Category Archives: Modern Languages

Engaging Students Through Digital Tools

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              One of the biggest challenges we
face as teachers is maintaining the attention of our students and increasing
their involvement in the learning process.  There are always students who are highly
motivated to learn and eagerly participate in all activities, but how do we reach
students who seem disengaged from the learning environment?

Of course, we strive to create a positive classroom ecology, provide
stimulating content and cooperative learning. These techniques are useful
strategies for engaging students. However, sometimes it can be helpful to
integrate digital tools to improve our pedagogical practices.   I have
found some platforms this year to help increase engagement even from students
who are reluctant learners or are less motivated. Two of my colleagues in the
Modern Language Department, Kristy Parsons-McClain and Sandra Cardenas
introduced me to Blooklet and Gimkit.

With these technology tools, you can find or create “learning sets”
according to what you are studying. The platforms are a little bit like Kahoots
but more sophisticated and visually pleasing. From the student’s perspective,
it is like playing a video game where they get to practice vocabulary and
grammar structures. The students love these games and report they that they
feel that it helps them to practice the grammar structures and vocabulary. It
also provides good data for the students to see how they are progressing and
for me to see if students are acquiring the language. The other tech tools that
I have incorporated this year are EdPuzzles, and PearDecks and I will be
testing out GoFormative and Garbanzo this semester.

DEI in action in the Modern Language Department

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Although teaching language through rich and authentic cultural content has been an ongoing practice in Carondelet’s language classrooms, it has become ever more imperative to ensure that these efforts are truly inclusive, diverse and widely representative of all members of those cultures. Just as we have (mostly:) left behind mindless and ineffective conjugation drills, we must take a close look at the “culture” we are teaching. Our department has been hard at work examining our content and resources, and including cultural contexts that reflect the speakers/signers of the languages that we teach.
Here are some examples of our work: 

In our French 2 classes, our students learned about the rituals of Rosh Hashana, and its enduring significance in French Jewish culture. 
In French 1 classes, students watched a video about breakfast preferences, and compared them to their own and that of other French-speaking countries. 
In ASL, all classes discuss audism (the belief that one’s ability to hear or behave as one who hears is superior) and how it affects Deaf people in their everyday lives.
Kristin is preparing a fascinating unit for ASL 3 about BASL (Black American Sign Language) and its origins.
When black and white students went to separate schools, there were also separate Deaf Residential Schools. The Black-Deaf schools developed their own way of signing. These signs and culture are still passed on today in many families and communities. 
In Spanish, Kerry’s students discussed the importance of language diversity after watching and reacting to a video of a young woman who sings in Quechua an indigenous language of Peru, and parts of Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. 
In French 3, students explored the culture of protest of the disenfranchised through street art in Paris and Brussels. We explored graffiti and murals, discussed Art Vs. Vandalism, and created a wall mural to commemorate with words of love, courage and compassion, the victims of 9/11. 
These are just a few of the many ways we show students that the world’s diversity comes in many hues and tones!

Feeling Through

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Hey! Just thought I’d share what I’m showing my kids this week. They’re watching this short film and we’re discussing representation, disability, community, their own perspective as an ASL student… but the one prompt that I give them before they watch is “who is God working through in this (true) story?” They’ve been incredibly insightful and I’m glad I’m able to have these discussions with them. Feel free to watch!

I’m excited to receive reflection papers from my juniors and seniors. One of my sophomore girls contributed this: 

“God was working through Artie. Artie was sent by God to be a guardian angel. He is an example of the Holy Spirit. He wasn’t what Tareek wanted at that moment, but that hug at the end shows that he was what God knew he needed.”

https://youtu.be/h1CqzntEZZ8

My Generation of Polyglots Seminar

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“I Took 9 Years of Spanish, and All I Know Are The Colors and Taco”

What was your experience with learning language in high school? Was it fun? A lot of “fiestas”? Brutal grammar and conjugation drills? or my favorite: memorizing dialogues: “Me llamo Juan. ¿Dónde está el baño por favor? ¿Dónde está la biblioteca, Maria?

When asked, many people may say that they remember the random dialogues that they were forced to memorize, maybe a conjugation or two, the colors, and not much else…

(You know it’s true)
The way modern language is being taught is ever evolving. In high school, I had one of the toughest teachers around. She drilled all of the conjugations in 24 tenses for the most random verbs and we painstakingly memorized these verbs, and I LOVED IT! (I am not most people). 
Last week, I had the tremendous opportunity to see a different way to approach language instruction with my department at a seminar in Gilroy, California (yas garlic!). It was a one day event with A LOT of information jam packed into a very engaging, informative and USEFUL seminar. I have so many things to say about this seminar, that I will probably blog about more takeaways at a later time. This seminar was taught by Mike Peto, language instructor extraordinaire. He demonstrated his lessons in Portuguese because most people don’t understand Portuguese, and he was making a point that his lessons were going to teach us another language. 
Mike Peto’s lessons focus primarily on Comprehensible Input and the lessons that go with CI. A few takeaways for me were the OWI (One Word Image) stories, Movie Talk, and Student Interviews. These are practical ways to get students engaged with the language, to help them build confidence in their language skills and to speak and write the language with increasing fluency. We practiced some of the lessons in the seminar, and after the day was done, I was excited to immediately try some of these lessons with my students the very next day. (Fortunately, these lessons don’t require too much planning because they are extremely student centered). They seem quirky and random at first, and I was a little skeptical, but I decided to try these lessons out…
One Word Images goes like this: the instructor has several criteria written on the board or the projector: What is the object, the size, color, emotion, likes and dislikes, job, rich/poor, kind/mean, and what is a superpower. Students are tasked with taking an inanimate object, like a pineapple, or broccoli, or a seashell and giving it life. (This is a period 2 drawing)

Students create a story around this object. They provide adjectives, and superpowers, and likes and dislikes and a job for this inanimate object. They create a story around this one image, and they end up creating dilemmas around this new living image. While students describe, there is a designated artist, who is drawing an illustration based on what is being described by the class. The teacher facilitates the story, and by the end, there is a final product: a story and an illustration that accompanies the text. 

I had my doubts that this wouldn’t be “academic” enough to prepare students for the AP Exam, however students are providing profound connections, without even realizing it…In my 5th period class, my students picked a broccoli who was very sensitive and depressed because he was white and yellow and not green like his friends. He was a professional ballet dancer, and he didn’t fit in with his friends because they all played sports. 

After the story, we talked about identity and the roles that we all play in society, and interpersonal relationships and what is ideal in society. These are in the AP themes, and we discussed all of these bigger themes entirely in Spanish, and even the students who don’t participate much in class were compelled to speak up, and that was a truly empowering feeling. I have decided to create digital story books that are written by and illustrated by the students, per class so that each class builds their story every week.  
Students were able to retain a large amount of information without studying the vocabulary or the structures. They were able to recall the information orally and they were able to write the information presented on paper when they were finished with the lesson. Student feedback was overwhelmingly positive and students felt accomplished and engaged in the language. This sure beats memorizing dialogues or a shopping list of conjugations like we did when we learned a foreign language.

¿Cómo Se Dice, “Maths” en Español?: A Collaborative Vlog

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WATCH THIS VIDEO, YOUR WORLD WILL CHANGE….(probably not, but just watch because I put work into it) 🙂


So I don’t like math. 
I never have. I like being competitive and getting points on Alludo though,
which is why I ended up signing myself up for an online maths course for math
teachers. (Yes, I said “maths”). I really didn’t have any intention of getting anything out of this
course and I really did just take it to get more Alludo points, because who
needs sleep? I also wanted to know what my students go through on a regular
basis to see if I can adjust my curriculum according to their needs and how
they learn, so I gave maths a whirl.


 Much to my surprise, it wasn’t really a course about math,
(maths) in the videos that I watched (on double speed to save time), but rather
a philosophy on teaching and learning that can be applied to various realms and
curricula. While I watched the videos I noticed language pertaining to “fixed
mindset” and “growth mindset”, and the concept of “yet.”
 Students in these
videos stated “I’m not good at math” “I’m just not a math person” “This isn’t
how my brain works”, and I began to make some connections: I noticed many of my
own students in Spanish saying similar things “I’m just no good at languages” “My
parents weren’t good at language, so neither am I” “I had bad teachers in middle
school, so I’m not very good”. I started to create a correlation between
Spanish teaching and learning and math, and when I approached Lesley Schooler
about this connection, she agreed that there might be some similarities. Like
math, students in Spanish are afraid to make mistakes, they put an obtrusive
filter on producing and speaking the language because they’re afraid they will
make mistakes and not be precise, so they just don’t speak. I found the
neurological studies in the math online course through Stanford to be
fascinating with the connections that I could make with my students in Spanish
class. I realized that the material needs to be slower and more attainable for
students, and not penalize mistakes, but point out mistakes, and allow students
to correct them (this is where the brain grows) and they shouldn’t be marked
down for making mistakes, but they should fix them so that they enjoy the process
of learning. The videos present the idea of the journey and process in learning. Students try and think aloud and defend and explain their findings rather than simply right and wrong and they move on. I am inspired to incorporate more of this style into my classes. The conundrum that I’m having is, while this is a great way to encourage learning and brain growth, I want to know that I am preparing students for college, and upper level learning where there might still be an institutionalized, systematic fixed mindset that they also need to be able to navigate. Would I be doing my students a disservice if I don’t require precision as well? I’m not sure. 
I shared these thoughts with Lesley and we made other
insights and connections as well. I think this is a good course to take, even
if you don’t teach math because a lot of the principles can be applied in many
fields of study. Also I actually learned some math, and I don’t hate it as much
as before. Yay!

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!

That One Time I Had An Idea…

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I have so many ideas that I don’t even know what to do with them. Finding the time and energy for all of the things swirling through my head is a daunting task. Once I have an idea, and I think it’s great, I automatically think about how I can make it better…and then I get overwhelmed and it becomes a vicious cycle. 
I actually had so many ideas for blog posts, and they all live in my head and I haven’t found the time until now (because I have to) to actually compose my ideas in this blog…woops?
Anyway. My most recent idea came from Lacy Matthews: 
She’s the best! 🙂

who made an announcement about immigration over the loud speaker one morning during prayer in first period. I got inspired in that instant to assign my Spanish 3 Honors students the task of writing a personal narrative of an immigrant coming from a Spanish speaking country during this time. Students were to write their story in the first person from the perspective of an immigrant (obviously in Spanish).  First they were required to pick a scenario: which country? What is this person like? What is their family like? What challenges or successes arose from the immigration process?

Students researched social media posts, news articles, blogs, vlogs, pretty much anything available to them to get the most accurate, authentic perspective they could find. And they really enjoyed it. They were tasked to work in groups, and produce a dramatic, first person perspective narrative of what an immigrant might go through in various scenarios.
My students found themselves learning about government policies regarding immigration, polarizing perspectives, the daily struggles of someone living in a war-torn country or a country with limited economic opportunities. They found themselves feeling compassionate toward individuals that they had never encountered before. They learned things that weren’t readily available in a textbook or a lecture, and that’s awesome.  Oh, and I guess they learned some Spanish along the way too 😉
I found that my students were really into this project. They took pride in what they were doing,  and they wanted to do it well. They were meticulous with the grammar, conjugations, subject verb agreement, adjectives, and the best word choice, because as one student put it: “I want to do these people justice. Their story is important, and I owe it to them to do a good job.” 
(And then my teacher heart exploded into a million happy pieces!) 
I later found out from one of my students who has Lacy for religion class that she was simultaneously teaching about immigration and was showing a film titled: “Which Way Home?’ (I think that’s what the movie was called, my brain turned to mush during Christmas break, correct me if I’m wrong, Lacy). Students in her class were also privileged to see a guest speaker who discussed immigration policy and bills regarding the issue. I was delighted to know that several of my students in my Spanish class also share Lacy’s class and we were discussing the same themes.
This unintentional collaboration happens more often than not with my classes. Somehow whatever I happen to be teaching completely coincides with another discipline, and then BAM! Interdisciplinary teaching. The only problem is, I don’t want to have to find out from my students what’s happening in other classes, but it’s a welcome blessing anyway. I love to see that my students are making the connections on their own without it being forced. I like when learning is organic, and when students can come to their own conclusions on their own. 
Back to what I was saying about so many ideas…I like this project…It has been great so far, but I want to do MORE with it. I’m open to more ideas and suggestions because I want to expand on this topic. I don’t want to just leave it as an essay. Let me know your thoughts! 

Sometimes Things Go Better Than I Had Planned…

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My Spanish 3 Honors students can conjugate 21 tenses in any given form on command. They can analyze and discuss the similarities and differences between Jorge Luis Borges’ short story and Salvador Dali’s surrealist paintings through the theme of duality of being and metafiction. My Spanish 3 Honors students can discuss the benefits and moral disadvantages of stem-cell research and technology in the medical field. They can recite the Beatitudes, discuss genocide in Guatemala, all in Spanish…HOWEVER: 
Many of them do it in an inauthentic accent that makes me weep bitterly at night…(okay that’s not true, but the accents definitely need some work…)
I have struggled for YEARS to find techniques to keep my brilliant students accountable for having an authentic accent. Their accent must match their genius minds. When I correct them in class, and they repeat after me, they are able to sound authentic and within a few minutes, they revert back to overcompensating with an “Americanized” accent (Imagine Dr. Phil speaking Spanish…)
You’re welcome.
While I understand that speaking Spanish with an authentic accent isn’t imperative to understanding the general gist of what a person is saying, and I also recognize and appreciate the fact that not everyone is capable of sounding like they jumped out of a Spanish telenovela, I do find it to be important to at least make an attempt to the best of one’s ability to produce a sound that is as similar as possible to the target language (in this case, Spanish). To make this blog not such a long read, I’ll get to the point…

I wanted to find a fun, out of the box tool that would help my Honors students become cognizant of their accents and to hold them accountable for trying to sound as authentic as possible. I wanted to provide them with a tool that they could use to practice at home. I introduce you to:
It’s a game where people try to pronounce certain words with a plastic barrier in their mouths. (Apparently it’s hilarious, I’ve never played…) Anyway, I came up with this idea because many English vowels require the speaker to close their mouths to pronounce. For example: “oh” or “u” (you). If you just tried saying these vowels, you find that your lips close together. My students are saying words like “dos” and “ocho” like “dose” and “ohchoh”. In Spanish, the mouth stays open. It’s hard to explain in writing, but the plastic tool prevents students from closing their mouths, thus forcing them to pronounce the vowels in a more authentic way. Here are some videos, first in English, then Spanish:

I asked my students what they thought about this new technique to help them with their accents, some said that they liked it and they could feel that the plastic piece was helping them be aware of the positioning of their lips when they spoke. Others said that it didn’t really help. Perhaps they won’t go home and practice with their own tools that I provided to them, but there was an even more valuable lesson that came up with using this ridiculous piece of plastic. It was ridiculous. I have found over the years that in order to be successful at speaking a language, one must take risks. The mental filter that tells you that you sound dumb, or are going to sound ridiculous impedes many language learners from actually attempting to speak. The biggest lesson for my students was to eliminate the filter, to both look and feel ridiculous, and attempt to speak anyway. Did this piece of plastic help them improve their accents dramatically? Perhaps not, but it certainly made them more cognizant of their accent, and it was a physical reminder to let go of the filter and just try to sound the best that they can. This is not what I had planned to happen with this activity. I was more focused on getting my students to sound more authentic, but an even better result came from the class: My students were having fun, they lost their obtrusive filters, and began to let go of the fear of speaking (and singing). 

I’d say that’s a win!