Category Archives: French

What if we treated academics like athletics?

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Hear me out.
As long as I’ve been teaching French, the rhetoric has always been that learning a language should be taught similarly to how we teach sports to children: You aren’t going to be Michael Jordan the first time you pick up a ball, utter a French sentence, play an instrument, or try to solve a difficult problem. 
These skills require honing through lots and lots of practice, dedication, repetition, encouragement, and passion from the instructor/coach. I’ve always tried to instill this mantra in the minds of my students, but it never hurts to keep coming back to it.
So when I opened my browser while lounging over a cup of coffee this morning, I was delighted to see an NPR interview with former-NFL player-turned mathematics Ph.D. candidate John Urschel (From The Gridiron To Multigrid Algorithms In ‘Mind And Matter’) touting his new book Mind and Matter. Then I fell into a rabbit hole, reading all I could about how Urschel is trying to change the way we talk about teaching and learning in American education. Then I stumbled upon his NY Times Opinion column “Math Teachers Should Be More Like Football Coaches,” and despite not teaching math, I greatly identified with much of what he’s saying. I ventured even further into the rabbit hole by perusing his Twitter account and had to share his story with some of my math teacher friends.
I feel so empowered to keep doing what we’re doing with role models like Urschel in both our and our students’ lives. He is giving students of all different walks of life access to an educational outlook they might not have otherwise held. And these lines really spoke to me, reaffirming my own goals as an educator of both young men and women from so many different backgrounds, social milieus, religions, family structures, political beliefs, mother tongues, home countries, you name it:

I recognize that because I’m a mathematician at MIT and I play professional football, I’m in the spotlight. And I have a responsibility to use this platform to show people the beauty of mathematics. To show people playing in the NFL, this isn’t your way out. You can do something mathematics. You can do something in STEM, even if you don’t necessarily look like what the majority of people in that field look like. 

And I have to say, okay, if you look at the field of mathematics, if you look at elite American mathematicians, there’s almost no African Americans. There aren’t many of us in PhD programs, there’s not many of us as undergrads, and what you’re sort of left with is the sad realization that there are brilliant young minds being born into this country that are somehow being lost — either because of the household they’re born into, or their socioeconomic situations, or sort of the social culture in their community. And this isn’t just a disservice to them, this is a disservice to us as a country.

Even at the end of the school year when I feel completely out of sorts, exhausted, and at times even ineffective as an educator, I needed this bit of reaffirmation to help me refocus and guide the students into the final stretch, the fourth quarter, the bottom of the ninth, or any other applicable sports metaphor you’d like to insert here:

A growing body of research shows that students are affected by more than just the quality of a lesson plan. They also respond to the passion of their teachers and the engagement of their peers, and they seek a sense of purpose. They benefit from specific instructions, constant feedback and a culture of learning that encourages resilience in the face of failure — not unlike a football practice. There are many ways to be an effective teacher, just as there are many ways to be an effective coach. But all good teachers, like good coaches, communicate that they care about your goals.

This speaks to what so many of us have been doing all year. And I wanted to end the year on a note of appreciation and gratitude for being part of such an innovative and supportive community of passionate educators!

Gamifying the French Classroom

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Last year, I attended a workshop put on by the French Consulate entitled “Gamifying the French Classroom.” It was interesting but not as practical as I would have liked–most of the games were for purchase or required software I don’t have.

Ever since attending that workshop last April, I’ve been trying to think of how to bring more of a gamified feel to my projects and units. Students respond well to Quizlet Live, Kahoot, and Jeopardy! in my classroom, so why not make learning more entertaining and ultimately more engaging? After reading Amanda’s blog in the fall about her final exam review passport (and also attending her group’s Grab-and-Go PD session last month), I felt compelled to rethink my finals review as we wind down the year and make the push towards exam week.

Let me back up a few steps first. For the final unit of the year in French 3, I’ve decided to modify the traditional food unit and teach students about food trucks, regional French cuisine, and the food truck culture in Paris which I experienced firsthand over the past three summers working in Paris.

I called my unit “The Great Food Truck Race.” To determine their groups for this final unit and project, students selected from random cards I made with French regions written on them. Earlier this week, they researched their assigned regions, local cuisine, and points of interest. From there, each group designed an origial food truck and a logo after learning about their regional cuisine. I think they’ve been having fun with the project-based learning aspects of this unit, but I wanted to tap into the “race” aspect of this unit as we make our way to finals week.

And that’s when it struck me. Instead of doing a “finals review” week or a few random days here and there, why not design an entire unit around a series of review activities?

The idea is simple: each week, I am hosting a series of competitions that really aren’t much different from the typical language exercises, activities, and worksheets we’ve been working on all year. The only difference is how I’m framing these competitions.

I’ve set up a Google Spreadsheet that the students have access to in order to keep a running tally of how many points they score during each competition which constitutes the ongoing “food truck race.” By the end of these next three weeks, the group with the most amount of points will earn a small bonus on the final exam. I introduced the rules earlier this week and the excitement which greeted my announcement was unlike anything I’ve seen all year. You would have thought I’d told them they could be on their phones every class from here on out…

The “competitions” include the following activities (along with several more I’m still mentally figuring out):

  • The Price is Right game in French to review food words, quantities, and numbers
  • A Jeopardy! review of food vocab from French 1-2
  • An upcoming quiz on the conditional mood we covered during the fall semester (which I’ll let them take in partners and score purely for race points and not for the overall grade)
  • Subjunctive verb conjugation speed races to review material from two units ago
  • Instagram challenges in which I’ll assign a task and judge the videos based on creativity and use of language
  • Speaking quizzes (formerly known as “oral exams”)
  • And then more traditional assignments for this current food truck unit such as creating a realistic menu, hosting an “interview” with a local journalist and their food truck, writing up an in-class business proposal without the assistance of Google Translate or a French-English dictionary, researching French outdoor games and proposing a special Happy Hour with games of their choosing, and so forth.

After only two in-class competitions, I’m already seeing more participation and engagement than I’ve seen in past classes. I hope the momentum continues into the remaining weeks, but so far it’s been fun to teach and keeps me on my toes in terms of thinking about how to make each review session more successful, engaging, and fun!

And best of all, I’m tricking my students into studying and fully participating in French.

For now, I leave you with some of their initial food truck designs as their posts are trickling in all weekend.

Carondelet News Channel (en français!)

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I had originally planned to begin a new unit in my French 3 classes this past week and a half leading up to Spring Break, but everyone was showing signs of exhaustion after the completion of our last chapter, projects, and oral quizzes (on a light topic such as environmental issues and endangered animals in Francophone countries). They did a great job, so I wanted to reward them with something different than usual as we transitioned into Spring Break. I wanted a creative challenge that we could successfully complete in a week, and the pressure was on–I honestly had no idea how it would turn out, but I was excited to tap into my journalism background and do a journalism mini-project-based unit.
Over the past week, I taught my students all they might want to know about the news and media in French. I helped them expand their vocabulary in French after reading recent headlines, listening to topical news podcasts, watching daily news broadcasts, and parsing through satirical news sites in French to see if students could figure out what headlines were real and what were parodies (ask me if you want to see the presentation–the headlines are hilarious). We even debated current events and students defended their opinions about the news and journalistic integrity.
During our final long block period (today’s class), I charged the students with creating a class-wide 15-minute news broadcast. Running through some modified design thinking exercises, students in my 5th period (sole Carondelet-only) class pitched and then voted on their ideas for the show, concept, title, and logo and came up with the following:

In groups of 2-3, the girls were responsible for the following 2-minute segments: 

  • Introduction and Carondelet-local news (including Mr. Cushing’s departure from the school as he prepares to go on tour with the Spice Girls)
  • San Francisco Bay Area news about a local scammer and Anne Hathaway impersonator
  • International news chronicling the Carondelet trip to France next week in the wake of today’s Notre Dame Cathedral fire in Paris
  • Sports covering the Carondelet swimming, rugby, and lacrosse teams
  • Arts and lifestyle covering the construction of the art class’s school bus in the inner court that was tragically stolen overnight and replaced with a gigantic croissant
  • And the broadcast closes out on a very high note covering the erratic weather we’ve been experiencing recently.
They quickly edited their videos using either iMovie or the Apple Clips app which Karina and I presented about on Friday (and I’m looking forward to creating a screencast or future blog entry showcasing all the cool features Clips has to offer if you weren’t able to attend our Grab-and-Go session last week). 
Here is the folder of all their videos if you’re at all curious to see what they were able to produce with the quick 80-minute turnaround during today’s class. I had a lot of fun helping them think through their scripts and watching the final production (which we won’t get to watch as a class until after break), and I am so proud of them for their creativity and sensitivity and attention to world news as it relates to this class.
This was one of my most favorite long block periods of the entire year, and I am looking forward to getting even more creative next month when I roll out a food truck race competition in my French 3 classes.
That’s it for this blog, see you on the other side of Spring Break, everyone!

Time to fill out your brackets…

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…but I don’t mean your NCAA Division I brackets. I mean these puppies:
March is the International Month of the Francophonie, a celebration of all things Francophone: music, literature, food, culture, clothing, etc. It’s also the start of the annual NCAA Division I Basketball tournament. In honors of both of events coinciding each year, hundreds of schools around the U.S. participate in La Manie Musicale – March Music Madness! 
Three times a week, two Francophone music videos/songs are pitted against one another. French students both at Carondelet and De La Salle alike vote to determine which video will advance to the final round. As of this afternoon, I’ve opened the tournament up to the entire community.
If you are curious and want to check it out, you can either stop by the hallway outside of Room 28 and see the large bracket that I’m updating in real time. You can also visit the link below to see the bracket I screenshotted above. Embedded in the bracket are links to YouTube videos and the Google Forms for voting.
Enjoy! And be on the lookout for student-created lip dub/lip sync videos once we eliminate some of the competitors…

Instagram and French (Part 1)

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This semester, I started out the first unit in all of my French classes with a totally new way of doing homework. It mainly stemmed from the fact that I’ve been struggling with homework in my teaching here because a.) I still really haven’t figured out how to grade hundreds of weekly assignments and give meaningful feedback in a way that still allows me to experience some semblance of a life outside of work, and b.) many students were not able to keep up with their assignments in French for whatever reason and were sabotaging their grades during the first semester.
So this winter, I devised a weekly project that allows students to submit homework via a medium that they’re already using on a daily basis: Instagram. I crafted a series of rules and criteria to follow in order for us to create our own network within the social media site, offering weekly assignments students were to post about, as well as an accompanying Google Form to give me suggestions for future assignments, report what they learned each week (in terms of content and what new nuggets of information they learned from their fellow classmates), and practice new French vocabulary or grammar covered each week. Further, I created my own French account to provide students with comprehensible input in the target language and models for what they could publish each week. I also wanted to give myself the experience of being a student alongside them each week. Feel free to check out my page (as well the students’ comments) here!
My ground rules for this project were to be kind and supportive of one another, to only use French, and not to use a translator (I strongly encouraged my students to make mistakes on their sites). They were to post three times a week outside of class, and periodically in class when activities called for it.
I’ll be honest: I was expecting every one of my students to be totally onboard right from the get-go. It can sometimes be a struggle to get kids off of social media, so I expected this to be a hit… but that wasn’t necessarily the case. That said, it did take some students a week or two to warm up to the idea, and some flat out didn’t enjoy it at all, but I quickly noticed higher homework completion rates over the past month and a half than I’d seen the entire first semester and that was encouraging to observe.
The project also completely surprised me in a different way: some of the students really have taken to this activity. They posted more than the minimum requirements week in and week out. They were being really kind and encouraging to one another. They were learning more about me as a person and I was learning more about them in such a short period of time. They were posting pictures of their classmates in other classes (sorry if they interrupted a chem lab or math problem to share it on their French Instagram pages…). They were sharing their pages with other students who aren’t in my French classes and only interacting with those students in French, or jokingly asking then “en français s’il vous plaît” when those students posted on their pages in English. Students in different periods and different classes followed one another. I also provided students with links to French-speaking celebrities (politicians, athletes, actors, singers, bloggers, etc.) and students interacted with native speakers and learned real-world vocabulary from scrolling through their feeds!
I did run into a few hiccups when three sets of parents notified me that they didn’t want their child on social media, when a student lost his device, and when a student broke his phone and couldn’t use it to record video. For those rare instances, I had the students submit their videos, pictures, and sentences through Google Docs in Schoology. I worry they didn’t get the full experience of the other students, but they were still able to contribute and check in on my page from the web browser version of Instagram to get the same input as their classmates.
In terms of my time management and grading, I felt like this was an extremely simple way to neatly organize a portfolio of student work for the entire unit. I created one giant Google Spreadsheet with links to each of the students’ pages internally. When students did research or poster projects, I had them record videos and submit them to their IG pages. I used student videos as comprehension exercises in class (instead of the same boring two actors my book uses). I asked students to make commercials. Students had to tag one another and ask each other questions (and then respond to anyone who’d asked them questions – just as I did when three students tagged me and asked me questions). And because I pretty much always have my phone on me, I could check in on their feeds throughout the day and comment back on student posts, giving them nearly real-time feedback on their work. I graded their posts once a week in PowerSchool based off a completion rubric I made.
The most amazing and meaningful thing I’ve taken away from this project is how quickly I got to learn about my students. My daily classroom interactions seem more meaningful and connected than they felt in the past. Last semester, a student might make a comment about their interests in class, but I would soon forget because my brain is like a Chrome browser with a million tabs open. However, after seeing a post of a student brushing her horse, and when she mentioned she liked horses in class, I remembered the post and immediately asked her more specific questions about her horse in French. In that moment, she knew that I had read her post, that I remembered it, and that I genuinely wanted to know more about her life.
On the other hand, the students also got to learn a lot more about me as a person. They now know all my pets (and husband) by name and they ask me how they’re doing periodically, they know my favorite French singers, the movies I like, and what kind of food I enjoy eating. Since they were all so brave and open in trying out this new project and in sharing personal details with me and their classmates during the month (they sang, played instruments, juggled, spoke for an entire minute in uninterrupted French, vlogged, introduced me to their friends and family, posted jokes to French-speaking celebrities, and so much more) I also put myself in a vulnerable position in solidarity and posted a video of me singing for them in French!
Since finishing this first unit on Tuesday, I’ve begun collecting student surveys and their overall thoughts on the project that I will share in a future post. I already know that this project has its ups and downs, so along with student feedback, I am beginning to make modifications for our next unit of study. Oh, and in two weeks I am attending a conference workshop with another French teacher who’s successfully integrated Instagram into his classroom experience. More to come soon!

Trying something new: TPRS Storytelling in French 1

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Prior to this year, I’d been familiar with TPRS Storytelling in language acquisition classes, but I always assumed it was for younger students. Everyone I knew who employs this method teaches either middle or elementary school world language courses, so I always kind of dismissed it as someone who has taught pre-AP language and literature courses.

However, I follow a rather large French Teachers Facebook group and there has been a ton of buzz lately regarding TPRS Storytelling (Sidenote: this Facebook group is seriously the best PD I know about! As a non-native speaker, I can ask a nit-picky French grammar question to literally thousands of teachers and get an answer within minutes, peruse other member’s materials, and upload my own materials to our shared Google Drive. I totally encourage you all to join a group like this if it exists in your field!).

Several teachers have begun sharing their experiences with storytelling and simultaneous drawing to help learners visualize and understand. I’ve been reading their articles with interest, but still maintained my initial skeptical and dismissive attitude thinking my ~30 freshmen (a predominately male class, mind you) wouldn’t take to this method since it involves sitting quietly and listening at times and active participation in French at other points in the class.

Now that I’ve gotten my bearings on my life as a new teacher here, I figured I was ready to take the plunge after reading success story after success story on the Facebook group page…

I dipped my toes in the water for my first story, a particularly average story about two students, their likes and dislikes, life at school, and after-school activities. My stories involved new language students hadn’t yet learned. I wasn’t sure how they’d react, but they were responsive, attentive, and inquisitive the entire time. They helped me name the students, gave me their schedules, and determined that they were twins at Carondelet and De La Salle. Flash forward a few weeks, and imagine my surprise upon learning from their unit evaluations that nearly every student enjoyed the activity and wanted more!

So this morning, I got even bolder with my story. It has a crazy twist at the end and the class erupted in laughter (after hearing me speak only French for 20 minutes!). I followed the activity up with oral True/False questions in French and had them draw scenes from the story. The kids totally knocked it out of the park; I was so impressed with how much they were able to understand and respond to, and I think they were too.

I’m already scheming follow-up activities, dreaming up ideas for how to weave stories into my French 2 curriculum, and I am hoping to build my repertoire of stories and seek out further PD that will help me grow in this methodology!

Maybe my drawings will also improve along the way…. 😅

I failed; then, I tried again!

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Well, it’s a month into the school year, and I’ve just had my first failed lesson! Actually, it was a great lesson for me:) 
I planned (badly) a discussion around a prayer to St Joseph that didn’t yield neither learning outcomes, nor interest on my students’ part. 
Frustrated and embarrassed, I first blamed (to myself) my students – yes, I went there- for their lack of intellectual curiosity and/or ability.  But after venting to colleagues and doing some reflecting, I realized I hadn’t prepared the discussion thoroughly.
Did I have an objective? What was the outcome desired? Did I put myself in my students’ shoes when scaffolding the lesson?  More importantly, did I give them time to inquire, process, and share with each other before contributing to the class discussion?
The answer is a resounding NO! (Not shouting, just emphasizing:)
I just couldn’t leave it at that; so, I re-planned and prepared, and tried again with another class. And, well, what a world of difference! 
Reflecting and trying is well worth the effort – a lesson for educators and their students. 

Peace,

Nadine 


First cross-curricular activity: Making a pinhole eclipse viewer in French!

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Last Friday in my French 3 Honors’ class we constructed our own pinhole eclipse viewer in preparation for today’s eclipse.  To make our first cross-curricular activity relevant to our French class, I provided students with step by step instructions in French and basic vocabulary around the phenomena.  After reading the instructions in groups and checking for understanding, students traced, cut, glued and assembled their viewer out of a cereal box en français. 
It was a fun experience for the students to figure out instructions in French, make their viewer, and share with classmates this special moment.
As for me, I am looking forward to incorporating cross-curricular activities in my units!
Nadine