Best practices
April 26, 2016
They couldn’t hear the word “no”
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The school year is almost over for my students and me- really, this Friday is our last day. You may know by now that we’ve been working through the movie Canela as the entire foundation of our curriculum this semester, and it’s been fabulous. It’s been a gold mine of authentic language and culture for my Novice […]
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March 22, 2016
I think I’ve come to the end of the acquisition vs. learning distinction for the purposes of language learning in a classroom. Rewind. When I first started investigating second language acquisition research, I was blown away by what I learned about how people really learn languages. It revolutionized my classroom. It brought me to incorporate […]
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March 11, 2016
In case you couldn’t tell, I love storytelling! And at Central States today I had the opportunity to talk about it with a lot of fun teachers and in particular my co-presenter Wendy Farabaugh. It’s not particularly useful for me to offer our slides as we had all of 4 of them; it was not […]
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February 24, 2016
In eleven years of lesson planning, I’ve learned to have a healthy fear of one particular word in that process: and. Picture this: Recently I’m working on a lesson plan, and because I’m “behind” and trying to catch up on the syllabus (which I wrote, and can really change anytime I want), here’s what I end […]
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October 27, 2015
You know that glassed-over look that your students get about halfway (a quarter of the way?) through your lesson? The same one you get about 15 minutes into the faculty meeting? Here’s how to fight it. First, realize it’s not your students’ fault. Their brains are designed to filter and process information and the brain […]
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September 28, 2015
The Best Laid Plans (KWLA ’15)
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Given how long Thomas Sauer and I have been colleagues and friends, I can’t believe we haven’t presented together before. Well, we fixed that on Saturday and presented a 3-hour workshop on effective lesson planning. Two things: 1. Three hours was not enough. 2. I learned at least as much from Thomas as anyone there learned […]
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April 21, 2015
Three before me
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What could you get out of #langchat? You never know! No matter how many years you’ve been teaching, everyone’s bound to come away with some treasurable, profitable nuggets from #langchat. I’m not even sure which recent #langchat this came from. It could have been when we were discussing grit, how we could help learners persevere […]
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April 15, 2015
A few weeks ago the topic for #langchat was about timing and transitioning activities in a class. Then, shortly after, I was teaching a novice-high class of sixth-graders as part of an interview to perhaps go back to teaching next year (MAYBE). (Lesson plan coming soon.) Anyway, it made me think more about this issue […]
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March 14, 2015
Good morning from a sunny, beautiful spring day in Minneapolis, the location of the 2015 Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. My presentation here is called “Arming Students for a World of Incomprehensible Input.” It’s based on an episode of the Black Box Podcast from last year (listen here, read the script here), […]
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March 10, 2015
I’ve been hearing a flurry of comments, great ones, directing teachers to not get so distracted by the 90% TL goal that they forget to make sure they’re speaking comprehensibly. I’m sure you’ve seen and/or committed, as have I, one of these common unfortunate practices: speaking in target language and being super proud of it… except […]
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February 17, 2015
Shall we talk labor and delivery a moment? I suspect I have your attention! No worries, I’m not going to get gross. I don’t think so, anyway. But you will get to know me a little bit better. When I was pregnant with my third child, some family friends were visiting, a couple and their […]
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February 12, 2015
What does your seating arrangement say about your classroom style? In my last post I made a side comment about how I handle seating assignments and discovered that the only time I’ve written about it on the blog was in the last bullet point in a post on increasing student TL use. How unfortunate, since […]
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