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Dear novice-learner teacher - love, an AP teacher

foto Alex Fuentes

Twice for #langchat we've polled the following question:

What activities prepare students for AP from the very beginning?

I confess, I probably wrote this question, maybe with some help from something similar being suggested as a topic. Certainly I've voted for it twice. But for whatever reason--perhaps teachers of lower levels don't think much about AP or the question was polled with others deemed more relevant--this topic has lost both times. So as usual, I'll take my opinion to the blog. Because I can.

I'm currently in my fourth year teaching AP. I know I've learned a lot from it, and I've gotten better at it, but my students are also improving considerably, mostly, I think, from what they get before my class, not from what they get from it. AP is a fourth-year class at my school. My first year, I had just 2 students, scoring 1 and 2. Second year, 6 students scoring one 3 and five 1's (ouch). That year I was so mad at the College Board I won't tell you what I wanted to do with them. Last year I hit some things really hard and actually, I ended up with my eight students scoring one 4, three 3's, two 2's, and two 1's (yay!). This year, I have such a stellar group of kids that I wouldn't be surprised if all six of them pass.

Now, in all seriousness, I hate the AP. I hate the test, and I hate the College Board, and I hate the idea. I can't stand that one three-hour exam thinks it can predict how proficient my students are and will be in college in Spanish. That student my first year that scored a 2, he was conversationally fluent, at least an Advanced Low speaker, after 3 years (he'd skipped Spanish 3) and the most motivated learner I have ever met. Of the two students who scored 1's last year, one is majoring in Middle School Spanish Education and the other is minoring in Spanish.

Really, that's how I feel about all standardized exams (thank you, Alfie Kohn). But the fact is, most of my students care about it. It is our only fourth-year option, and last year they voted on whether to keep it AP (in which they are required to take the exam) or to call it Spanish 4 (in which they'd have the option to take the test). But all but one voted for AP. They want the weighted grade points, and the AP Advantage study hall, and yes, they want the extra focused preparation for the exam. They want the bragging rights, and they want the college credit. So, I'm about pleasing the students, and here we are again.

After four years of watching students struggle and succeed in their fourth-year AP class, here are my requests for you, the elementary teachers (which I also am) through middle school, Spanish 1, 2, and 3 teachers.

1. Please, please, PLEASE feed them ALL KINDS of authentic audio.
   This is my #1 because it's my #1 problem with my students. They get to me (in Spanish 3) and can't understand anything but learner language. The majority of audio on the AP is not learner language. It's stuff like BBC Mundo and Radio ONU (which I couldn't understand until, say, 10 years into my journey). More importantly, the majority of audio in life is not learner language.
   The common mistake is to think that novices cannot understand authentic media. The truth is that the difficulty is in the question and not in the source. If you're asking them to hear the word cinco that's a different question than if you're asking them to hear the word aprovechándonos.
   
   
2. Interact with vocabulary in real contexts.
   Asking students "what is the word for black? Good! Red? Great!" does almost *nothing* for their language acquisition. Trust me, from day one a novice learner can understand this question:
   ¿De qué colores es un oso panda? (2)
   Context is everything. My current AP students have not had a vocab quiz in four years and their vocabulary is incredible. Yesterday in our novel they were accurately identifying words like solía and lechuza. One of my Spanish 3 students actually asked for vocab quizzes the other day and we had to have a talk about how cramming does not create long-term memory. This is connected with the issue of authentic media - get students listening to and reading real materials and the vocabulary will just be there. I promise.
   
   
3. Ask questions that require critical thinking.
   Critical thinking is a life skill. Prepare your students for life by asking them real questions that make a difference. Stop asking 'what' and start asking 'why' and 'how.' To me, the true test of a critical thinking question is if there's no clear-cut answer. Instead of stopping with "what foods do you like?" ask "is a guinea pig food? why or why not? would you try it?" (In Ecuador, guinea pig - 'cuy' or as my dad likes to call it, 'barbecuy' - is a delicacy.)
   
   
4. Do speaking assessments. GET THEM TALKING.
   My current Spanish 3 students tell me that last year they had exactly 1 speaking assessment. Now, kids like to complain about teachers, but if it's anywhere close to the truth, it's far too few. They're now facing two speaking assessments each in every unit for sixteen in all and they're dying. They hate it, except for my one who's aptitude leans toward speaking and away from writing.
   The AP has a wicked guided conversation activity in which someone says something, then there's a beep, and the student has 20 seconds to think up and say what the test says they need to do. That's repeated about five times and that's the interpersonal speaking section. It's stressful and intense and unrealistic but there you have it. My current AP students are so used to talking back and forth in class that this year they were able to do this for practice without much anxiety much sooner than the students I had last year. Keep students talking -for the AP and for life.
   
   
5. Teach and require idiomatic expressions.
   It's a sad fact about general proficiency guidelines and about the AP that the difference between one level and the next can come down to one single phrase - an idiomatic one. Three years ago the one student who passed said she went in determined to use the phrase "vale la pena." Honestly, she was the most proficient student in the class but I wouldn't be surprised if it made the difference between 2 and 3 for her. Keep an idiomatic expression on the wall, once a week or every two weeks. Reward students when they use them. Do an activity that requires a particular one. Point them out in authentic texts. Realize, and help students realize, that language is idiomatic.
   
   
6. Do assessments that require extrapolating and synthesizing main points from multiple sources.
   A couple of years ago I did a KWLA presentation called Prompts with Power. It was about finding authentic sources and asking students to answer a question, orally or written, based on the sources. Teach students to draw their own conclusions after comparing and contrasting two other opinions. Or three. Similar or different, it doesn't matter, but it's a life skill -and an important one on the AP- to be able to look critically at what other people think and use those opinions to develop an informed personal one.

Perhaps it's good I had to write this here and not on #langchat - this is certainly more than I could have explained in snippets of 140 characters. Thanks for putting up with it.

Learning from #langchat

foto por how will i ever

If there's one big principle I've learned over the past 10 years, 8 teaching and 2 in grad school, it's that good teaching isn't magic. Sometimes it looks like magic, but it's not. Sure, some people just don't have the personality or gift of explanation to be a teacher. But some very gifted people have made very bad teachers throughout the history of education (I had some, didn't you?). I wish there were some card trick I could learn that would make everything in my classroom effective and, well, magical, but if there is, I haven't found it yet.

Enter #langchat, which started (and continues) as a Thursday-night professional development that is prompted by and dictated by its participants, all world language teachers, or somehow connected to the profession. Three colleagues on Twitter approached me through email... wow, is it a year ago?... to start the chat, and it's blossomed into a useful hashtag that we use to share questions, answers, and links about teaching world language. The professionals who interact on #langchat have taught me so much more about good world language teaching than any bag of tricks could do.

A couple of recent blog posts made me think, hey, perhaps it would be useful for me to reflect in the blogosphere on why I use #langchat, why we started it, and where it should go from here.

1) Twitter is an unfocused, messy medium, but I love it, and let's make the most of it.

Twitter is anything but focused. Sometimes #langchat is like an open PD forum with pockets of teachers in the room, sitting at different tables, and a lot of chatter because there are seven different conversations going. (I think that's happened at every conference I've ever been to.) I remember a couple of #langchats where we started out with the topic (which participants had chosen) and went off in so many directions I felt like we weren't anywhere near what we were supposed to be talking about, and it was impossible to get back. But you know what? That's okay. Because that's where people were. That's what they needed to talk about that night. And that's what #langchat is about - it's professional development that you need, when you need it, on the subject you need. If it doesn't apply to you, skip it and see what's happening next week.

2) Everyone has learned something from their journey, and everyone has the right to express what they've learned on #langchat. Please share yours with me.
Years ago, I remember telling my Spanish 3 students that I was going to try to speak in Spanish more in class (like, 10 minutes a class instead of nothing) and hearing them groan. I'd never even heard of ACTFL, much less their target input guidelines. That's one thing I love most about teaching: we're continually learning. I've learned so much more since college than I learned in college. I'm pretty sure I've learned more from our Twitter PLN in two years than I did in grad school.

I think all of us have that story - none of us has "arrived" at the final magic trick. Looking back at #langchat, personally that chat last year on authentic assessment picked me up by the collar and dumped me on my tail, so to speak, to show me I was relying too much on technology as assessment without thinking about whether or not the tasks were actually realistic or useful. And the PBL chat that @dr_dmd led - I thought I used PBL, but by the real definition, I almost never did. So I kept hammering him with questions, trying to figure out how PBL, authentic assessment, learner language, and input could interplay in the WL classroom, and came away determined to change up our major fall project in Spanish 3. I still don't know how I feel about PBL in the WL classroom as a major vehicle of learning, but just this last week my students benefited from what I learned from Don in that chat, and that's now part of my journey.

What's your journey? What have you learned? Whatever it is - in whatever format or area - share it, not just on Thursday evenings, but like we all do, throughout the week using the hashtags #langchat, or #flteach, or #spanishteachers, or #apfrench, or any number of others!

3) Everyone deserves respect, face-to-face and online. Respect me, and give me the benefit of the doubt. Bring problems with me, to me.
I am the type of teacher who learns about something and then throws caution to the wind and jumps in head-first. Four years ago I went to a TPRS workshop on a Thursday night and then Monday morning we pretty much threw our textbooks out the window (okay, it was a little slower than that). Then it was like God put me working with people who were the exact opposite: 'okay, let's get my feet wet a little bit here; okay, that worked pretty well, maybe next year I'll go a little deeper.' To balance my personality or something. ;-) What I've learned from working with them is what has been mentioned here--it's a journey and you never know what will motivate someone toward the next step on their path.

From my perspective, many times I'm looking back on my own practices and asking, "Why didn't I see how terrible my idea was?" and I wonder if that comes off on Twitter as sounding like, "Why can't you see your idea is terrible?" if someone is doing something similar. 140 characters of digital type is a tough medium to communicate what we've learned. That shouldn't make us give up; on the contrary, I suggest two responses: 1) I determine to remember that we're all worthy of respect and edifying speech and 2) I determine to remind myself that if I'm offended it's more than likely I've misread what the person was trying to communicate and I should ask for clarification from that person until we've worked it out.

4) Respect is not the same thing as agreeing or affirming everything. I may be wrong, but...

But nothing! Call me out! Well, respectfully, but still, please don't affirm my bad ideas and call it respect, right? I look back and think, what would I have learned if people hadn't questioned what I was doing? There's one colleague in particular who has the mildly annoying habit of consistently asking me why I do a certain activity or assign some work or teach some unit or whatever. But the only reason it's mildly annoying is that frequently I'm just flat wrong, and there's no good pedagogy behind what I've done, and I'm immensely grateful that I have someone like that who keeps me professionally sound.

As one more personal example, it's no secret I try to keep translation out of my classroom as much as possible and that makes me not exactly a TPRS teacher, but it's also no secret that I think TPRS is one of the most revolutionary improvements to come to language learning in the last century, and I think Kristy (@placido) must be an amazing teacher I'd love to live closer to so I could observe her.

5) #langchat is intended to bring together a wide range of educators to foster the best exchange possible.

One of the most popular education chats on Twitter, #edchat, is so large that people blog about it being too large, and has broken up into two separate chats. And lots of area-specific chats have spun off from it. #langchat, so far, has not had the level of participation that would productively produce even more focused chats, in my opinion. That's not to say it couldn't. If educators want to spin off age-level focused chats, they should feel free. If a couple of educators hadn't had the idea to get some language teachers together to chat on Thursday nights, we wouldn't have #langchat. So what's your idea? Where do you want to go - and do you want to lead others there? Go for it!

You can follow me on Twitter at @secottrell. Join us Thursday evenings at 8 Eastern, 7 Central for the best professional development around, #langchat. (Tweetdeck and tweetchat are useful tools for organizing and following #langchat tweets.)

Not your average health unit

foto por USP Hospitales

A unit on health is common in Spanish class. We have a unit in Spanish 2 on describing ailments and visiting the doctor. Then in AP I have a unit called "Cuidándome a mí" (taking care of myself). It's useful -last year's AP essay was health-related- but for AP I wanted to go beyond the typical reflexive verb, sickness phrases, doctor questions vocabulary and activities. Besides, our principal asked us this year to focus on hands-on learning with our students. So how could I make the learning hands-on, relevant, and connected to communities and culture?

Every unit in AP contains four performance assessments: interpersonal speaking, presentational speaking, interpersonal writing, and presentational writing. I've had a focus in this unit for the past two or three years on healthcare and undocumented immigrants, but this year I wanted it to really matter. Here are the assignments we did for each:

1) Interpersonal speaking

One student played a doctor's receptionist, and the student being assessed was someone in the doctor's office. I was a mother whose child needed a chicken pox vaccine in order to go to school, but didn't have any health insurance or much money. So the receptionist won't let me make an appointment, and the student had to explain to me that I could get the vaccine at the health department. To complete this task my students had to a) get the address and phone number of the health department in our city, b) identify language options at the health department, c) find out what kind of care is offered at the health department, d) find out whether undocumented immigrants can get care at the health department, and e) understand how services are paid for at the health department. And these students had never even heard of the health department!

Here's April completing this task.

2) Presentational speaking

Scenario: The local Latino community is having a town hall meeting to talk about local health care options. Several local political leaders are attending (with translators). Based on an article about undocumented children in the health reform debate and a video about a baby's life being saved at Seattle Children's Hospital, present a 2-minute argument about why undocumented immigrant children should or should not receive healthcare services at health departments and hospitals.

3) Interpersonal writing

Students had to locate a doctor in the city who spoke Spanish. This involved actually calling the offices to verify that they had Spanish-speaking staff and to get their address. Then they wrote a letter to the doctor explaining what they had learned about the undocumented and/or uninsured Spanish-speaking community and encouraging the doctor to get involved in free or low-cost clinics in the area. We are mailing these letters.

4) Presentational writing

Students wrote a lengthy letter to our Congressman, John Yarmuth. Based on a Pew Hispanic Center study, comments by the Republican presidential candidates, and a radio program addressing changes in the California MediCal access laws, students addressed such questions as:

-what is the most reasonable response to the healthcare crisis?

-if we treat everyone indiscriminately, will healthcare costs rise to an unsustainable level?

-how can we control costs for those who can't pay without overburdening society?

-what kinds of healthcare are human rights and what aren't?

-what do we do with undocumented children who had no say in their legal status?

-should undocumented immigrants receive healthcare anywhere, or only in certain places?

-how can we inform undocumented immigrants on their healthcare rights and options?

I am going to write an English-language note to accompany these letters, explaining what we did to Mr. Yarmuth and telling him that my students care enough about the Latino community that they have taken the time to learn their language, and if he will take the time to find someone to translate their letters, he will get some interesting opinions, as well as getting a taste of what language negotiation immigrants have to go through to become informed. Then I'll mail them.

I actually posted about this unit two years ago, but I think now it's become a lot more relevant and service-oriented.

Presentation: Target Language: Expect More, Say Less

Whoops! I completely forgot to post my Prezi from my second KWLA presentation! Here it is, Target Language: Expect More, Say Less.

Target [Language]: Expect More, Say Less on Prezi

Spanish 3 assessment documents

Sometimes I feel like I'm reinventing myself every year. Do you ever look back on something you did and think, "Why on earth did I do it that way? What a bad idea! Here we go again." I feel like I do that every year! So even though I completely redesigned my Spanish 3 class last year, this past summer I attended a week-long workshop on using proficiency-based assessments, and here I am again, reinventing Spanish 3.

I give all the credit in the world to @tmsaue1 and the @JCPSWorldLang teachers who welcomed me into their learning community and inspired me to work on authentic, proficiency-based, standards-based assessments. You can view their documents here.

In the spirit of open source I also try to make everything I do available. Here are my Spanish 3 assessment documents, and the rubric I use to "grade" them (you'll notice there's no place for an actual grade). Feel free to comment here with your email if you want an editable version--they looked terrible in Google Docs as Word documents.

For KWLA 2011: Media from Reel to Real

Here's my Prezi for my Friday a.m. session, Media from Reel to Real.

Media from Reel to Real on Prezi

Accuracy vs. proficiency: an illustration

photo Steve Mullan

Accuracy refers to grammatical forms that match the standard form of the language. So, a student produces 'yo pensé' instead of 'yo piense' (something my 3's have been doing recently). Proficiency includes an aspect of accuracy, but primarily refers to how well the speaker (or writer) is able to communicate and comprehend meaning. The contrast is what Cathy Doughty (confusingly) refers to as focus on form vs. focus on formS. (The distinction is necessary but this way of referring to it has always driven me up the wall- I can't remember which is which without looking it up. Every.time.)

Next week, Ingrid Betancourt is coming to visit our local library, a super exciting event because every year for the past 3 years my Spanish 3 students have done a project related to her kidnapping and rescue. To prepare for her book talk, I got her book in Spanish and I'm trying to finish it before she comes. It's 700 pages long. I've made it halfway. I just read this morning a perfect example of the importance of proficiency over accuracy. I know that as Spanish teachers it makes us cringe inside every time we hear "Me llamo es..." but read this snippet of Betancourt's story and see which you think is more important.

Betancourt was in the jungle for more than 6 years. Not long after she was kidnapped, three American contractors were also kidnapped, and they ended up with her for a period of time in a type of jail in the jungle. The hostages bickered quite a bit amongst themselves, often targeted at Betancourt, so much so that at one point she was taken out of the jail and housed elsewhere in the camp. Then, the other hostages back in the jail complained so much that her conditions were now better than theirs, that she was transferred back. When she returned, one of the Americans, Marc Gonsalves, whom she says did not participate in all the bickering, approached her. Here's my loose translation:

Marc smiled sadly and told us in broken Spanish, with all the verbs in infinitive form, that he was very happy to see Lucho and I again. His words reached my soul...

"I can't believe it! You're speaking Spanish! I go away for three short weeks and you end up speaking better than me!"

...

Everyone laughed, because Marc answered with the three words of Spanish that he could patch together. He translated literally some English expressions that, miraculously, in Spanish came out hysterical and made us all laugh. Then he bid farewell courteously and went back to the barrack.

So, can verbs in infinitive "reach the soul"?

Fun activity #6: A escribir

Fun activity #6 is ¡A escribir!, an activity obviously designed to get students spontaneously writing.

foto por Jeffrey Pacres

At first, when our activity chooser landed on "A escribir," students were not thrilled. Writing? Don't we do that all the time? And from my perspective, how do you keep a random, effective writing prompt on hand all the time?

This is where I have to hand all the props to @ZJonesSpanish and his Tírate a escribir writing activities based on comic strips. The chooser lands on A escribir? No problem. I literally have to do -nothing-. I pull up Zambombazo, click on Tiras, and pick the newest one that I think will interest my students and be appropriate for their level. We talk about the tira cómica for about a minute, and then they have 8 minutes to write whatever they can think of about it. It's been a whole lot more interesting for my students than they thought it would be. We even sent some responses to Zachary and he posted them on the tira on his site.

Another offering from Zambombazo great for lower levels too (and incidentally, writing or speaking) is his ebook, ¿Qué le dirías?.

Spontaneous writing gets kids thinking on the spot in the TL, a skill that boosts oral proficiency as well. Go for it!

App review: Tour Wrist

A couple of weeks ago on #Langchat, the Thursday night (8 ET) chat by and for language teachers on Twitter, we discussed iPad (and other iOS) apps that may be useful in the world language classroom. That night I downloaded something like 25 free apps and since then I've been on a mission to see what they can do in my classroom. In my Spanish 3, we have 2 iPods and 1 iPad, and in AP, we have 2 iPads and 3 iPods. Not ideal, but enough to have a little fun.

Our first unit in Spanish 3 was on things we do with friends and family for fun ("Esparcimiento"), and included some talk about travel, as well as concentrating on expressing opinions with deeper vocabulary than "Sí, me gusta." The interpersonal speaking assessment involved me having a conversation with them (about a sports game) so-- what do the rest do while I'm talking to 1? Enter Tour Wrist.

tour wrist home page

Tour wrist is a free app that lets you do virtual tours of more than 23,000 places all over the world. You can look at the Tour of the Day (or obviously, home, hotel, or photographer of the day) but more useful is the "Browse all tours" function. That takes you to a map of the world.

tour wrist map - Central America

You can use two fingers to enlarge any part of the map to see more of what's there. Now, the offerings in Latin America are not exactly extensive, but the app is a whole lot of fun. As you focus in, more and more green placeholders show up. Tapping on one will tell you what it is, and tapping on the arrow on its title will take you to the tour.

This is where you find the best feature - by holding your device at eye level, you can turn around and see the 360-degree view as if you were there. Really, you can hold it up and look at the sky, or down and look at the floor.

Tour of bridge in Medellín, Colombia

Anyway, what do you do with this in class? While I was doing the interpersonal conversation with individual students, the others had to work in pairs to find a tour in a Spanish-speaking country and answer the following questions:

1. What is it?

2. Where is it?

3. Do you like it?

4. Why or why not?

They did this for at least two places.

The students really enjoyed the app, of course, but more importantly, they were using their recent targets (expressing reasons for opinions) to talk about places I could never take them to. I did have one pair choose random places in the Caribbean or someplace. I told them later that if they were doing something that didn't have much to do with Spanish or places where people speak Spanish, they probably had the directions wrong.

So- it would be nice if there were more tours available in the places we were looking, but it's a stylish, user-friendly, free app for all iOS devices, lots of fun for all involved.

What ideas do you have for Tour Wrist in the world language class?