1 month reflection

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. 

I'm an exciting person who does exciting things

How I spent my Saturday morning:

Made coffee.  Drank coffee.
Reflected on classroom management difficulties I'm having in one class and how that class compares to other classes.
Reviewed previously-used sources for classroom management: First Days of School, CHAMPS, assorted resources accumulated through the years, like you do.
Tried to figure out how applied behavior theory fits into a teaching methodology as fluid as TPRS.
Figured out that some of these things relate to the same difficulties I have with standards mapping in general.  Spent 20 minutes on a standards-mapping tangent.
Wrote new classroom management system informed by research review.  We'll see how it goes.
Read up on Kindergarten Reading, a TPRS event.  Decided I won't have time to do anything about it until next year. 
Blogged about it.

EDITED: I almost forgot!  I read an article about tech integration.

And now we return to your regularly scheduled reflections

I took the month of July off from school things.  I've been doing no concrete work, and whenever I've thought about my classes, I've tried to think about something else.  The idea behind that is this:  For many summers in the past, I've woken up most days, all summer long, thinking, "Okay, I'm going to do school work today."  And then I don't, and I'm disappointed with myself.  Well, this year, for a variety of reasons, I did school work through the entirety of June.  When July came, I told myself that I could use some down time. 

So I guess it's not really taking time off, so much as it is recognizing reality: I'm not doing any school work.  It's been great for me, anyway.  I've done a lot of things I've been trying to do for a long time.  I grew basil and made pesto.  I painted something without adult supervision.  I used a binder clip to hook a battery to an LED and make a sort of flashlight out of PVC pipe fittings.  I've been exercising, and I've gone to the dojo once a week for two months.  I finished taking Stanford's iTunes U course on computer program design principles, and have started re-taking the iPod/iPad programming course, now that I know a little something about writing programs.  (It's still well below what the professor on the videos expects from his real students, but he'll never know.) 

But August starts on Wednesday, and I'm going to be kicking it in to gear.  I've still been learning about how to learn and how to teach, I've just been avoiding thinking about practical applications.  As a result, I have a back log of really exciting possibilities that I want to get to work on; I think I'm going to come out of my corner swinging with both fists.  Stay tuned for a goal list and some plans of action.  In the meantime, here's something that my friend Jamie sent me to chew on:

http://www.ryanlouiscooper.com/2011/10/how-to-learn-stuff.html

What are you most looking forward to doing when you get back to school?  What changes do you hope to see, and what changes do you hope to make?  What do you hope hasn't changed at all?

Processing student feedback

For a class evaluation, I gave my students a form based on the NBPTS World Language standards.  For a variety of reasons, mostly accidental, I only ended up giving it to my Spanish II and my Spanish I classes.  By nature, these students are the ones most inclined to like class; they signed up for it, after all.  For that same reason, though, they're the ones most likely to call BS if there's a problem, I think.  I've just finished going over them, and here are some of the highlights:

On a scale of 1-5, in both classes, I averaged better than 3 in every category.  My median and mode scores in every category were also 3 or better. 

The 2 categories I did worst in were "forming constructive relationships with students and families" and "knowledgable about how students learn language."  As far as forming constructive relationships, the dissaatisfaction can come from a lot of different angles.  I wish I'd asked a more specific question.  Is it the "family" part I don't do so well on, or is it the "students" part, or is it the "forming relationships" part?  I know I don't call home as much as I should to say nice things about students.  I'm working on it, but it takes a while.  The "students learn language" one was surprising to me.  I thought I did pretty well.

My consistently lowest scores were from my Spanish II class, who mostly came away with the impression that I don't value diversity and I don't understand the different ways students learn.  In short, I think, they don't think I valued them as individuals.  That's too bad, because I loved them as individuals. 
 
One of the classes thought things went better in the first semester, when I spoke more Spanish, than the second semester.  They seemed to think we had more fun.  The other class thought it was fun most of the time.

I got pretty high marks for knowledge of language, culture, and assessment.  The last one sort of surprised me; I keep trying to re-vamp my tests to they test what I want the students to know, but I don't think I'm there yet.  One student wasn't fooled.  S/he gave me generally high marks, except when it came to assessment. 

The students all think I know Spanish really well, which is good, because I do.  I feel like I'm sort of cheating putting that question on there in order to make myself feel better.  (Not that I feel bad, but I knew I was going to score 4 or better in that question.)  But if I don't ask it, how will I know if my students don't believe I can speak Spanish? 

Here's the takeaway: I know my stuff, but I'm not connecting with the students in a way they understand.  Some of that may just be the nature of trying to connect with them in a language they don't speak, but connecting with students is a good goal to work towards.

Taking it for granted

I've been working really hard on developing an English IV and Honors English curriculum this semester.  I've also been trying to push Spanish II forward, and have been looking ahead to the possibility of Spanish III and IV.  I've been coasting through my Spanish I, trying to catch up with everything else.  On Thursday, it bit me in the temporal adverb.

I've been through this lesson a dozen times before, so I came in a little underprepared.  I hadn't looked over my notes or the handout that I'd be giving--this presentation had worked every other year; why not today?  Well, it didn't.  It was kind of a disaster.  I still don't know what happened; I wish I'd been video taping.  The practical upshot is that I had to re-teach the entire lesson on Friday.

This experience got me thinking about taking things for granted.  For the first time in my professional career, I haven't had to fight tooth and nail for every inch of learning my students achieve.  Some of them study Spanish outside of class; many of them use my throw-away utterances in their own Spanish conversations.  Most of them know better than to ask for translations or to shout out the English once they've figured something out.  I have yet to send a student to the principal's office, or indeed to use any punitive measure other than a reminder of rules and procedures, maybe an explanation of why they're important, and to hold some "extreme" cases after class for a minute.


It's March now, and because of all the amazing achievements my students are making, I've been thinking that I'm doing a great job of teaching them.  Also, they mostly behave really well, so I sort of thought my classroom community program was working effectively.  It turns out I'm the guy born on third who thinks he hit a triple.  I've gotten lazy with re-teaching expectations, positively reinforcing behaviors, reviewing content, and re-designing lessons to meet students' needs.  In fact, I've almost forgotten that the students have needs.  I've been teaching Spanish 1 for long enough that most of my weekly plans play on several different intelligence types, and most contain some level of differentiation of instruction.  So I really have just been pulling out old weekly plans and photocopying old handouts, and calling it a day.

Thursday really was a wake-up call for me: I can't make it through the week just planning my "new" classes.  My Spanish I students deserve the same level of prep that my English students do.  I apologized to them on Friday as I re-taught the lesson, hopefully better.  (It felt better.)  If there are any students reading this now, I apologize again.

Well, that's September gone, then.

This has been a REALLY good start to the year, I think.  I hope my students would agree.  I actually spent the first two weeks on community building, and have an outline for continuing it through.  I have enforced my rules consistently, and when I noticed a big upsurge in students pushing the boundaries, I responded in what I think is the appropriate way.  The students had seen the consequences for consistent disruptive behavior already, so the students who were testing the rules were unsurprised by their consequences.  After a few minutes, I found an excuse do to a re-focusing activity, like Braingym.  The next day, we re-covered our expectations, a la Randy Sprick, and rehearsed the routine where the students fell apart.  This was in my 8th grade Spanish class.  In almost none of my other classes have I had any difficulty that I couldn't pin on "the teacher kept us in the chair too long."  In fact, in my honors English 12 class, I have asked the students to re-write the rules--none of my original rules are a problem. 

All of this almost certainly has more to do with the school climate and the students themselves than with my opening sequence.  This school is something of an anomaly.  There's no school-wide positive behavior support system, the school expectations are not posted on banners all over the walls.  And yet the students know.  And even more amazing, they follow them.  I am frankly stunned at the internal level of communication between faculty, staff and administration that must be going on to make this happen.

What will be REALLY interesting is to see what happens in December.  Our football season ends in September, and the football coach is evidently a key part of keeping this whole system running.  We're a "Friday Night Lights" kind of school, except instead of the football players expecting special privileges because of who they are, they're held to a higher standard of comportment and academics. It's awesome. 

I'm clearly well-liked by the students.  My Spanish students tell their parents they like my class, and their parents tell my principal, and my principal tells me.  In return, I call students' homes as often as I can to gush about the wonderful things they're doing.  If it keeps up like this, the positive behavior stuff will just end up running everything.  And wouldn't that be nice? 

My Spanish 7 and 8 classes are what I expected them to be--start with social niceties, and go on from there.  (I expected my 8th graders to have had Spanish 7, and evidently this isn't universally true.  So that was a surprise.)  My Spanish I class is a little different.   They all claimed some familiarity with Spanish from middle school, but none of them could tell me what they knew, and nothing I've taught them so far

As for my actual performance in delivering content, I give myself a B in my Spanish classes, and a pretty generous C in English class.  In my early Spanish classes, I teach students the geography of the Spanish-speaking world.  (It's one of the content expectations.  I didn't write them.)  It's part of my Schmoozing 101 unit (hat tip to Annette from the County ISD for the name); students have to know where their Spanish-speaking friends are from without running to Google Earth.  (Although that is precisely what I do.)  But it's the sort of thing I hate--it's basically memorizing, it takes FOREVER to do right, and apart from some commands, I have a hard time doing it in Spanish.  So the students aren't speaking as much Spanish as I want them to.  (I've finally got the "draw your own map" project doing what I want it to do, though...yay!)  So they're learning what I'm teaching, I'm teaching it in the right way, but it doesn't feel like the right thing to teach.  I'll be working on that for future classes.

My Spanish II has thrown me a complete curve ball, because they're grammarians at the fourth-year level, but have the communication skills of people who have never spoken Spanish.  Because they haven't.  They have surprisingly strong packets of vocabulary, but there's no reliable way to predict what they have.  I've spent most of the last month selling Spanish as a vehicle for communication, and met with a few days of wide-eyed terror-stricken stares when I refused to translate directions.  They're starting to catch on, though, and I think they love it.  We started a unit in which we'll review everything that happens in a day, with a focus on them speaking Spanish every single day. After that, it will be my standard Spanish II curriculum, with a de-emphasis on grammatical concepts that they already know extremely well, and with plenty of time for back-filling.

Unsurprisingly, my English classes are a little meh.  I have a clear learning goal, and a good vision of what steps we need to take to get there.  I think my day-do-day practice is good instruction, because a lot of my students are doing good learning, some of them actually against their will.  (That was kind of a joke.)  I can clean up some of my routines, particularly the beginning of class.  But there's a gap, and I keep feeling like there's something missing.  I look around and wonder what I'm not teaching.  I may ask Annette from the ISD if she has time to observe me teach someday soon, and give me some pointers.

...and that's a year.

Yesterday was the last day of school.  As last days go, I thought it was a great one.  The students participated in a wide variety of really fun, creative activities, designed, set up and executed almost single-handedly by my friend and colleague Preston.  Jeff the Science Teacher and his Experiential Sciences class built a trebuchet and spent a good chunk of the morning throwing softballs the length of most of a football field.  There was a slip-and-slide 60 feet wide and 80 feet long, a dunk tank that the principal dutifully sat in, face-painting.  The superintendent grilled hot dogs.  It was a real carnivalesque occasion.  (Hopefully I'll be able to steal some pictures from people with more foresight than me, or at least students who had their cell phone cameras on.)

It was also very sad for me and for several of my colleagues.  My position has been suspended, and I was laid off.  Kris, our instructional coach, will return to being our high school ELA teacher, which means that John (whose position was funded by ARRA money) is out of a job.  Jami, an amazing teacher with whom I've worked closely on the MiBLSi project, and was deeply loved by the students and parents, will be doing education outreach and missionary work in the Dominican Republic.  Gregg is continuing his education; instead of hiring another full-time art teacher, the administration is looking for an art/music teacher (or a part-time art / part-time music teacher; I was never clear on which).  Another colleague won't be returning for reasons which aren't mine to share.

I'm still writing a post to my students, thanking them for the four great years and encouraging them for the future.  The landscape of the school will be very different for them next year.  Children and young adults are flexible, but at least 5 and as many as 8 people they know and love (to varying degrees) will not be there. 

I'm also drafting one to the staff of our school, which I will probably never share with them.  I want to tell them to make the most of the time they've bought themselves at such great sacrifice.  I want them to know how good things are in their school, and how great they could be.  I want them to know what an honor it was to work with them.  But I couldn't tell them anything they don't already know, so maybe that little blurb will be enough.

There will, of course, also be a great deal of hand-wringing self-reflection over the year once the dust settles.

I have a great deal to say to our state legislators, and I have been saying it at length in a variety of formats.  I'll continue doing that until things improve.


I'm looking for a position now.

And at the end, there's nothing to say, except, Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Burr Oak Community Schools year of 2009 and 2010.

What a language teacher's job is

 On Thursday, I had a long, intense conversation with my colleague Kris.  She's our instructional coach this year, and I strongly hope that she will continue that role in the years to come, even as she returns to full-time teaching duties.  She expressed the concern that I jump the gun in my classes--I move too quickly from building buy-in, directly to speaking Spanish.  She worries that the students don't get why they're doing what they're doing, and thus never engage, and thus never really learn.  I take her observation to heart, because I'm pretty sure my kung fu is strong, but my students are not learning Spanish at the rate they should be.  Good practice done badly is bad practice, and if my students aren't learning, I'm not quite doing something right. 

According to Krashen, as cited in Lee and Van Patten (1995), "...as long as there is motivation and the right affective environment (e.g., low anxiety), a person cannot avoid learning a second language if there is sustained comprehensible input" (29).  They cite other researchers that say this is overstating the case somewhat, and they themselves stake out the position that using the language in communicative settings is necessary for learning languages.  However, to the extent that this statement is true, it has powerful implications for language learning and, by extension, language instruction.  The whole rest of their book is dedicated to outlining what those implications are.

But for now, I just want to worry at that one sentence for a little while, pick it apart and apply it.  I'm writing lesson plans right now, so the action items are immediately applicable--I can go from this blog screen to my unit plan, to my weekly plan, and apply what I figure out.


It looks like this: 

motivation + affective environment + sustained COMPREHENSIBLE input = language learning.


According to a source I don't remember right now (it was in an audiobook I borrowed from a friend, which I've since returned), as cited by Sprick (2007), motivation is a function of value times expectancy of success.  So, if students value what they're learning, their motivation increases.  If the students expect to succeed at a given event, their motivation to do it increases. 

The updated equation looks thus:


(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained comprehensible input = Language Learning


I don't know enough about what Lee and VanPatten mean by "affective environment" to perform any cute faux mathematical operation on it.  I believe, though, that this largely refers to classroom management issues, about which I've typed extensively.

Lee and VanPatten dedicate most of their book to outlining the concept of sustained comprehensible input.   They later add "meaning-bearing" to the list of qualities of valuable communication.

(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained, meaning-bearing comprehensible input = Language Learning

This means that a student has to catch that there is a meaning she is supposed to understand in the utterance.  The student also needs to be able to understand some portion of the communication.

This is a pretty clear description of a language teacher's job.  These work out to these action steps:

1.)  Sell the value of the learning.  This means explaining reasons that a student should learn languages, but also why a student would want to.  (I always think of the Rosetta Stone ad: "He was a farm boy from Iowa.  She was an Italian supermodel.  He had one chance to impress her.")  This corresponds to increasing the value of learning.

2.) Increase the expectation of success.  Celebrate baby steps.  Define milestones, and move heaven and earth to drag your students towards them.  Once they get there, make a big deal over it.

3.) Run your classroom well.  I've had a lot to say about this.  Marzano has a lot to say about this.  Jackson has a lot to say about this, Wong and Wong have a lot to say about this, and Sprick has a whole lot to say about this.  It sort of boils down to these.

• Have a very few rules which apply all the time.  Be consistent about reinforcing them positively and correcting them when necessary.
• Have procedures for everything.  Teach them explicitly and rehearse them.  (Behaviorism at its finest, but it will help if the students create their own procedures.)
• Make your classroom a place where it's okay to make mistakes, and teach students how to make GOOD mistakes.  As Kryza likes to say, "This is a risk-taking, mistake-making classroom."  In fact,  Corder (as cited in Lee and VanPatten (1997)) says that mistakes are "indispensable to the learner himself" (in Lee and VanPatten, p. 22.) 

It feels like I'm missing one or two, but we'll go from there.

4.)  Give your students language they can chew.  Lee & VanPatten say that if your students are at level N of comprehension, then you should communicate with them at N + 1.  That's a hard number to hit consistently, especially with a class of 20, 30, 40 language learners.  (Not that I have a class of 40 people, but it's probably not far off for many of my colleagues.)  Lee & VanPatten have things to say about that, too.

So, there.  I've defined what a WL teacher's job is.  Not exactly my original goal, but that's okay.  My next trick:  Matching this up with Marzano's 10 reflection questions from The Art and Science of Teaching, Jackson's 7 principles of master teachers, Kryza's "Chunk / Chew / Check" lesson-planning and differentiation model, the National Board's teacher assessment tool, and Kris's "Hook your students" principle.  Also, what this means to what my class looks like.

Resources:



Jackson, R. (2009).  Never work harder than your students.  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Lee, J., & VanPatten, B. (1997).  Making communicative language teaching happen.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marzano, R. (2008).  The art and science of teaching.  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Sprick, R.  (2008). Interventions audio.  Eugene, OR: Northwest Publishing.

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?

Happy New Year! Things done, and things yet to do

Well, that's 2009 down.  (In my mental calendar, it's not so much one year--2009--as half of SY 2008-09 and half of SY 2009-10.)  And as always, it's worth reflecting on the successes of the year.  In accordance with tradition, these reflections will take the form of a top ten list.

TOP TEN MOMENTS OF 2009

10.  I began my 4th year of teaching--I'm no longer officially a rookie!  Now, all I need is for my craft to show that.
9.  SY 2008-09 was our first full year of Positive Behavior Support.  The students have strong opinions about it.  Very strong.
8.  I modeled literary analysis for my sophomores by ripping Twilight a new one.  A good time was had by all.  (Later I made it clear that reading anything was better than reading nothing.)
7.  We've formed a professional learning community at school.  After 10 meetings, we're just about ready to stop complaining and get down to business.
6.  I wrote more on this blog last year than in the previous two years combined, and increased my readership by 50%.  Now 3 people read it.
5.  The professional development days.  SOOO many professional development days.  If I'd done this much work on applied behavior analysis in college, I'd have my minor in psychology.
4.  I reorganized my curriculum.  Again.  Only not really.  Again.  Still, it's better than it was, in the same way that a lean-to shed provides better protection from the elements than a pile of sticks.
3.  For the school's winter assembly, 5 of my co-workers and I walked like Egyptians, while 4 others showed off their entirely too-good Bangles impersonations.  Later research suggested that most Egyptians don't actually walk like that, and probably dance better.
2.  One of my students of bygone years--one of the ones I never thought liked my class very much-- came into my classroom wearing some amazing pajama pants.  He said to the class, "These are pantalones en español.  ¿Te gustan mis pantalones?"  Grinning from ear to ear, he waltzed back out.

And the number 1 moment of 2009 in school-related topics was.... (brrrrmmmmmm.....)

Working with the Amazing Staff and Oft-Imitated, Ne'er-Duplicated Students at our school.  You're the reason I keep getting out of bed at 5 AM, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Happy New Year, all!  (I'll leave the "things left to do" in the title for a later post.  I'm too busy doing some of them right now.)

Hard realities, harsh truths

I strongly considered keeping this journal entry away from public consumption.  It's not going to be nice, it's not going to be pretty.  It's going to be more questions than answers, and it's going to end in an admission that not only do I not know what the answers are, I'm not sure where to find them.  It will probably meander through a forest of clichés, get lost in a swamp of self-pity, and just maybe begin to climb the mountain of self-awareness.  If anyone ever read this, it might actually hurt my career.  I've changed my mind, though, for three reasons.  It's possible that somebody might read this and have an answer.  It might be used as a model of reflection, self-awareness, and problem-solving.  Besides, nobody's reading, anyway.

But we're going to start here: My students don't like my class.  They're also not learning any Spanish.

I've taken a lot of courses this year, and they basically have two primary goals related to school: build a positive community of learners (school-wide positive behavior support and MiBLSi), and increase my capacity to improve my students' learning (everything else).  It's become painfully clear to me that teaching is more about what you do than what you know, something I think that every good professional sort of knows already.  To that end, every week or two, I try to add another element I've learned into my practice, work in a new or improved learning activity, or in some other way do something new to improve my students' learning.  One every week or two is a small percentage of what I've learned, but it's a lot more sustainable than trying to pull something new in every day.  But, sustainable or no, good practice or no, my students aren't learning Spanish.

They may be learning lots of things.  I've started working in higher-order thinking skills.  There's an element of social justice and a focus on cultures and comparisons I've never had before.  All of these things are important components of a world languages class.  I try to model civility, flexibility, stay-on-taskness, all important life skills.  I try to have a sense of humor about the world in my place in it.  But they're not learning to speak or understand Spanish.

I've over-focused both on the differences between a language class and other classes, and on the similarities.  It's a neat trick, I know.  Bear with me.  The big differences between Spanish and, say, social studies go like this:  When you leave social studies, you're supposed to know certain things about history and anthropology and such.  Ideally, you've been taught how to think about social studies, and not simply that the Magna Carta was signed in 1776 by Grant and Lee at Woodstock.  (Or whatever.)  But you probably have to pick up those facts along the way in order to compare civil wars.  (Studies show that in the breadth-of-content vs. depth-of-content debate, depth of content actually increases the breadth of content covered.)  In Spanish class, you have to learn how to compare and make connections to languages and cultures, and use these in your communities.  But if you can't perform some basic functions in the language, then you've missed half the content, and the part that most people think of as Spanish class.  So, I've over-focused on the differences by ignoring useful planning techninques--big-picture questions, learning goals, and things like that, in order to build in language-practice time.  I've also ignored the similarities in the need for vocabulary development techniques, but I have a reason for that--middle- and high-school students should deeply learn about 90 content-related words per class per year.  If I wait that long for students to learn vocabulary, they'll never get anywhere.

In the past couple of years, my PD has focused on classroom management issues, and higher-order-thinking-skills issues.  I've not had a whole lot of world language-specific training since becoming a full-time teacher.  I'm not sure how important it would be to have such training--shouldn't I have a pretty good idea of what a Spanish class ought to look like?  Well, in a few words, probably, but I don't.  I loved learning Spanish, would happily sit and do work sheets based on pedagogical theory from the 17th century, thought that watching movies and slide shows and playing learning games were all pleasant distractions from the serious business of learning.  To find that in fact they're an integral part of the learning process, and that failing to include them is one of the more-commonly cited reasons for dropping out of school, means I have little no personal paradigm for a good world language classroom.  Below,  a list of some of the assumptions I'm working off of, and where I feel I rank on those assumptions.


1.)  I am a teacher.  This means I teach students.  My subject is Spanish, but that's almost incidental.  What my students learn from me may well be something other than Spanish, but they should be learning from me.  Since I am teaching Spanish, they should learn things like communication strategies, how to learn vocabulary, how to study a culture and live in it (in certain instances), things like that.  As I alluded to above, I think I'm pretty good at teaching my students other things--it was once suggested to me that I'm more of a philosophy teacher than a Spanish teacher.    This was simultaneously a great compliment (to me--a great insult to actual philosophy teachers), and a heartbreaking strike against my actual job.

2.)  1st-year Spanish classes should be conducted in Spanish, 80% or more of the time.  After that, they should always be in Spanish.  (I don't remember where I got the 80% number.  If I find it, I'll cite my source later.)  I'm not good at this.  I speak maybe 10 minutes of Spanish in a 60-minute class.  That's like 16%.

3.)  In order to run a class entirely in Spanish, the students need to have a very strong sense of community, and an ability to self-direct their learning.  These things do not happen by accident.  I'm not great at this, either.  I've focused really hard on making this happen on purpose, and it hasn't stuck as well as I'd hoped

4.)  Early-level Spanish classes should focus on speaking communication, with reading and writing as support structures.  I do this fairly well, in that we don't do that many writing activities without a fair amount of speaking to go along with it.

5.)  Higher-order thinking skills and social justice are important elements of a world language class.  I'm getting better at this, but I'm pretty sure I'm sacrificing the communication aspect of class to these goals.

The thing is that I'm not sure what I'm not doing right.

Why this post?  Why now?
On Friday, Kris, our teacher coach, observed my 10th grade Spanish II class.  It wasn't an unmitigated disaster, but I think it's fair to say that it was a disaster with few mitigations.  I talked most of the hour, I did it in English, the board work was a review activity that took 15 minutes, we spent a lot of time going over classroom management issues.  I didn't get on to new learning activities until the last 20 minutes of class or so, and even then it was a listening activity.  The students didn't make it any secret of how bored they were.

This isn't the first time that happened, and every time they tell me this, I try to ramp up the next week's lesson plan.  I'm guessing I just don't understand what my class is supposed to look like, or at least how to make it happen.  This is disappointing.  The last few years, I've started the school year very excited to get started on the work.  The last few years, by the time winter break comes along, I'm demoralized, having performed tremendous amounts of work, seen no real benefit in either learning or classroom management, and with huge amounts of work (which should prove useful, but may well not) to do ahead of me.

So Kris has given me a few pointers, and I'm going to try them out this week.  She started out by suggesting I re-think my board work activity.  So we'll go from there.  Hopefully, we can get me doing what I should have done all along.  I suppose it's better that this happened now than after winter break; now I'll have time to implement a few changes and analyze them.  (This blog post took over 3 hours, over the course of 2 days, to write.  It takes some time.  This one was obviously important, but I can't afford to do it all the time.) 

Admirable characteristics

This one's not exactly off-topic, but not exactly not. I found myself pondering (like one does on long car drives after long weeks) the qualities of people I admire. I considered my friends, I thought about historical figures, I contemplated fictitious characters infused with characteristics by their authors, I mulled over the authors of fictitious characters. (I'm NOWHERE NEAR out of synonyms for "thinking.")

What I decided is that I admire clever people: people who do clever things, people who do things cleverly. I don't mean showoffs--the guy who walks on wires between buildings springs to mind. I mean like the team that came up with the iPhone. My students are well aware of my affinity for the iPhone. I don't have one, would lose or destroy it if I did. But they're clever little devices. Facebook is clever, even if many of the people using it are not. I think that a lot of Cirque de Soleil performers are clever, even if they are showoffs.

But above all I like people who use language cleverly. By this, I don't mean politicians who can turn anything into a question about their latest amendment offered to the Farm Subsidies Legislation of the Day. That's not clever, it's self-serving. It also doesn't mean using big words because you can (and I say this unironically, knowing that I do it all the time. Unironically? Really, Cosby? Not even the spell checker recognizes it as a word.) That's not clever, either. At best, it's a play to seem smarter than you are. At worst, it's the active abuse of language, an attempt to make things more confusing.

What I DO mean by clever language use, I think, is this: using words in new and creative ways, successfully making words do jobs they hadn't originally been intended for, ordering words in beautiful ways. I like puns, for example. You can debate whether puns are clever or not, but consider: A hot dog vendor, fallen on hard times, can't make both ends meat. (As many of my favorite puns do, this one comes from Terry Pratchett's excellent Discworld novels. Each of them is a lesson in clever. This example is from The Truth.) Whether the end result is clever or not (and I think it's a hoot--and that may tell you all you need to know about me), the process to get to that joke takes a fair amount of cleverness.

Martin Luther King used language cleverly. Reading his speeches is nothing at all like hearing them, and I can only conclude that listening to a recording is nothing like hearing them live would be. But reading it, removing the time element from the equation, the cleverness underneath shines through. He wrote what I think of as High Oratory. He referenced literature, the Bible, historic works, the classics. A third of his speeches were metaphor. (I made that number up.) And yet, you don't have to know exactly what he's referencing to understand what he's talking about. "I have been to the mountaintop, and I have seen the promised land!" (Watching the video again gives me chills. It's 90 degrees outside and I'm shivering.) That's clever. In addition to being clever, he was also a teriffic presenter; he's always a joy to watch. In addition to all that, he was right. But being right wasn't enough to make him the historic figure he is. (Cf. 2:36 into the previous video--who is that guy?)

Ani Difranco uses language cleverly. (Never mind the "mister lighting person" reference. The hymnal reference is clever.) Joaquin Sabina uses language cleverly. These are the people who impress me.

So what place does this self-indulgent essay have on an otherwise professionally toned blog? Well, here's the next step in my reflection process (told you I had more synonyms): how does this apply to me, my relationship to my students and co-workers? Well, I'm easily impressed by cleverness, particularly in language use. That is, in part, why I became a language teacher. (Growing up, I found it easier to experiment with linguistic cleverness in Spanish. Harder to do well, but easier to play with.) That piece of self-awareness also suggests the kind of student I'm going to like instinctively, and the kind of student whose good qualities won't be so obvious to me. I can also increase my awareness of how I interact with students and their parents. It's AMAZING how often cleverness is exactly the wrong tactic. Also, I can use this to examine my priorities. Am I assigning a certain project because it's best suited to a given learning objective, or am I doing it because I think it's clever? And even when cleverness is appropriate, how I use it is important. Am I being clever at students, or am I providing students an opportunity to be clever?

In short, then: Correctness is more important than cleverness. The guy in the MLK video had a point, even if it didn't blow me away.

Activity analysis: "¡Somos Arqueólogos!"

One of the things I should do a lot more of is examining my activities to see if they're doing what they should, and how to improve them. My methodology teacher, Michael Braun (maybe more about him someday--he also taught me Spanish in high school, and looking at his classes would probably go a long way towards explaining why I think about teaching Spanish the way I do), suggested keeping a binder with assignment sheets in it, and writing notes on post-it notes. I'm going to work on having that system in place by the start of the next school year, but in the meantime, I offer you this:

¡SOMOS ARQUEÓLOGOS!

Imagínate que eres arqueólog@, quinientos años adelante de hoy. Tú (arqueólog@) descubriste la casa en que tú (estudiante) vives.

¿Cómo es este domicilio tan raro? Identifica 5 cosas en la casa. ¿Cómo son estos artefactos? ¿Para qué crees que sirven? (Acuérdate: Tú vives en el futuro. El mundo es muy distinto. Imagina que no sabes nada de la vida actual.)

[Imagine you're an arqueologist, five hundred years from now. You (the archaeologist) have discovered the house in which you (the student) lives.

What is this strange structure like? Identify 5 things in the house. What are these artifacts like? What do you think they're for? (Remember: You live in the future. The world is very different. Imagine you don't know anything about life today.)]

LEVEL: This project was designed for 2nd-year high school students. There's no reason it couldn't be adapted for 1st-year students, or indeed for any time a description of the house becomes necessary.

OBJECTIVE: Students will describe objects in their house from the perspective of someone who doesn't know what they're for. This will help them think of common household objects in Spanish, contextualize vocabulary of common household objects, and establish background knowledge for comparisons of common household items in their house and a house in a Spanish-speaking country. It will also provide students with the vocabulary and language necessary to describe their houses to other students in Spanish.

ASSOCIATED STANDARDS:
1.1.N.RW.g Ask questions in writing about the attributes of places and things in their immediate environment and answer using a list of traits
1.2.N.R.c Understand written interpersonal communication on topics of personal interest such as preferences, family life, friends, leisure and school activities, and everyday occurrences (email, letters, messages, notes, and text messages)
1.3.N.W.c Write brief personal descriptions on familiar topics in Spanish such as self, friends, family, home and school

ASSUMED KNOWLEDGE: Students are expected to have an awareness of, but not yet be entirely comfortable with, the vocabulary of household items, and have a good working knowledge of words that describe physical features of objects (size, color, etc.).

ASSESSMENT: Students show their comprehension of the knowledge by successfully communicating with other students about the objects in their house. This is a formative assessment of vocabulary; it's also a practice activity for other activities to come.

STUDENT OUTPUT: Students' responses ranged from 3-5 word descriptions for each item to a bullet-pointed list in English.

THOUGHTS: I continually butt up against the difference between World Languages and core-content classes, just in terms of learning matter. In this activity, students aren't expected to learn anything new, they're expected to think about what they already know in a different way. This is designed to permit students' minds to focus exclusively on the language acquisition. I recently went to a conference that suggested it might be better on all levels if students are engaging in the culture at the same time as the language.

CHANGES: First, I need to clarify the expectations. Students did not know what was expected of them. Second, rather than having students imagine their own house a different way, it might be better to have them "excavate" a typical house of the Spanish-speaking world, being sure to include a few things the students probably don't have in their own house. (I still think it's important for students to look at their own activities in a new way, but maybe this isn't the format for it.)

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.

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?

People doing what I do, better than I do it

At the ASCD website, Dina Strasser works her way through Marzano's Art and Science of Teaching. She's posted her blog entry on the first chapter.

I tried a similar exercise this past summer. I'm looking forward to reading the work of someone who's good at it.

UPDATE, 21 Feb: Marzano speaks. This is actually a pretty cool format--it's like listening to a really fascinating conversation, with a computer right next to you that cites the speakers' sources as they talk.

I'll try to keep abreast of Dina's (etiquette check: is it okay to refer to someone I've never met by their first name? Politeness in World 2.0 is so weird.) blogging and Bob's responses. (Can I call him Bob?)

Never work harder than your students, Preface and Intro

The preface has some inspiring words and what certainly seem like keen insights into the development of teachers. Jackson defines what she calls the "master teacher mindset," a way of thinking about and looking the craft of teaching which exemplifies really effective teachers. The defining point seems to be that instead of looking for hard-and-fast answers to questions that arise while teaching, a master teacher understands that asking the right question is the more important act (2). She suggests that all teachers can be master teachers with practice, a sentiment with which I certainly agree.

The introduction reminds me of nothing so much as a quiz in Cosmo. (Erm...or so I'm told.) You answer the questions, you give yourself a score based on your answers, and then the test tells you who your true love is, or what your ideal profession is, or whatever those tests are supposed to tell you. Or, in this case, what level your teaching practice rests at. I rank in as a practitioner, the third stage of four in this hierarchy of professional development, by exactly 1 point. As you can probably tell by my tone, I'm always a little skeptical of such things; it's like a horoscope. They're vaguely enough worded that they could apply to anybody. Some parts of the "practitioner" description are very accurate, but others are not. (I flatter myself that I have a pretty high awareness of both my skills and areas of needed improvement).

Having said all that, Jackon's primary objective in giving the quiz seems to be to initiate self-reflection and increase self-awareness. This reflection seems like it's going to be a key to Jackson's book, and I don't think it's something that can be over-practiced. So despite the teen-magazine feel of the beginning of the book, Jackson's purpose in the book seem to fit pretty tightly to my motivation for reading it.

Various points

*Credit where credit's due. He probably isn't the first or the only current user of the phrase, but the incomparable Glenn Greenwald uses that title when he wants to get out a number of things on his mind. I can only aspire to emulate his dedication to his task, and I will never be able to emulate his knowledge and skill at his job. For the moment, I'll settle for emulating his Web 2.0 mannerisms. Each of the points below is worthy of its own posts, and each of them has a post in the works. But they're itching and urgent. And, honestly, I don't know where to begin with them.

*The limitations of reflection. Sometimes, after really hard days, I look at the disaster I wrought upon my students and hope that I didn't do them any lasting harm. And I think to myself, "I love my job. I love my students. I love my subject matter, and where I work, and my coworkers. I believe unwaveringly in T. Roosevelt's notion that 'Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.' I think about this stuff all the time. It has occurred to me that, many years from now, thinking about teaching might not be a bad job. All the time I plan and I consider and I research and I write. And this is the best I can do?" And I despair. Then I go home and I think about how I could have done it better.

*Systemic thinking, or, the teacher as low-level bureaucrat. I'm not very good at thinking about systems. I don't do well at making arbitrary decisions and then making other people do them. I can weigh pros and cons and make a decision based on the results just fine, but if I have to pick between 5 equally good choices, and then make 140 people a day go with it, I get sort of stuck. This is a tremendous downfall as a teacher. Turning in student work, passing back student work, transitions between classes and useful but less-than-exciting paperwork are all really important systems. However, they're pretty much arbitrary--I decide what I want to happen, and then I ask my students to do it. My memory tends to take a back seat to my knee-jerk decision-making process (which, incidentally, is why I write down my lesson plans and try to follow it like a playbook). So these (and other) systems, which could really make my life and that of my students much easier, if I really designed them well, tend to be ad hoc hand-me-your-papers-no-wait-don't kinds of things. It probably frustrates my students, and it certainly limits my efficacy. So I'll try to stick to one system for the rest of the year, and redesign the whole thing during the summer. I'm getting better at it, and I can prove it, but nothing works as well as it should yet.

*Iterative standards. A lot of standards in World Languages are iterative--you have to perform the same communicative tasks in a number of contexts in order to get credit for the standard. By my way of thinking (and there's a lot of thinking still to be done on this), a student can get credit for these standards in one of two ways--either through summative assessments, administered shortly after instruction / formative assessment / reteaching / etc.; or through an as-yet undesigned, week-long final exam that really tests a student's ability to perform all six major communicative tasks in a variety of contexts (16 after two years of high school Spanish, according to the state's Standards and Benchmarks document). This seems like an impossible contrast to me, and I don't know why. I have a hard time envisioning permitting a student to pick and choose which sections of the final exam they want to take; in contrast, the final exam would have to be really long in order to test all communicative skills in all required contexts (or even a reasonable facsimile of them). I guess I'm just having a hard time picturing the logistics of this. (See "Systems thinking," above.)

*Teacher dispositions, positive behavior support and ACTFL. My quadrennial issue of The Language Educator, a publication by the ACTFL whose core objective normally appears to be to provide universities with MEd programs an outlet for their extra ad revenue, has a couple of genuinely interesting and, dare I say, useful articles. One of them is called "Another piece of the language learning puzzle: Why teacher dispositions are a crucial aspect of student success," by Maura Kate Hallam. It ties high expectations into student achievement, mentions a few ways people are studying it and teaching it, and encourages teachers to be more aware. (It also cites the National Board definition of teacher disposition; sounds like a good basis for student review of classes. Elsewhere in the issue they publish the full list of NB standards for WLOE.) A lot of things about the article are interesting, but one in particular caught my eye: They quote a Latin teacher as saying, "[...] TESA [Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement] addressed the affective side of teaching, which is often easy for young teachers to forget about as they worry about content. Experienced teachers always need reminders about what makes a positive climate." It's true that we can forget about staying positive, and that there's more to teaching than the list of standards. Teacher disposition, like behavior reinforcement, seems to take a back seat to measurable content advancement in the contemporary classroom. But, like behavior reinforcement, if you don't have it, the content is meaningless.

*Never work harder than your students. It's the title of a book by Robyn R. Jackson. It's another "how-to-be-a-better teacher" book from ASCD. I have a copy on loan from my principal. As I work through it, I'll keep the post posted.

*Celebrate good times. Each of my students has made huge progress this year, and our school community is starting to feel like an actual community. People (not just faculty and staff) are coming together to create positive social events. Just as could be expected from a group of people with a common goal and a common geography, we're all starting to row in the same direction, even if we're not always stroking on the same beat. My high school Spanish classes are getting better and better all the time, not just at Spanish, but at school. They're taking some lessons which (let's be honest) start out a little superficially, and often really turn them into something worthwhile.

Edited to fix typos and subject/verb agreements.