanted to know what had happened to these students. Their classmates wanted to know, too. The questions came from my lesson plan; the conversation depended on their answers.
Our reading was about French snails who move to Wyoming. I had a few questions projected on our big screen in both Spanish and English: What strange things have you eaten before? Have you ever eaten snails? Do you want to visit France? If you could go anywhere, which country would you visit?
This is a Spanish class, but our conversation can take us anywhere. I ask in Spanish, and at this point, five weeks into Spanish 1, students often respond in English. I cheerfully rephrase in Spanish, writing on the board so everyone can see the Spanish. And I ask follow-up questions.
A heritage Spanish speaker tells me that she has eaten tacos de cabeza and tacos de ojo. I ask: Is there a place you can buy those tacos in our town?
“No, Mr. Peto,” she responds in English. “I woke up one morning and found a whole cow’s head in our sink.”
Me, speaking in Spanish: “Oh, so who makes the tacos in your house?”
She still responds in English: “My dad.”
I’m not exactly sure how tacos de cabeza are made, how the meat from the head is cooked, or how the eyes are prepared to make tacos de ojo. There are things I actually want to know. The conversation has taken a fascinating turn toward this student’s family and foods that many of her classmates have never tried.
“Entonces, tu padre hace” And so your father makes—I point at the “hace = makes” sign—“tacos de cabeza. Tu padre hace tacos de cabeza… ¿mucho? tacos from cow head meat. Does your father make them… a lot?”
For the benefit of the class, I write mucho on the board with the translation: a lot.
Here is a story I could never have prepared: a student wakes up and finds a whole cow’s head in the sink. When students want to share experiences like this, those experiences become part of our classroom’s stories, too. We return to them in a Write & Discuss or ask the student to tell us more another day. We have spent years writing stories that we hope students will find interesting. We should also be listening for the stories they bring with them.
Of course, listening takes practice. With all of the classroom management of a level 1 class, it really is not easy.
Most students have never tried snails, but when I turn to the entire class, I find one student in every class who has. In the first class I make the mistake of quickly interjecting: “They are kind of like boogers.”
It is a cheap laugh that kills the conversation and, worse, reinforces the idea that unfamiliar foods are disgusting. The snails I have in mind are more like morsels of very tender meat in garlic butter. I realize immediately that my comment is counterproductive.
I make mistakes. I try to learn from them.
During the next class period, I follow my initial question, “Who has eaten snails?” by simply changing the question word to “Where?” Where did you eat snails?
During the first class, when I made the booger comment, I thought that I’d be an entertainer. I was worried about entertaining the audience, looking for a laugh, and I failed. Students didn’t seem to notice. We just went on with the class. But I knew that I had sacrificed a genuine moment of communication in exchange for a lame joke. I had supplied my reaction before finding out anything about the student’s experience.
In the second class, I ask in Spanish: “Where?”
The student responds with a smile that her mother once brought her to a French restaurant in Washington, D.C.
That one word, where?, gives her room to tell us something about her life.
Being “open to hearing her voice” means asking a question whose answer I actually want to hear, then allowing that answer to shape my next question. It means being curious enough to stay with her experience for a moment, even though I have a text ready to read that will keep the class on task.
I have to remind myself that I am not a comedian, and my students are not hecklers to be managed.
I am more like a conversationalist like Terry Gross, getting my students to share something about themselves. When I ask questions that funnel us toward an expected punchline, I can easily undermine the student voice I meant to invite.
This matters especially to those of us who love teaching with stories. We know how much a good story can do. We put real care into finding stories, writing them, and making them comprehensible. I want to bring that same care to hearing the stories students offer us, including the small ones that emerge in an unexpected answer.
That delightful smile reminded me how easily I can mistake a genuine conversation for a delay. I had planned to read a story about French snails moving to Wyoming. My student had a story about going to a restaurant with her mother. There was room for both.
I still wanted to read the text. But I also wanted to hear what she would say next. If students are truly front and center, their answers have to be able to change where the lesson goes.
The books that have full margin notes in English are A Cat can be a Hat (Spanish, French & German), Esme and Beto (Spanish, French & German), Normal hamburgers (French; the Spanish version has limited words defined in the footnotes with a full glossary), and volumes 3 & 4 of the comic books A Strange World in German (Spanish & French have low-frequency words defined with full glossaries). After this essay was published, we created the Big Book of Tiny Readings series that also have extensive margin notes. Other books published by My Generation of Polyglots all have full glossaries with low-frequency words defined in the margins.
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