Starting the 2023-24 School Year

This year is going to be a great one!

I feel renewed and ready to tackle this year in a way that I haven’t felt in several years. I was honored to be invited to present and attend the conference and it was an incredible experience. It was unlike any other conference I’ve been to.

I have a lot of new ideas for this year thanks to what I learned at the conference, especially the Intermediate language lab. My oldest students (8th graders, the majority of whom are in the novice high range) have been my biggest challenge. Most of them have been with me since kindergarten and they are ready for more advanced language. Unfortunately, I didn’t really know what that looked like. For the past few years, it’s looked like slightly longer versions of the kinds of stories I teach my younger students with. These are ok for my 8th graders, but they need something more-they need more opportunities to use language themselves. This is where the language lab really shone for me.

Rather than the traditional 50-60 minute sessions that I’ve experienced (and presented) at ACTFL, FFLA, and SCOLT, I was able to watch the same teacher teach the same intermediate-level kids over the course of three 1.5 hour periods. I attended the classes taught by former FFLA and SCOLT Teacher of the Year Claudia Elliott. I took so many notes!

I learned so much about transitions, about ways to present information, about how to react to student behaviors and about what to expect from my students. Rather than just learning about different ideas for brain breaks and for transitions, I was able to see them in action and learn how to implement them. Claudia is a friend and a great teacher, so this was a truly enlightening experience.

The things I’m implementing now in my first days of school:

Can-Dos posted in English, but explained in Spanish – this gives students a chance to hear the language, but also supports their understanding by letting them follow along in their L1.

Butcher paper – Claudia used butcher paper in several formative assessments. In doing this, students were able to write large enough for the whole class to see what was on the paper and then this becomes input and a resource for the class to use later in the unit.

Using previously created summaries to create new assessments – this is related to the last one. It allows students’ own work to be the source of the content of activities. The things used for this were mostly the Write and Discuss summaries created during after the various activities completed in class.

Student output is choppy, even in an intermediate class – our expectations of students’ output should be realistic. It is easy to get into the mindset that since the students get input in our classes every day, they should be growing by leaps and bounds in a short amount of time. But language acquisition is a slow process and students need to be allowed to have time to acquire at their own pace.

The biggest takeaway, though, was seeing the implementation of an adage that I have heard and read for years: that language is the medium, not the goal itself. Seeing the way Claudia sheltered vocabulary and used language in her instruction so that the students could also use the vocabulary to talk about the topic was really inspiring and I’m looking forward to incorporating similar activities and methods into my own classroom.