Best practices
January 25, 2013
A while ago this comment was left on the old Musicuentos site, on the post “Do something drastic – kick the vocab quiz“: “Can you give us some examples of what activities you do to ensure mastery of the vocabulary? And do you have any advice on how to promote this kind of teaching/learning in […]
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January 21, 2013
Paragraph form
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The rubric I use to score all performance assessments (which I almost completely stole from colleagues) has an entire section called “function/structure” that I use to identify how proficiently students communicate in “paragraph length.” Indeed, the AP rubric (from 2007, which will be changing for 2014) talks about “paragraphing,” and for speaking uses words like […]
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January 16, 2013
For the original myths post, click here. You can also view all of the myths posts. Because myths 8 and 9 are related, I want to address them together. The connection between them is that they both make us give up on giving novices authentic materials. When I wrote about myth 7, I compared Taco […]
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January 8, 2013
More choice every day
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One of my most popular posts ever – and most popular conference topics – is about giving students choice in their homework assignments. After a while I thought, well, if giving students more choice in homework is so motivating, why not in other assessments? Why not in their final exam? And so I moved my […]
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October 25, 2012
Best and worst games I’ve seen
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I don’t think many teachers truly believe that having fun is the only prerequisite to learning. Even with my preschoolers, whose teachers I often tell that our 20 minutes may look like chaos but is really learning through play, I have to carefully structure our fun in order to maximize acquisition. So why does it […]
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October 12, 2012
Using authentic materials is an ideological battleground for language teachers. No matter how much people agree that it’s important for all levels, I still seem to hear so much uncertainty as to how to do it, particularly for novices. –But what if they don’t understand? What can they do with it? How can we help […]
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September 26, 2012
Success with Stations
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We did it! Under much inspiration by @muchachitaMJ and @viajando_kj (with Megan’s presentation on stations the only general session I was able to attend at KWLA 2012), this week we did a stations day for the first time. Overall it was a great success, more so in Spanish 3 than in AP. Here’s what I learned. […]
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September 23, 2012
More student choice in homework
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Are you using or considering using the weekly student choice homework idea? Check out the 35 awesome new options suggested by attendees at my recent session The Choice is Theirs at the fall conference of the Kentucky World Language Association. Have students talk to Siri or make travel reservations online (up to the payment part, […]
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September 22, 2012
Here is the Prezi for my presentation about student choice in homework and assessment for the Kentucky World Language Association’s Fall 2012 conference. For more information, see the original post It’s time for them to use their time, as well as Design your own final exam and the Google doc of my class’s weekly activity […]
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September 21, 2012
Here’s the Prezi from my presentation at the Kentucky World Language Association, Kick the Vocab Quiz. For all my posts tagged ‘vocabulary,’ click here.
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August 28, 2012
Myth #7: Spanish Mike is a taco.
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It’s about time I picked up the task of finishing my myths posts! For the original post, click here. Myth #7: Media produced for language learners counts as authentic materials (or, “The ‘First Semester of Spanish Love Song’ is the best video ever!”) Most media in the world language classroom is a taco. It’s not just […]
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July 26, 2012
Advice for teachers in training
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I’ve gotten two emails lately from teachers in training asking for advice. If there are any significant number of preservice teachers like them, asking such good questions and determined to pursue excellence, we’re headed for great things in language learning. One just asked me for general advice for a preservice teacher. Here are a couple […]
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