Progress report, January 2010

My Spanish classes still don't look like I think they should, and I feel like I've really lost focus on what matters to me as a teacher.  I'm getting bogged down in defining activities, reinforcing behavior, etc., and have let go the act of teaching Spanish.  Much more of my outside-of-class time should be spent planning units, designing learning activities, aligning assessments to learning goals, etc., and rather less spent designing school-wide and classroom behavior support systems.  The question I need to answer is: When my students are behaving the way I expect them to, and when I have everything planned out, what is it my students are actually doing?  And the corollary question--How do I get from where I am to that place?

The short version, of course, is that when the plans go as planned, the students are speaking Spanish.  All of my "more structure to class" activities are intended to make this easier to achieve.  When the students know what they're supposed to be doing all the time, the supposition goes, it won't matter what language I'm speaking to them in.  And more Spanish is more good.  Better.  You know.  Once classroom structures are in place, I continue to think, and once students know how to refer to them in Spanish, then it becomes easier to conduct everything else in Spanish.

What I think I'm missing, though, is two key pieces.  First, my students still see no reason to learn Spanish, so I have to give them a "why."   Second, of all the structures I've built and designed and stolen and taught, I'm not sure my students understand the process of learning a new language, so I have to give them a "how."  I know I do this all the time, but my students are almost universally frustrated by the process of learning new vocabulary, and forget it almost immediately.  They are not yet taking responsibility for their own learning, and I haven't yet figured out how to inspire them.


It feels like I keep tripping over this same dot on the floor.  Any thoughts?

It's all about the students

This blog post is directed at my students, but it's part of a broader conversation that all of us should spend a lot of time on. It's a continuation of some conversations we've had about school rules, why we have specific school rules, and how, when, and why to work to change them. Students, this post turned out a lot longer than I meant. If you want to skip the essay and just leave your thoughts about our school's rules, policies, and expectations, just go straight to the comments. Please remember to be respectful; I don't want to have to delete comments for inappropriate language. (Imagine you're, maybe not in school, but at least in the parking lot outside with our principal standing nearby.)

Our school board sets the school rules; these are the things that are included in your planners that we go over at the beginning of each school year, and that the school-based adults should be reinforcing all year long. This includes the school cell-phone policy (you don't have one on school; if a teacher needs you to have one for a project, give it to that teacher before school starts and pick it up after school ends), the dress code (nothing distracting; no sleeveless shirts for men, no shoulder straps thinner than 3 inches for women, no shorts or skirts that come up higher than the fingers), the tardy policy, the graduation requirements, etc. The school board consists of people who have a stake in the performance of the school. In our case, it's mostly your parents, but it can also include local business officials, education professionals (usually ones who don't work for the school), and others. Their motivation in setting the rules is to keep you safe in school, and to provide you with the best education possible. They usually work with the schools' administration to make the rules.

We also have a set of school behavior expectations--Be Safe, Be Respectful, Be Responsible. (If you poke around in the archives, you'll find out more about how these came to be than you ever wanted to.) The Bobcat Code is another way of repeating the same basic ideals. Every community has rules about appropriate behavior, and these expectations are intended to tell us all what those are for our community. It's not just to tell students how to behave. It's also to tell teachers and staff how to behave, what to celebrate, who our good citizens are, things like that.

Each teacher has their own set of guidelines, too: rules, behavior expectations, and classroom procedures. The purpose of these guidelines is to codify how teachers and students interact. You can tell a lot about a teacher by their classroom guidelines.

All of these different levels of "rules" and "expectations" have one objective: to make school the best learning environment for you possible. In order for that to be true, the following things have to happen:

1. The rules have to be directed towards improving your learning experience. (That's why we don't have a "Buy American" clause in the policies--it's got nothing to do with your learning.)
2. You, the student, as well as we, the teachers, have to know what the rules are, what they're for, and what the consequences of following and not following them will be.
3. The staff has to apply those rules consistently, re-teach them regularly, and be prepared to explain (in an appropriate time and place) what the educational value of a rule is.

Changing rules isn't easy, especially at the "school-board" level. I think the best way to do that is to work through the student senate, or failing that, through the administration. The school-wide behavior expectations are a little more flexible. Talk to me or send me an e-mail for more information about changing those. At the classroom level, the teacher has a fair amount of discretion with her own expectations. She still has to enforce school rules and support school-wide behavior expectations, but "good citizenship" is a little bit different in each class, for each teacher. If you think a teacher has expectations that are detrimental to your learning, talk to her. There are ways of getting REALLY harmful classroom policies rescinded, but we all want you to be in the best learning environment possible. Try talking to us first.

In any case, with any rules change, be prepared to justify how the change will help your education. Once, I asked students what they thought about school policies. One student responded, "There should be a boxing ring where students who aren't getting along can beat each other up." We asked how it would help their education to get into fights. The response: "It wouldn't. But it would be fun." Whether it would be fun or not, it would be at the expense of the safety of the students, it would take away from learning, and it wouldn't work as well as more productive, non-violent means of problem-solving. So that's an example of a bad policy change.

SO....after all that, what do you think about our school policy? What works, what doesn't? What could work better?

Day-to-day consistency and lesson planning

I'm never really been sure as how to structure a class so that it looks the same every day, what with the wide variety of events that might happen in a school day. I know that part of that is designing and teaching a procedure to get back on task after interruptions, but the interruptions range in intrusiveness such that one procedure, even two or three or procedures, to get them back on task continues to escape me.

So my lesson plan has been an ad-hoc document, an objective followed by a list of activities designed to achieve the objective. That's probably fine as far as it goes, but it means that Wednesday doesn't look much like Monday. (Also, Wednesday doesn't often look like Wednesday's plan.) This makes it hard to model the same 3 or 4 classroom-management phrases in Spanish every day, which makes it nigh impossible for me to conduct class entirely in Spanish, which is the goal.

So, I've spent some amount of time looking for a way of making plans that would help establish a more consistent daily class structure. And I finally found a document that was handed to me during the New Teacher Academy meetings, and probably during my teacher education courses in college, based on Hunter (1984):

READINESS

• Warm-up:
• Objective:

INFORMATION

• Instructional input:
• Modeling:
• Activities/Questions Strategies

PRACTICE

• Guided practice
• Independent practice

ASSESSMENT

• Closure

A lot of this looks like it would fit well into a WL class, and into my class in particular. Every day, I have a warm-up activity and a learning objective to engage students in what they already know. Instructional input is what in world language pedagogy would be called "comprehensible input." "Input flood," a term I've only recently come across and thus may be misinterpreting, transfers to modeling. Activities / questions strategies (called by Marzano "checking for understanding" (2007) ) just involves a preliminary check that the students gets what they're supposed to get and how they're supposed to go about getting it. (I say just; it's no simple matter. I often think I've taken great pains to make sure students understand, only to have to anser the same question I've just addressed 4 times.) Guided practice==in-class checks; independent practice==more practice; homework. Closure = a formative assessment and some groundwork for a summative assessment down the road.

Here's where my issue lies: In the Communication column of my standards, each lesson has to take two things into consideration: context and communicative mode. (Ideally, a lesson should also include some Cultural context; get a student to make Connections between this lesson, other classes, and their own lives; help a student make communicative and cultural Comparisons, and then help move their learning into their Communities. But one step at a time.) If a unit has 3 communicative contexts, it means that there are 18 different lessons that happen in an ideal world: a spoken / listening conversation; an written / read conversation; a listening comprehension; a reading comprehension; a spoken presentation; and a written presentation. Even if you tie together a few (or even all) contexts together for the presentational communication mode, there's still a heap of lessons that should occur.

Given all that, is it even theoretically possible to make tomorrow like today? Probably not, but it's worth the try. But up until now, I've had a different understanding of the structure of a unit. This is a day-to-day model, which seems to sacrifice a big-picture understanding for an illusory class-structure uniformity. I've always understood a unit to be a different kind of thing: a presentation, modeling, and practice of vocabulary in a wide context, followed by a closer examination of the vocabulary and grammar necessary for specific communicative tasks. Communicative practice activities, a few activities that tie in all the different contexts, a day of review, then a test.

Anyway, I'll try this "new" lesson plan format and see if I can make it work for me. It will probably be rough going for a while, but once I get the hang of it, I think it will tie objectives, instruction, practice, and assessment a lot closer together. (That's the point of the format, after all.) Also, I think it will increase my students' capacity for taking Spanish as the primary classroom language in the future.

Update: Two minutes of further reading revealed Marzano's claim that this lesson plan structure "is best suited for kessons that address procedural knowledge" (180). Good for some situations, but not all. I'm still going to try it for a little while; there's a lot of procedural-type stuff in communication: how to say you're going to do something, how to listen for key vocabulary, how to identify the main idea of a passage. I think vocabulary learning may more neatly fit in with "declarative knowledge," which is a different ball of wax.

WORKS CITED:

Hunter, M. (1984.) Knowing, teaching, and supervising. Using what we know about teaching. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Modified by Wilson-O'Leary for teacher conference.

Marzano, R. (2007.) The art and science of teaching: a comprehensive framework for effective instruction. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. 181.

Procedures and structure in the World Languages classroom

Everything I've read ever suggests that the single most important element of classroom management is to establish and teach procedures consistently and well. (Wong & Wong 2005, Marzano 2007, Flannery 2008, and an e-mail I just got from the State Education Association illustrate the point, but I'm pretty sure that that's far from exhaustive.) It's an aspect of teaching that I've had to get a lot better at in my classroom, since I'm not inclined by nature to be procedures-driven.

At the same time, communicative language theory suggests that you start speaking the target language immediately and more or less constantly (Lee & Van Patten 1995, to name one). The act of a student understanding a language they're learning is referred to in the literature as "comprhensible input," and its importance in the language classroom cannot be exaggerated. The mor of it, the better. This is an aspect of my job that DOES come naturally. I love speaking Spanish, and to be perfectly frank, I like the sound of my own voice.

However, I've always had a problem with these two key elements of my job, because they seem to come into direct conflict with each other. I base a lot of early-stage language education on playing off of prior knowledge--my students know that they're students, they know I'm a teacher, and they know they're in school. In the younger grades, that's 4 sessions worth of lesson plans, after you get done adding songs, pictures, TPR activities, and the like. Even for the 1st-year high school students, that and peripherals make for a good chunk of vocabulary acquisition. But procedures require great precision and absolute clarity. In order for a procedure to be effective, a student has to know when, where, how, and WHY. Beginning-of-class procedure doesn't work for coming back from a fire drill. In the same vein, if you're making up procedures as you go along, students are (rightly) going to think you're asking to jump through hoops; besides, the next day, I never remember which procedures I said were in effect. This is the antithesis of a procedure, it's the whim of a dictator.

So, marrying these two practices suggests that from day 1 a language teacher should teach procedures in the target language. But the chance for miscommunication in such occasions is great, and the consequences include misunderstood, misapplied, or ignored procedures. This as good as plunges a classroom into chaos. (At least, it did mine.) Another potential solution is to teach mostly procedures in English with some Spanish content instruction. This feels like a splitting-the-baby solution, one that satisfies neither the need for good procedures nor communicative theory. It's failed to work for a long time, though, so it's what I went with this year. We're two weeks into the school year, and my high school students seem to be pretty okay on the procedures, as well as on the smattering of Spanish we've covered so far. (I'm thinking about my Spanish I students here.) Not an ideal solution, but an okay stop-gap measure so far. One could, I suppose, simply ignore one beginning-of-the-year obligation or the other, but that sounds like the makings of a hard year.

A related subject to this is the level of structure during instructional time. I have boardwork at the beginning of class and I try to have an assessment on the lesson at the end of the class, but what happens in between varies wildly--instruction? practice? speaking activity? listening activity? vocab?. I imagine it's the same with other teachers, that it isn't simply my disorganization biting me in the tail yet again. Ideally, in order to maximize comprehensible input in Spanish, my students should know what to expect every minute of the day before the tardy bell rings. My plans are thorough, but they're not prescient. So balancing structure and comprehensible input again seem to come into conflict. It's an issue that I've noticed, but I haven't thought a lot about it yet.

I don't think that I've read anything that addresses this apparent contradiction. I'd hoped to acquire a copy of the ACTFL's Keys to the Classroom, a book designed for new World Language teachers, to see if the pros had any suggestions. So far, no dice. If anyone in the real world has seen anything like this, or otherwise has suggestions, I'd appreciate hearing them.

Works cited:

Lee, J., and VanPatten, B. (1995.) Making communicative language teaching happen. McGraw-Hill.

Wong, H., and Wong, R. (2005.) The first days of school. Mountain View, CA: Harry K. Wong Publications.

Flanery, M. E. (2008.) "When the ship sails adrift." NEAToday, 27 (1), 30-31.

Update: I just looked at the program for the State World Languages Association conference coming up one month, and there appears to be a session that strives to resolve the very conflicts I mention above. More about on this after the conference (assuming I can go).