Author: Holly Morse

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Building relationships with your students is one of the most important secrets of successful teaching! When you know your students and care about them, they will forgive a multitude of teaching blunders. This is especially important when you are just starting your career!

In all honesty, it took me 43 years to hone my skills to the point where I actually thought I was doing a pretty decent job teaching Spanish!

While you are perfecting HOW to teach, get to know your students and what makes them unique! Make your classroom an opportunity to interact individually and take a personal interest in every child! What are their lives like outside the classroom? What sports, extracurriculars, or leisure activities interest them?

Make an inventory sheet for them to fill out in ENGLISH so that you can begin to find ways to relate to them! Stand at the door when they come in and at the door when they go out! Look them in the eye and take an interest in them personally on a daily basis. No matter what happens in the classroom, good, bad, embarrassing, etc. they will begin to understand that you care about them and this will help them to build confidence and begin taking risks in the world language classroom.

It is intimidating for many to venture to speak in a new language in front of their peers. You have to be the one to encourage and create the right atmosphere for this exciting new adventure.

Many students dislike the world language classroom because it feels threatening on so many levels! What if I have the wrong answer, have a terrible accent, have no clue what the teacher is saying to me?

In my next blog, we will explore the importance of building a safe and inclusive community in the world language classroom. You truly have such an opportunity to create a positive and productive atmosphere for language learning. The first step is building a relationship with each child no matter how amazing you are at teaching your subject! 

In the meantime, check out our other blogs on language, and be sure to follow FL4K on social media through the links at the very bottom of this page so you don’t miss the next Tool Tip and other language fun!

Missed my first Tool Tip? You can read about the Can-Do classroom here right now!

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Are you looking for a way to have all your language students feel confident and find success in the classroom? 

In my experience, one of the absolute miracle approaches to teaching a language is to engender a can-do attitude in every student! Once I adopted this way of thinking in my classroom and actually began to teach toward standards, I could not believe the results!

Every student learns differently

Every student, no matter what the learning challenges were, was engaged and working toward a goal that was not necessarily the same as the student sitting next to him! Once I began comparing students to the ACTFL standards and not their gifted and talented classmates, miracles began to happen in my classroom. Whether students lacked confidence in speaking and felt extremely defeated by language learning when they came to my classroom, they left feeling proud of the skills that they had developed. The truth is, no matter how weak or challenged a student feels upon entering our classroom, we have an opportunity to help them develop real-world communication skills at their own pace that will build their confidence and truly their whole attitude about language learning.

Everyone CAN learn to speak another language, just not the traditional way of grammar and massive vocabulary lists! That can be a boring approach that does not engage students in practical learning!

How to find success in the classroom

Of course, this is not an approach that I can teach in one blog post. So stay tuned for Tuesday’s Teaching Tool Tips, where I will share what I have learned about teaching for proficiency and how I finally, after decades of teaching, saw the results in my students that I had always dreamed of: Confident students with real-world communication skills!

Not only will you see results with teaching for proficiency, but it will also change your whole teaching experience! Don’t you want to have every day be a positive experience for you and your students?

Next time, I will begin to share my story about becoming a standards-based teacher with some ideas about how you can get started. Imagine! You can start learning now what I learned in the last decade of my 43 years of teaching! Throughout that extensive teaching career, I always loved the beginning of the year to wipe the slate clean and start over, thinking, I will get this right! Well, that finally and fortunately happened in my last year! I actually said to myself, I finally got it! That “it” is what you will find in Tuesday’s Tool Tips to help you find success in your classroom.

Next time, I will delve into the educational process of becoming well versed in the ACTFL Standards. It is important to understand what it means to be a standards-based teacher (MOPI workshops) and how to help your students progress on the ACTFL Standards continuum. 

If you’re looking for a language program for your children or students that follows ACTFL standards, be sure to check out FL4K’s new immersive program. You can sign up for early access here! 

In the meantime, check out our other blogs on language, and be sure to follow FL4K on social media so you don’t miss the next Tool Tip and other language fun!