Month: May 2022

How to Avoid Burnout in the Language Classroom

Post author By Holly Morse
Post date May 31, 2022

Avoid burnout in the world language classroom

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Teacher Tooltip Tuesday: Avoid BURNOUT!

May seems like a good month to address the pernicious result of working nonstop for an entire school year without taking time to breathe: BURNOUT!

Why is burnout common in the World Language classroom?

According to the American Psychological Association, burnout is defined as “physical, emotional or mental exhaustion accompanied by decreased motivation, lowered performance, and negative attitudes towards oneself and others.”

Oh, dear! Our field is especially wrought with this kind of exhaustion because language teachers are among some of the most conscientious individuals I have ever known.

With 40+ years of experience in the profession, I have had the great privilege of knowing many world language teachers. Based on what I have seen, (literally dozens of colleagues at teaching levels from PK-college), our profession attracts a lot of earnest individuals with tremendous discipline, creativity, intelligence, perfectionism, perseverance, and great wonderment about the world! I consider myself blessed to have worked with so many incredibly gifted world language teachers.

But, guess what? With all this giftedness, comes a strong work ethic and the endless quest to teach our students to actually speak another language and yet, that goal can continually elude us.

We get to the end of the year and aren’t always happy with our results. So, we wipe the slate clean and try again next year, all the while feeling completely burned out from the effort.

Helpful resources for understanding burnout in our field

To get an idea of what we expect of ourselves to be effective world language teachers, peruse the Teacher Effectiveness for Language Learning (TELL) PROJECT this summer as professional development.

Take a look at the assessment tools and think about how you are doing according to what many professionals in the field have collaborated to define what effective world language teaching entails. I suggest looking at the Feedback Form Full Class Observation to see what criteria are important for best practices.

You may also want to look at the assessment tool for The Learning Experience. This will give you an idea of why our field attracts so many hardworking individuals.

Creating the best language experience without the burnout

Teaching a world language effectively is demanding! Here are just a few of the criteria for creating the best language experience for our students according to the TELL PROJECT:

I provide opportunities for my students to become more effective communicators
I provide opportunities for students to engage in cultural observation and analysis
I provide opportunities for my students to acquire language in meaningful contexts
I ensure that students receive comprehensible input.

How can we do all this without feeling burned out?

(Also to consider is the complication of the GEN Z student that is accustomed to the dopamine fix from instant and constant communication through social media. How can we compete with this phenomenon without ending up feeling burned out?)

There is no panacea, no magical formula, to inspire in our students a genuine desire to learn another language for real-world communication. We can share all kinds of data about the job market advantage, the excitement of being able to know people of other cultures through knowing their language, and the way language learning trains the brain for other higher functions, etc. The bottom line is that it takes a lot of expertise to teach another language in a way that motivates and excites students, and gets results!

It can definitely leave us all ending up feeling exhausted, unappreciated, and with a negative attitude about starting it all over again in September! BURNED OUT!

The solution

At FL4K, I am part of a teacher team writing curriculum for you!

We have personally experienced burnout and are doing everything we can to create a platform that supports teachers in their quest to be effective language teachers without burnout! We actually help you to provide the highlighted criteria above as deemed necessary for effective world language teaching according to the TELL Project!

It will cost you NOTHING to take a look and see what we have created for you!

One of the most exciting features of our curriculum is a full interculturality program that includes social-media-like posts about Hispanic culture with carefully scaffolded target language progression, amazing images, interactive polls in real-time for your students, discussion questions, songs, games, hands-on activities, and more!

Check this out to consider for your fall program. There are also some testimonials online that you can read. I, personally, met with a teacher in January who was completely overwhelmed with her teaching load from 1st-8th grade, and here is what she said after a few months of piloting our Fl4k program:

“Just wanted to check in with you all and let you know that everything is going awesomely with the program. The kids love it and my friends who are parents of the kids are amazed at how much Spanish they are speaking at home just having fun with it.”

Isn’t this what we all are looking for? A support program to help us fulfill our lofty goal as world language educators to have our students enthusiastic about and actually SPEAKING another language without BURNOUT!

I’ll be back next week with another tool tip! In the meantime, check out FL4K and take advantage of their free summer trial. Try out the entire program for free all summer long!

Once n’ Done Not Effective Teaching for Language Proficiency

Post author By Holly Morse
Post date May 24, 2022

One n' Done is not effective teaching for language proficiency. Here's a better way.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Now that you know the stages of group development: forming, storming, norming, and performing, let’s consider the effectiveness of the curriculum in the language-proficiency-driven classroom.

A long time ago, I used to use a product called, “Once n’ Done” to keep the shiny veneer on my kitchen floor. Well, that’s just what it was, a refresher veneer. I feel like a lot of textbooks promote this kind of teaching, teach the grammar once, have students show off what they know on a quiz or test, and move on, “Once n’ Done.”

This is simply not effective for language acquisition. Just think how many times a young child needs to hear and repeat words and structures before he begins to come up with words on his own. If we are truly going to promote language proficiency in our classrooms we need to guide our students’ language development in very intentional ways that promote language acquisition versus memorization and regurgitation.

Covering a chapter in a book does not typically count toward this end, especially if the book lacks proper scaffolding of vocabulary and structures to offer a sufficient amount of repetition. What is difficult for students learning Spanish are the intricate regular conjugations of verbs and the many irregular ones. If we don’t continually give them the opportunity to converse using these structures, they can’t possibly retain them for practical purposes.

This is why so many students seem to say after several years of studying a language that they can’t speak it. How unfortunate this scenario is when most of us would say that our purpose in teaching a second language is for the real-world use of it.

How can we teach in a way that our students will learn to speak?

When I was subbing for a former colleague this last week, my former Intermediate Low students who are now in Intermediate Mid, rattled off their connectors to me: sin embargo, por eso, mientras que, también, porque, y, etc.

They told me that even when they forget their verb forms, they know these words and can use them effectively to connect sentences. They still seem to be loving Spanish and working every day on SPEAKING.

The subs lesson plans were astoundingly effective in having students SPEAK! They were partnered up conversing about a simple question that they had written a paragraph about the night before.

(¿Eres aventurero/a? ¿Por qué sí o no? ¿Hay otros aventureros entre tus familiares y amigos?)

During this drill, however; they were not using any written words to communicate. They were simply sharing all about this topic with 10-12 different classmates in a speed dating format where students are in two circles and either the inside or outside is moving every 3-4 minutes.

I simply walked around the words listening, interjecting questions, and ensuring that the students were only speaking Spanish. Their current teacher and I were both trained and certified in the Modified Oral Proficiency Interview and we use the tenets of the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines for Language Acquisition.

These guidelines drive most of what we do with our students! We follow rubrics for the different levels of proficiency that we teach and guide the students in very specific ways. As a result of our MOPI training workshops and certification process, we understand more specifically how to help students build language proficiency skills.

Our rubrics include the following categories as adapted from ACTFL Performance Standards for Language Learners:

How well do I maintain the conversation?
– the quality of interaction
What language/words do I use?
– vocabulary in context
How do I use language?
– function and text type
How well am I understood?
– comprehensibility
How well do I understand?
– comprehension
How intercultural am I?
– interculturality

The rubrics show students how to progress in their language skills. A textbook that shows these “analytic growth rubrics” well is Wayside Publishing, the EntreCulturas series in Spanish and French. While some more traditional teachers find the books lacking in a drill for structure, this textbook series is one of the first that I have seen that truly scaffolds language for proficiency, building in lots of room for speaking and listening practice, practical vocabulary in limited amounts, repetition of structures and intentional focus on interculturality! Check it out. It may be just right for your purposes.

And please check this website out for another amazing way to engage your Gen Z students in a fully intercultural, ACTFL-aligned, proficiency-driven curriculum:

In my first year of retirement after 43 years of teaching Spanish, I am working for a company that is developing a complete state-of-art intercultural language curriculum on a single platform.

Tailored for Elementary and Middle School students the curriculum includes dialogues with recording features, interactive practice questions, games designed specifically for language students (contextualized vocabulary), and a complete leveled (Novice version, Intermediate version, and Heritage speaker version) interculturality program.

The program comprises songs, hands-on activities, polls with real-time results, and discussion questions. For all students, including High School students, we offer a toolkit subscription that includes basic grammar structure and vocabulary games, dialogues, and Instagram-like culture posts that cover the following topics for eight different Hispanic cultures: nature, food, sites of interest, adventure, citizens, geography and climate, global challenges, products, and arts.

The program is customizable and can be adapted for your own curriculum needs. Honestly, I have never seen anything like it on the market and it is astoundingly popular with the students who are piloting the program this year.

This is a company that listens to teachers and tries to develop a curriculum according to what we need that the textbooks aren’t providing to teach students to truly build language acquisition skills for real purposes!

What is “Once n’ Done” in this language curriculum? You will be amazed at the success that your students will have and how much the program will help to de-stress you and your classroom!

Educational Teacher's Tool Tips

How to Improve Group Participation in the Classroom

Post author By Holly Morse
Post date May 17, 2022

How to Get Your Students Forming, Storming, Norming, and PERFORMING Successfully!

Reading Time: 4 minutes

In the last three weeks I have explored the first three stages of group participation and development: forming, storming, and norming, all essential developmental phases in preparation for the final phase, performing!

Most of us have been doing this throughout our teaching careers in the form of group projects or presentations at the end of a unit to give students the opportunity to show what they CAN DO!!

However, if teachers are not careful, this phase can be wrought with complications. Students need to be shepherded through the stages of getting to know each other (forming), wrestling with different personalities (storming), and learning to accept their differences (norming) in order to maximize their ability to be successful as a team. Once a group of students has figured out how to work together, a teacher can assign group projects and presentations.

Group Participation

The age-old problem will still be ensuring that each member of the group participates equally in completing the work. Inevitably, there are some group members that care more about their grade than others and end up doing all the work while resenting less productive group members. I hope that it will not be discouraging for me to admit that I never mastered this issue after 43 years of teaching! Rather, I hope you will be challenged to find new ways to tackle this inequity.

One idea is to make sure that peer evaluation is an important part of the group grade. Help students hold each other accountable by requiring them to evaluate each other anonymously. Build in time elements that require each group member to speak for a certain number of minutes. Consider as many parameters as possible that ensure participation from all!

Presentation Engagement

Even after you have your groups engaged and performing, there is the additional problem of keeping the rest of the class engaged. I have found that group presentations can kill overall Gen Z student engagement in a heartbeat.

Since an important part of building proficiency in a language is learning to ask questions, I suggest requiring every student not presenting to ask follow-up questions. Keep track of how many they ask and factor this data into their participation grade.

You might have students in their seats fill out information about the presentations to keep them focused and engaged. Questions could be general: Mention 2-3 things that you learned; What was good about the presentation?; How could the presentation be better?, etc.

Group Projects

Here are just a few of my favorite group projects ideas:

Have a small group of students plan their version of “El Camino de Santiago,” a well-known pilgrimage that ends in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
1. Students have to research which route they will take, how long they will walk, describe two people they met on the trail, the food they ate, and 2-3 experiences they had, and present their walk to the class. This can be such a fun project for creative students!
2. What is sad about Gen Z students is they don’t tap into their creativity. They just want to get this project done and get into reading their next social media posts. Be sure to frame this project as an amazing opportunity to learn about “El Camino” and plan a trip that may very well be a reality for them one day when studying abroad during their college days! ( I take every opportunity to entice them to do this!!!)
Create a campaign for a cause and compete for financial support like the TV show “Shark Tank.”
1. In small groups, students decide on a cause (actual or original) and present the rationale for supporting their cause. Each student has fake money to put toward the cause that interests them most.
2. This results in a competition for which group is able to promote their cause most successfully.
3. The project can be adapted to a product that relates to a particular unit. For example, students could be charged with creating a fitness program as a culminating activity for a health unit.
Hispanic murals and muralists from different cities around the world.
1. Each group could present their research with a slideshow that features this amazing form of street art and an explanation of the symbolism.
2. As a final step, the group has to create their own mural and explain its significance.
3. This can be a digital creation or a sketch, depending on the artistic talent of the group!
Creating stories around famous Hispanic artwork.
1. I especially liked to do this with Frida Kahlo as a way of introducing a whole study of her life and works.
2. Small groups choose one of her paintings and without knowing anything about her, they create a story around the images. After learning more, the same students present the real story behind the same work of art. It’s a fun way to stimulate creativity and engage students in art appreciation.
Famous Families.
1. In small groups, students research a famous person’s family to introduce to the class.
2. There can be a certain amount of intrigue with this since many times we don’t know much about the family of a famous actor, singer, artist, or sports figure.
3. I like to make sure that students find out about pets, too, if possible.
4. There are many variations on this project, too. In small groups, students can create their own families and present them to the class.

There are endless project and presentation possibilities that can be designed to promote both interculturality and language proficiency in a way that is fun and engaging for today’s digital natives. Start imagining a few of your own as a culminating activity for a unit that incorporates vocabulary, structures, and cultural knowledge!

And one more bit of advice… be sure to structure the project with specific criteria and expectations. Review exactly how the project will be graded. I like to use rubrics that outline what is entailed in order to get the A, B, C, etc. This is the secret to getting stellar products!

FL4K

If you are interested in an amazing way to supplement your curriculum with rich interculturality, check out FL4K. The toolkit that includes culture posts in an Instagram-like format and proficiency-based games and dialogues serve as a great preparation for discussion, research, and projects or presentations!

We’ll be back next week with another tool tip. In the meantime, sign up for a free trial with FL4K!

Uncategorized

4 Activities for the Norming Stage of Group Development

Post author By Holly Morse
Post date May 10, 2022

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Tuesday Teacher Tooltip: Take advantage of the norming stage of group development to allow students to enjoy pair work in the World Language Classroom

During the last two weeks, I have addressed the first two stages of group development, forming and storming, where students become acquainted with one another and wrestle with all different personality types. In the “norming” stage of group development, students have developed enough respect for one another that they can engage in pair work effectively. In this stage, students begin to cooperate and engage in partner activities.

Here are a few ideas to consider for this phase.

Peer Editing

Students can now comment on or edit one another’s work with maturity and respect.

Teachers can use Padlet or Flipgrid, both apps that allow students to critique each other’s work. These are platforms that allow students to post their own work and then comment on each other’s work. The students can’t wait to both respond to their peers’ work and then, read the comments about their own work.

Students can tease each other and have fun interacting. This kind of feedback exchange is healthy and motivating in a class where students know and respect one another!

Role-Playing

Once students have built trust in the classroom with one another, they begin to become much less intimidated. They will more likely volunteer to play a role with each other and practice their language proficiency skills while hamming it up!

Pair Work

In the norming phase of group development, you can begin to randomly pair students using the Class Dojo app or traditional methods of creating pairs.

Mixing it up really helps students to become better acquainted with one another and prevents any student from feeling excluded.

I always had sticks or notecards with every child’s name on a card. Just to create drama in the classroom, I would throw them up in the air and pick them up two at a time to create pairs. The kids always loved this method and had faith in the randomness of it due to this ancient, but very transparent method!

Dice Games

You can make a dice grid for students such as this sample for teachers.

Use real dice in the classroom or students can use a dice generator online. If they roll a 2 and a 6, they have to find the two possible questions in the grid for that combination and answer one of them. The one who rolls answers the question first and then asks the same or the other question to the partner.

Make dice games for every unit of study. This is the way to truly give students a chance to practice communicating. Kids love to express their opinions about everything! This activity gives the teacher a break, too. After 15 minutes of play, randomize the partners again and continue having the students work in pairs.

Norming is a wonderful stage of group development that allows for natural exchanges in the classroom that provide real world language exchanges.

With FL4K, our single platform program with a built-in culture curriculum for 10 different Hispanic countries, we provide dice games and ideas for pair work activities for every unit! Please check out our website to view samples of our state-of-the-art way of teaching World Language for real-world communication!

Educational Teacher's Tool Tips

4 Activities for the Storming Phase of Group Development

Post author By Holly Morse
Post date May 3, 2022

4 Digital Activities for Students in the Storming Phase of Group Development

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Last week I mentioned some activities that can be used in the World Language classroom during the “forming” phase of group development. This week, I will address the next phase, “storming,” the time when students may begin to share differing opinions and even compete with each other in the classroom.

Teachers can provide time and space for students to wrestle with ideas and even disagree, ultimately building trust, in preparation for the norming and performing phases of group development.

The storming phase can be both controversial and fun at the same time if the teacher helps to monitor the group development in a healthy way.

Students can get to know more than the basic facts about each other. They can begin to play competitive games and participate in polls, and even discussions, that may force them to contend with differences of opinion. When conflicts arise, teachers must guide students to listen to each other and maintain respectful behavior toward one another at all times.

Consider digital games for this phase of group development.

Quizlet Live

Many of you already play Quizlet Live in the classroom. You can mix up the teams every few rounds and have individual students keep track of how many times they have won. The student with the most wins at the end of class might get their name posted on a leaderboard (poster and marker) for the Quizlet Live Champions.

In my classroom, this was very low stakes and fun for students. Usually, we had different winners every week and then, the rivalry would start to see how many times each one could be featured on the board.

This works well for the “storming” phase because the students get competitive and begin shouting with excitement all in very low-key fun!

Kahoot

Kahoot is another good competitive game in the classroom that can be used for review. It always amazes me how students come alive when they can compete with each other. You can put them in teams to eliminate embarrassment or intimidation. A lively round of Kahoot can create just the positive energy you are looking for in your 21st-century classroom!

Speed Dating

Speed Dating works well for this phase of group development, too. Students can line up in two parallel lines with one line rotating as they exchange information about a cultural topic that they are studying.

The questions can be controversial in nature and pertain to a very specific set of vocabulary and expressions. The students can prepare ahead of time what they do to help protect the planet and why they think it is important. Then in lines or concentric circles, one group can move, each time sharing their information with a different student in the class.

Projecting a picture and having the students guess what is going on in it can lead to some differences of opinion. When they finish arguing about their ideas, the teacher can tell them what was actually happening in the picture. This allows students to disagree in a fun and friendly way.

FL4K

At FL4K we have several activities built into the program that promote the opportunity to both compete and express their own opinions. We have digitized the old-fashioned game of Fly Swatter into a modern game that builds oral proficiency in an engaging and intentional way. Students get a digital flyswatter and can compete against each other to swat as many correct flies/answers as possible while simultaneously building language proficiency skills.

Another FL4K feature with the culture program is a built-in polling option in real-time. Students can register their opinion about something pertaining to the culture they are learning and then find out how many in the class agree with them and how many do not.

The teacher can then lead a discussion about the polling topic. For example, after learning about the many waterfalls in Costa Rica, students can answer a poll that gives them the option to say whether they would like to swim under a waterfall or not. Students can then share why they might be interested or fearful.

We have 30-40 culture posts per unit with polling questions for many. It keeps students interested and engaged in practicing the language in a natural way.

Early in our language program, students learn “tener” expressions and can quite capably talk about what they are and are not afraid of. This can stimulate good conversation and again, get kids to handle controversial topics in a healthy way.

What ways can you think of to create energy and excitement in your classroom that help students learn to compete, communicate, and accept differences of opinion with a priority of respecting each other? Have fun with the “storming” phase of group development!

Next week we will enjoy exploring the next phase of “norming.” In the meantime, sign up for a free trial with FL4K!