I’m looking forward to presenting at the World Language Summit at North Cobb Christian School tomorrow! I will be sharing some ideas for creating speaking and listening activities for online and hybrid learning environments. Here my slides:

Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
I’m looking forward to presenting at the World Language Summit at North Cobb Christian School tomorrow! I will be sharing some ideas for creating speaking and listening activities for online and hybrid learning environments. Here my slides:
FLAG is currently offering a fabulous free webinar series for World Language Teachers. I recently watched Marcy Webb’s session on Virtual and F2F engagement. You can watch the recording here, and check out upcoming webinars here.
My notes on the webinar:
How do you know your distance learners are engaged? What are your best strategies for building relationships in the virtual classroom?
Holy smokes. It’s been an intense three days of learning. I attended Solution Tree’s PLC At Work Institute this week, and I’ve got to say, it was the some of the best PD I’ve attended, particularly considering it was not grade or content-specific (hello, SCOLT and FLAG, you will always be my #1 for PD! 😘).
PLCs (Professional Learning Communities) encompass a lot of big educational ideas: differentiated instruction, standards based/mastery grading, common formative assessments, and data-driven teaching. A PLC must identify the essential learning outcomes, develop common assessments, and then analyze the assessment data as a team. Assessment data informs and drives assessment; if students have not mastered the essential content, they need to be re-taught and re-assessed.
I attended a fantastic session with Michelle Marrillia titled, Do Your Common Formative Assessments Really Change Your Practice? Turning Data Into Successful Secondary Classroom Instruction that gave me some practical ideas for how to integrate remediation into regular class time. She talked about the importance of guaranteed recovery systems – tutoring before or after school is not a guaranteed option, because not all students have transportation to attend tutoring outside of regular school hours. In my school’s case, remediation during our study hall time is not guaranteed either, because many of our students attend the career academy for half the day, and travel between the campuses during study hall. In order for the recovery system to be truly guaranteed, it has to be integrated as a regular in-class routine.
Option 1: Pull students for short & sweet recovery sessions several times a week. Identify the students needing remediation based on your common formative assessment (CFA) data, and pull them for some small group or one on one instruction during independent work time. I’ve done this before with quiz corrections: I give the class an assignment to work on independently (or in partners, or in groups – something they don’t need help/guidance from me on) and I call up everyone to look at their grade and make corrections. We talk about what they missed, I give them a remediation assignment to work on, and we schedule a retake. Michelle suggests giving CFAs weekly (formative assessment should be frequent with data used immediately to inform instruction), with the retake for the previous week’s assessment copied on the back of this week’s CFA.
As you reteach, you are probably still moving on with new material. Copy the retake on the back of the new assessment the next week. pic.twitter.com/bFbHHWkMTM
— Andrea Brown (@andrearoja) July 9, 2019
Option 2: Schedule a longer slot of time for remediation once a week
Michelle suggested reserving one day a week as a “no new information” day for remediation and extension. Some teachers at her school use a red-yellow-green color coding system, with red meaning not mastered, yellow meaning approaching mastery, and green meaning mastered. On the remediation day, students get a sticker corresponding to how they did on the formative assessment and are assigned to a group according to their needs. The following points surprised and intrigued me:
I teach on a block schedule, and while I don’t see myself devoting 20% of my class time to remediation every week, my classes are long enough I could reserve half a class period for recovery, particularly if it’s not every week.
Takeaway: I need to prioritize grading CFAs quickly and using that data to provide remediation for students who are red on essential standards. Remediation/enrichment time needs to be a regularly scheduled activity.
Who’s headed to SCOLT? Me! I am very excited to be representing Georgia as “Best of Flag” with my presentation #AuthRes for the Novice Language Learner. If you caught me at FLAG/SCOLT last year, it will be much the same, but I have updated and added a few things. Check out my slides below, or click here to open in a new tab. I’m sharing tons of links to my favorite sources for finding beginner-appropriate authentic resources, as well as activities to go along with them. I’m also sharing three “ready to go” authres activities that I’ve used with my own students on leisure activities, school, and clothing.I will be presenting Saturday morning at 8:00 – I would love to see you there!
This summer, I had the opportunity to study in Cusco, Perú for two weeks with a scholarship from SCOLT. It was my first time in South America and such a gift to experience in a study abroad setting. As required by my scholarship, I made a video about my trip. Without further ado, here are my travel tips for Cusco!
A partial list of travel scholarships for language teachers:
SCOLT Scholarships: https://www.scolt.org/index.php/scholarships – Deadline is January 31, 2019
AATSP Scholarships: https://www.aatsp.org/page/StudyAbroadScholars – Deadline is January 31, 2019 – may include a stipend for travel expenses
Central States – https://csctfl.wildapricot.org/page-1860390 – Deadline is November 30, 2018
Southwest States Scholarships: https://www.swcolt.org/awards – Deadline is December 31, 2018
I feel like many teachers who are interested in travel don’t apply because they assume they won’t get it or that the other applicants will be better. My attitude is that if you don’t apply, you definitely won’t win! Just by putting in the effort to fill out the application, ask for letters of recommendation and write the essays you are putting yourself way ahead of the majority of potential applicants. I have applied for many scholarships and grants over the past few years and got all but one – which I was the recipient for the next year!* If you want to travel and have the freedom to do so, study abroad programs are a great way to experience another country. Don’t discount your credentials before you ever apply!
*Also, when you make it a habit to apply for things, you’ll find you can recycle many of your essays! And your recommenders can recycle their letters too 🙂
I had the privilege of attending and presenting at my state’s world language teacher conference this past weekend. I had a great time re-connecting with old amigos and learning from some home-grown teaching stars, and left feeling refreshed and energized. Here are some of the ideas and resources I collected over the weekend:
EDIT: HERE ARE THE SLIDES!
I am excited to announce that I will be presenting at FLAG this Saturday at 10:30 AM! My goal for the presentation is to share some ideas for activities that are highly engaging, can be done in the TL, and are also low prep.
If you are going to be at FLAG this weekend, I would love to meet you!
Down here in Georgia we got an inch of snow Friday night, so of course it’s Tuesday and I have a report-by-ten-o’clock-work-day. This quiet time in my classroom feels like a gift, so I’ve used some of it to do some reading and reflection.
Whale Done
I have to admit my expectations were low when the admins gave us a book with a cheesy title on our first day from Christmas break and along with a deadline for reading the first two chapters. However, upon completing those chapters this morning, I was pleasantly surprised by the message. The authors explain how the whales at SeaWorld are trained with positive feedback strategies, and how those methods can be applied to managing people (I have to chuckle each time I read “animal” and think “student”). Some takeaways from today’s reading:
The Language Teacher Toolkit
Confession: I follow The Language Gym through my feedly account, but I rarely make it through a whole blog post as the attention and focus required for processing each post is usually more than I can give in those minutes I am scrolling through my phone looking for a distraction! This book is similarly dense, but I am committed to getting through it. I read for thirty minutes today and found myself nodding and underlining on each page. Here are a few takeaways:
What are you reading these days? What I should I read next?
I attended a session on Monday on Digital Assessments. The presenter went over Plickers, and then showed us how she uses Edmodo. I was really impressed with how much mileage she gets out of the Edmodo platform – posting class notes for absent students, turning in assignments, quizzes, and surveys (what an easy way to do voting for Manía Musical!). I also really liked Edmodo’s badge feature – Edmodo has a few built in ones like “Good citizen” and “Hard Worker,” but you can also customize your own – she does “Movie Critic” (watch a historical film and write a page analyzing the historical accuracy – could adapt for foreign languages), “Hot 100” (get a perfect 100 on a test), and “Quizlet Star” (earn a high score on Scatter or Space Race). She uses the badges for extra credit (1 test point per 2 badges earned), but I think it also would contribute to a positive classroom environment – sometimes it’s hard to give good students recognition, but the badges would be an easy (and free!) way to do it.
Anyway, here’s my dilemma: I’ve dabbled in Edmodo before, and I know how easy it is to use. However, my district has purchased Blackboard as our learning management platform. I would like to use Blackboard since many other teachers in our school use it and students quickly become familiar with it, but it is incredibly complicated on the teacher end to create, post, and organize materials. I feel like I have to go through 8 screens to do something that in Edmodo would be 1! I attended a session this morning on differentiation with Blackboard and was quite impressed with all of the different functionalities Blackboard offers to set up formative assessments and tailor future assignments to a students’ needs and abilities. However….despite an excellent presentation by a very skilled and passionate teacher (who works at my school and would be available to help me!), I know that to actually implement what she showed us will require a lot of trial and error and a lot of time on my part. I hate spending an hour or two struggling with technology for something that should have taken 15 minutes at most.
Here are the pros and cons, as I see them:
Edmodo
Pros – Easy to use for both me and my students. Free. Will be able to access my information regardless of whether I change school districts.
Cons – another login for students to remember. Not officially sanctioned by the powers that be.
Blackboard
Pros -universal use across the district. Will be familiar to students, particularly the sophomores who had laptops and used blackboard last year. Lots of robust features. Classes already loaded in. Will make my administrators happy.
Cons – high learning curve for me, big time investment just to post materials.
At this point I’m leaning towards Edmodo, but I have another session on Blackboard to attend – perhaps it will change my mind. And then again, it all depends on how far we are with the 1:1 rollout…if most of my students don’t have school-issued laptops, I may not use much of anything.
Bloom into style, expression, and comfort
Reflections and thoughts on language teaching
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Deja tu huella en el mundo
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Become a more confident language teacher.
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Ideas, solutions, and inspiration for world language teachers
Traveling the proficiency path, one step at a time
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
A language teacher's website by Mike Peto
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
teacher, author, and teacher-trainer
A Language Teacher's Journey
Let's find our way together through this crazy, beautiful profession of teaching, shall we?
Teaching Spanish with CI, #authres, #edtech, and love
A glimpse inside my journey of teaching Spanish
Ideas, Strategies and Reflections on Comprehensible Input for World Language Classes