or,
"Implementing TPRS in the Elementary School"
Background:
Three weeks into the school year, I switched districts and levels. For the past 4 years, I've taught 7-12 Spanish. (I also taught a couple years of English, and this year, we started offering Spanish to 6th graders.) Before that, I taught K-12 Spanish, and it's fair to say that for at least the first two years, my elementary school methodology was an utter disaster. I got the hang of it after a while, I think, so that if the little ones weren't learning as much as they could have, they at least weren't wasting their time.
Development:
This year, everything about my teaching is better than it was the last time I taught elementary school.
1.) Learning goals. I understand what learning goals are. I used to think I did, but I didn't. I understand the difference between learning goals and learning activities. Most importantly, I understand their use and their limitations in second-language classrooms.
2.) Classroom management. I am a much better classroom manager than I was, I think. We spend much more time learning Spanish now than we used to, and it's much less about control and much more about creating community. I also know just how deficient I still am in this area, which makes me shudder to think of how bad I used to be.
3.) Curriculum. I know much much better what students should learn in order to be successful at a language, and I understand much much better how well they're supposed to know it. This began when I stopped using textbooks as a curriculum map, and
continued when I learned about using word frequency counts as curriculum
guide.
4.) Instruction. The quality of instruction is much higher. It's both more engaging and more effective. Not only are learners engaged and contributing, the instruction is hitting them, as it were, where they live, by doing the things that need doing to learn a language. . Students can learn about language the way I used to do it, as is evidenced by the fact that some of them managed to do so. But it turns out that it was far from the best way.
5.) Assessment. While I'm back to a curriculum that focuses on assessing a fairly arbitrary vocabulary set, it's a much higher-quality assessment of the arbitrary vocabulary set. At least as importantly, I know how to get the information I actually need from those assessments.
6.) Intervention. Language intervention was always sort of a tricky subject for me. I'm not a reading specialist, and frankly, anything I've learned about language acquisition I learned through some mechanism other than my teacher training (at least, until about 3 years ago.) But now I understand a little bit better how students (especially young students) learn language, and by extension I understand a little bit better why they might not be learning. This suggests some of the ways I can identify and support students who are having trouble. It also suggests ways of shaping instruction so as to avoid those troubles to begin with.
Current status:
The basis of my instruction is to use Spanish in a comprehensible way that students find interesting. Everything else is at best extra or at worse a waste of time. Dr. Krashen goes so far as to say that "interesting" isn't enough; it needs to be compelling, so compelling the students forget they're listening to another language. After you have their interest, repeat high-frequency vocabulary until your students are fluent with it. Fluency means that, when you ask a student actor a question, s/he answers correctly without hesitation. (This definition comes from Blaine Ray, one of the creators and main propagators of the TPRS method I use.)
Of course, elementary school students are a different breed. I teach up to 4th grade, and last month I taught 6th grade. I'm here to tell you there's a lot of learning that goes on in those 2 years. However, so far, it's played pretty well to the 2nd graders and up. They're interested in the stories, they want to see what happens next. I'm using enough of their own cultural references that they're getting it.
But kindergarteners? Fuggedaboudit. What are kindergarteners even interested in?
In my head, my stories are varied enough in form and content to hold attention. However, kindergarteners' attention spans are really short. Maximum attention spans, common wisdom goes, equals students's age + 1. That means most kindergarteners, at the beginning of the school year, can pay attention maybe 6 or 7 minutes. In a 30-minute class, that means changing activities 5 times.
I'm really going back to fundamentals here. I can provide comprehensible input that young learners find compelling, and change activities 5 times in 30 minutes. In fact, it isn't hard; it just takes--surprise--preparation, a focus on what works. I'm not hurting anybody, nobody's going to be dumber after I teach them Spanish, so I can slow down, do this right, and make sure I'm doing what kids need me to do.
Showing posts with label elementary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elementary. Show all posts
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Monday, August 24, 2009
Curriculum? I barely knew 'um!
As always, there's so much to write about: Chapters 6 and 7 of Never work harder than your students (which I finished reading on the 2nd week of summer vacation); summer PD courses (of which there were several, none of them in Spanish, I'm afraid); metablogging; how to fix public education and pay for the changes in one fell swoop; beginning-of-year preparations; developments in SW-PBS; a new professional learning team at our school which I'm super-excited about. (Excited enough, apparently, to channel my inner 14-year-old girl. "Super-excited?") And as always, my time would be better spent doing these things than writing about doing them. But I'm actually working on curriculum today, so it's on my mind.
I'm on year 4 of my project to revamp the elementary and middle school curriculum. Thus far my efforts have largely been confined to actual classroom activities--trying to find the kind of activities that younger students like to do, engage well with, and learn lots from. There have been a lot of experiments with songs, TPR storytelling, word-picture matching, and the ubiquitous color-the-picture handouts. The first 2 have had great success; the third, limited success, and the less said about the last, the better.
But one of the things I'm learning as I go to professional development and read books and think really hard about what's supposed to be happening in classes is that, more important than individual activities, is a sort of road map of activities, a curriculum guide. "Know where your students are going," Robyn Jackson might gently admonish me. In fact, I can hear her saying it in my head, right now.
So I've been trying to puzzle that out. Where are my elementary students going? I wrote one blog post on this recently, which sort of shaped out some of the outer limits. The conclusion was that my elementary program should have students interested in Spanish, excited about learning more Spanish, aware of the ways that Spanish class can tie into what they're learning in their core classes, and a little more linguistically aware. (Okay, so it doesn't say all of that. Not in so many words.) But within the context of having an exploratory program, each year the students should be more aware of the Spanish-speaking world and their growing place in it. They should be able to pick up a new linguistic context, a few more communicative tasks, maybe a new song. They maybe should learn a little bit about Spanish in the US, and a little bit about other Spanish-speaking countries. By the time they middle school, maybe they should know something about Spanish artists, musicians, actors, filmmakers, the movers and shakers of the mundo hispano.
Today I'm going to try and define these things concretely--at least at the "content expectations" level. I have some unit plans which need revisiting--in fact, since the NNELL conference last May, I know I need to revisit all of my unit plans, and working in a lot more culture a lot more explicitly is definitely on the to-do list, too. By the end of today (tomorrow, at the latest--the day is getting on), I'd like to have the following: Content Expectations K-2, Content Expectations 3-4, Content Expectations 5-7. (8th Grade Content Expectations will be the same as High School Spanish I content expectations; this year, I understand, it will be the same class.) I would also like to have 2 or 3 unit outlines begun for each level, at the "big ideas / learning objectives" level.
About the CE's themselves: I've been working with a set of EXTREMELY outdated content expectations. The Spanish instructor before me (and remember: in my school, there's only one of us at a time. We're like half a Sith order, only a good deal less evil. (For those of you who got the reference without clicking on the link: welcome to the Dark Side!)) had to make up some expectations before the State released the draft version of their standards, so she was working blind. As a result, the existing expectations are 1.) few in number; 2.) generic in all the wrong places; 3.) specific in ways that limit learning; 4.) focused too much on unquantifiable student behaviors. So I'm taking the state Standards and Benchmarks document and keeping all the standards that mesh with what I know about K-7 learning behavior. (Not a lot, but more every year.) After that, the task will be to make sure they all get taught and learned and assessed in 30-35 class sessions of 1 hour.
My prediction is this: in June of next year, I will have taught elementary and middle school students more Spanish than last year. I will have come nowhere close to teaching and assessing all the expectations on my list.
UPDATE: As I begin actually working on them, I notice myself actively de-emphasizing writing-based communication, both presentational and conversational. This is because a.) I thing spoken communication comes before written / read communication, and reading comes before writing and b.) I only get 30 hours a year with these students; and have no real mechanism for giving homework. These may ultimately prove to be faulty assumptions.
UPDATE 2: As I continue to work on it, and have advanced far enough into the process that I can start looking at articulation concerns, I'm deciding this: The main difference between kindergarten Spanish and 3rd grade Spanish is going to be less about the standards and benchmarks applied. It's mostly going to be about the different contexts. We're going to be doing most of the same things, but the higher grades are going to be doing MORE of it.
I'm on year 4 of my project to revamp the elementary and middle school curriculum. Thus far my efforts have largely been confined to actual classroom activities--trying to find the kind of activities that younger students like to do, engage well with, and learn lots from. There have been a lot of experiments with songs, TPR storytelling, word-picture matching, and the ubiquitous color-the-picture handouts. The first 2 have had great success; the third, limited success, and the less said about the last, the better.
But one of the things I'm learning as I go to professional development and read books and think really hard about what's supposed to be happening in classes is that, more important than individual activities, is a sort of road map of activities, a curriculum guide. "Know where your students are going," Robyn Jackson might gently admonish me. In fact, I can hear her saying it in my head, right now.
So I've been trying to puzzle that out. Where are my elementary students going? I wrote one blog post on this recently, which sort of shaped out some of the outer limits. The conclusion was that my elementary program should have students interested in Spanish, excited about learning more Spanish, aware of the ways that Spanish class can tie into what they're learning in their core classes, and a little more linguistically aware. (Okay, so it doesn't say all of that. Not in so many words.) But within the context of having an exploratory program, each year the students should be more aware of the Spanish-speaking world and their growing place in it. They should be able to pick up a new linguistic context, a few more communicative tasks, maybe a new song. They maybe should learn a little bit about Spanish in the US, and a little bit about other Spanish-speaking countries. By the time they middle school, maybe they should know something about Spanish artists, musicians, actors, filmmakers, the movers and shakers of the mundo hispano.
Today I'm going to try and define these things concretely--at least at the "content expectations" level. I have some unit plans which need revisiting--in fact, since the NNELL conference last May, I know I need to revisit all of my unit plans, and working in a lot more culture a lot more explicitly is definitely on the to-do list, too. By the end of today (tomorrow, at the latest--the day is getting on), I'd like to have the following: Content Expectations K-2, Content Expectations 3-4, Content Expectations 5-7. (8th Grade Content Expectations will be the same as High School Spanish I content expectations; this year, I understand, it will be the same class.) I would also like to have 2 or 3 unit outlines begun for each level, at the "big ideas / learning objectives" level.
About the CE's themselves: I've been working with a set of EXTREMELY outdated content expectations. The Spanish instructor before me (and remember: in my school, there's only one of us at a time. We're like half a Sith order, only a good deal less evil. (For those of you who got the reference without clicking on the link: welcome to the Dark Side!)) had to make up some expectations before the State released the draft version of their standards, so she was working blind. As a result, the existing expectations are 1.) few in number; 2.) generic in all the wrong places; 3.) specific in ways that limit learning; 4.) focused too much on unquantifiable student behaviors. So I'm taking the state Standards and Benchmarks document and keeping all the standards that mesh with what I know about K-7 learning behavior. (Not a lot, but more every year.) After that, the task will be to make sure they all get taught and learned and assessed in 30-35 class sessions of 1 hour.
My prediction is this: in June of next year, I will have taught elementary and middle school students more Spanish than last year. I will have come nowhere close to teaching and assessing all the expectations on my list.
UPDATE: As I begin actually working on them, I notice myself actively de-emphasizing writing-based communication, both presentational and conversational. This is because a.) I thing spoken communication comes before written / read communication, and reading comes before writing and b.) I only get 30 hours a year with these students; and have no real mechanism for giving homework. These may ultimately prove to be faulty assumptions.
UPDATE 2: As I continue to work on it, and have advanced far enough into the process that I can start looking at articulation concerns, I'm deciding this: The main difference between kindergarten Spanish and 3rd grade Spanish is going to be less about the standards and benchmarks applied. It's mostly going to be about the different contexts. We're going to be doing most of the same things, but the higher grades are going to be doing MORE of it.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
What kind of elementary program do we have?
I read an article in this month's MiWLA publication from a woman named Stacy Witkowski, who teaches elementary education on the other side of the state. At last year's MiWLA conference, she presented a session on how to teach elementary education, and was asked (elected?) to repeat the session at the regional conference. I attended her presentation in Michigan; I did not attend the Central States conference. She was a little self-deprecating, but she's probably further along the learning curve than she realizes. I took a number of REALLY good ideas from her presentation, and have some thoughts about the Q-and-A session afterwards. (The idea of giving all elementary students a T-shirt with their name on it, to be worn in school during the first week, during specials classes, and when there's an itinerant educator in the room, is one that's never quite left me.)
In the article, she mentions some of the different models of elementary Spanish programs, and all the different schedules a school can develop to implement these models. She lists among them FLEX, FLES, and Immersion programs, and goes on to define them. (I've read all of these definitions and numbers somewhere before, but I don't know where. I'm just saying that Stacy didn't just make them up. Although, if she did, I'd still believe her.)
FLEX stands for "foreign language exploration." Stacy suggests that if your students get an average of less than 60 minutes of world languages a day, you probably have a FLEX program. The students will learn a few words, get familiar with the sounds, maybe remember from one year to the next the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" in Spanish. (I was mega-excited that last year's 1st graders still remember the "Coquí" song from kindergarten. Then I found out that it was on Dora the Explorer. From a learning standpoint, still exciting, but...) A suitable expectation is to get students excited about the language. An unsuitable expectation is fluency.
FLES stands for (I think) "foreign language in elementary schools." There's a website: http://www.fles.org . Stacy suggests that programs of this kind have at least 75 minutes of language instruction a week (15 min / day minimum). This kind of time dedication can lead to strong lingustic skill development, if not true fluency.
Immersion stands for--well, immersion. All target language, all the time. It's not a word I like very much, because if you immerse a human in something as fluid as language, they'll drown. That's just nomenclature, though. We don't have this kind of program.
These definitions are never very far from my mind, because once my principal asked me, "Why can't our elementary students speak Spanish?" He didn't mean it as a criticism of me, but the answer that leapt to my mind was, "Because the elementary Spanish program has been poorly served by the last 3 people to hold this position, and I'm not doing such a bang-up job yet." I don't remember if I actually said this out loud or not.
But it did set me to wondering--after 5 years of elementary school Spanish, how much should a student know? She should certainly have a pretty solid grasp of some basic stuff--how to ask for things, use manners, colors, numbers, etc. She should probably be able to differentiate spoken Spanish from other spoken languages, but that's not a content expectation.
I meet with the elementary students once a week for an hour, or twice a week for 30 minutes, whenever I can manage it. This year, I may or may not meet with the students of one class for an hour a day for 3 weeks straight, then not again for 12 weeks. So how much Spanish can you learn in that time?
I think we have a FLEX program, strictly from the numbers. But I think we have the potential for a pretty good FLEX. Our elementary students should be learning more than they are, but I don't think we can realistically expect them to speak Spanish after elementary school.
After middle school, though....
In the article, she mentions some of the different models of elementary Spanish programs, and all the different schedules a school can develop to implement these models. She lists among them FLEX, FLES, and Immersion programs, and goes on to define them. (I've read all of these definitions and numbers somewhere before, but I don't know where. I'm just saying that Stacy didn't just make them up. Although, if she did, I'd still believe her.)
FLEX stands for "foreign language exploration." Stacy suggests that if your students get an average of less than 60 minutes of world languages a day, you probably have a FLEX program. The students will learn a few words, get familiar with the sounds, maybe remember from one year to the next the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" in Spanish. (I was mega-excited that last year's 1st graders still remember the "Coquí" song from kindergarten. Then I found out that it was on Dora the Explorer. From a learning standpoint, still exciting, but...) A suitable expectation is to get students excited about the language. An unsuitable expectation is fluency.
FLES stands for (I think) "foreign language in elementary schools." There's a website: http://www.fles.org . Stacy suggests that programs of this kind have at least 75 minutes of language instruction a week (15 min / day minimum). This kind of time dedication can lead to strong lingustic skill development, if not true fluency.
Immersion stands for--well, immersion. All target language, all the time. It's not a word I like very much, because if you immerse a human in something as fluid as language, they'll drown. That's just nomenclature, though. We don't have this kind of program.
These definitions are never very far from my mind, because once my principal asked me, "Why can't our elementary students speak Spanish?" He didn't mean it as a criticism of me, but the answer that leapt to my mind was, "Because the elementary Spanish program has been poorly served by the last 3 people to hold this position, and I'm not doing such a bang-up job yet." I don't remember if I actually said this out loud or not.
But it did set me to wondering--after 5 years of elementary school Spanish, how much should a student know? She should certainly have a pretty solid grasp of some basic stuff--how to ask for things, use manners, colors, numbers, etc. She should probably be able to differentiate spoken Spanish from other spoken languages, but that's not a content expectation.
I meet with the elementary students once a week for an hour, or twice a week for 30 minutes, whenever I can manage it. This year, I may or may not meet with the students of one class for an hour a day for 3 weeks straight, then not again for 12 weeks. So how much Spanish can you learn in that time?
I think we have a FLEX program, strictly from the numbers. But I think we have the potential for a pretty good FLEX. Our elementary students should be learning more than they are, but I don't think we can realistically expect them to speak Spanish after elementary school.
After middle school, though....
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
More reflecting than a diva's dressing room
SY 2008-09 is finally put to bed, and there's an awful lot to think about. I'm going to go into some of these points more fully in later posts, because I'm trying to get down everything there is before I forget about it.
FINAL EXAMS: The importance of comprehensive final exams became more clear to me than ever before; also, the limits of paper-pencil tests over the course of 3 days. If we're really going to test students' learning of Spanish, more and more I'm thinking that portfolios are the way to go. Note to self: find model portfolio evaluation systems. (Students present portfolios en español as final exam? That's in presentation mode of communication.)
STANDARDS-BASED GRADING SYSTEMS: My school is running on two fundamentally different grading systems, and I suspect that many others are, as well. The bulk of grades is based on the number of standards that students master (at some point, the definition of "mastery" becomes EXTREMELY important). Yet every trimester, we have to give students a letter grade for their cumulative GPA. We come up with arbitrary, counter-intuitive formulae to bridge the gap. To confuse the issue, the final exam isn't directly weighed into our "standards assessment / employability skills" formula, but it's worth 10 % of the final grade.
SYLLABI: For the next school year, we're going to have syllabi detailing what we'll be teaching, what standards the students will be held accountable for, and (presumably) how we're going to know, i.e., what assessments we'll be using. This is entirely a good thing, and by now for most of us it should simply be a matter of taking the information off of our curriculum document and putting it on to a piece of paper that students can read. We ARE all keeping our curriculum document up to date, right? Right? (trails off sheepishly)
SW-PBS: I found out yesterday that my school did not receive the Mi-BLSi grant we applied for. This means, among other things, that the system we grew last year will have to serve us for at least one more year. The good news is that the ISD's capacity for supporting the PBS program has increased substantially--our advisor has new resources to bring to bear, as well as new workers in the ISD itself. One of the main sticking points appears to be ongoing teacher training time, and that looks to be a BIIIIIIG deal.
STUDENTS LEARNING SPANISH: I'm still pondering what the results of the final exam mean. Most of my students did much better than they expected to (and as well as I expected them to), but fell down in some surprising ways--writing section, I'm looking at you here. So something's got to give there. In addition, I'm not sure that they learned to converse in Spanish as well as I'd hoped. So there's something to work on, too.
K-8 PROGRAM: Weaknesses in this program and its director are showing through the whole plan. Next year, there will be a year-long 8th grade Spanish program, so we're going to have to step it up a noch. I expect there will be a year-long 7th grade program the year after that, so I'm going to have to get a lot better really fast.
No doubt, more to come.
FINAL EXAMS: The importance of comprehensive final exams became more clear to me than ever before; also, the limits of paper-pencil tests over the course of 3 days. If we're really going to test students' learning of Spanish, more and more I'm thinking that portfolios are the way to go. Note to self: find model portfolio evaluation systems. (Students present portfolios en español as final exam? That's in presentation mode of communication.)
STANDARDS-BASED GRADING SYSTEMS: My school is running on two fundamentally different grading systems, and I suspect that many others are, as well. The bulk of grades is based on the number of standards that students master (at some point, the definition of "mastery" becomes EXTREMELY important). Yet every trimester, we have to give students a letter grade for their cumulative GPA. We come up with arbitrary, counter-intuitive formulae to bridge the gap. To confuse the issue, the final exam isn't directly weighed into our "standards assessment / employability skills" formula, but it's worth 10 % of the final grade.
SYLLABI: For the next school year, we're going to have syllabi detailing what we'll be teaching, what standards the students will be held accountable for, and (presumably) how we're going to know, i.e., what assessments we'll be using. This is entirely a good thing, and by now for most of us it should simply be a matter of taking the information off of our curriculum document and putting it on to a piece of paper that students can read. We ARE all keeping our curriculum document up to date, right? Right? (trails off sheepishly)
SW-PBS: I found out yesterday that my school did not receive the Mi-BLSi grant we applied for. This means, among other things, that the system we grew last year will have to serve us for at least one more year. The good news is that the ISD's capacity for supporting the PBS program has increased substantially--our advisor has new resources to bring to bear, as well as new workers in the ISD itself. One of the main sticking points appears to be ongoing teacher training time, and that looks to be a BIIIIIIG deal.
STUDENTS LEARNING SPANISH: I'm still pondering what the results of the final exam mean. Most of my students did much better than they expected to (and as well as I expected them to), but fell down in some surprising ways--writing section, I'm looking at you here. So something's got to give there. In addition, I'm not sure that they learned to converse in Spanish as well as I'd hoped. So there's something to work on, too.
K-8 PROGRAM: Weaknesses in this program and its director are showing through the whole plan. Next year, there will be a year-long 8th grade Spanish program, so we're going to have to step it up a noch. I expect there will be a year-long 7th grade program the year after that, so I'm going to have to get a lot better really fast.
No doubt, more to come.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Baby steps in the correct direction
I think learning has occurred. I'm not great at dealing professionally with elementary students, both by training and by disposition. So, after three years of making a significant portion of my living by teaching elementary students, I had a good day. For the first time in a long time, my elementary school class today went well by design, instead of by the good graces and personalities of the students, and the tremendous amount of work done by other teachers. I feel like I practiced techniques I should have known a loooooonnnnnng time ago--don't escalate confrontations with students; raised voices do not necessarily mean increased communication (as a World Languages teacher, you'd think I'd know that already); ambiguous communications are easy to misunderstand (see last parenthetical statement).
So I'm learning. Slowly. Hopefully, my students are learning more quickly.
So I'm learning. Slowly. Hopefully, my students are learning more quickly.
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