Minute by Minute Spanish

Spanish Lessons

Why is it so hard to get students’ attention?

By

Even if you stand on your head or spit coins they won’t listen. Why are there so many responses to this new teacher’s question about getting students’ attention?

A new Spanish teacher posted recently, “What are your best classroom attention getters. Particularly for High School. My freshman still have not learned that talking when I am isn’t acceptable. Nothing I have tried has really worked.”

My first response is to take charge and when you start an activity, explicitly tell students that the “fast finishers” will do X and not talk to one another.  Give them the options that they can do and be explicit up front so that it is impersonal.  If you start redirecting them at the end – it makes it personal and open to negotiation.  This is smart classroom management that comes with experience.  But what if that isn’t enough?

There were close to 100 responses to the above query,  featuring hand claps, sayings, call-and-answer responses, whistles, teen buzz, points-off-behavior-grade and the silent treatment.

What is going on here?  Clearly there is a bigger problem here encompassing two issues:

1.You must eliminate that part of you that gives them permission to talk over you.

2. Rather than trying to get them to be quiet, pique their interest with highly engaging transitions that vary from activity to activity.

 

Step One: Get Your Head in the Game

No teacher wants to admit this but it is true. When a class acts this way, the students are actually bullying the teacher.

I have learned a lot from my dogs. There is always an alpha dog. When we try to interfere and not let the alpha dog take charge, the other dogs are not grateful; rather they are confused and act worse until the alpha dog returns and re-establishes the pecking order.

Be the alpha in your classroom!
Like my beloved pets, students need the alpha to take charge, else they will all jockey to be the one talking the most and in charge. They need you to assert your alpha position.

Children need to know who is in charge and will act out if the teacher does not lead.

In my most still, reflective moments, I have to admit that when a student has more power in my classroom than I do, it is because a little part of my psyche agrees with the student that I don’t have to be respected.

I can blame that on my family legacy of beating us as kids, and most times I have vanquished it.

Sometimes it crops up when:

  • I am stressed with a life event.
  • When there is a really bad combination of students who should never be scheduled together, and I am powerless to make changes because Spanish just isn’t perceived to be that important.
  • When for whatever reason I will have unwanted consequences if my admin finds I am struggling.

I have a friend who let students talk over and walk over her because she is a French teacher and needs her enrollment. Turns out, only when she took charge did she retain her enrollment. You need to fearlessly address what part of you gives them permission to have more power in the classroom and deal with it.

You need to talk to yourself and tell yourself: “I am the adult in charge.

I will be obeyed.

I will not let children take away from those who are here to learn.

When students whine, it is not a moral judgment about me, but more about their own teenage angst. I will not feed their whining and let it grow by responding to it.

I deserve respect and if I don’t get it, that child will be removed for the rest of the period. My other students deserve respect.

There is zero tolerance for talking over me; it undermines my authority and I DO NOT DESERVE IT AND WILL NOT TOLERATE IT.”

Believe this and walk into that room with the steel eye and erect posture that demands respect. period.  Oh and every time you ask for their attention you must be 100% prepared with the next task. No looking for the handouts, or realizing that you have to fumble on the computer to find the video, nada.  You must get their attention and move on – otherwise you will loose them.  I use a daily tech guide and a clicker so that from any part of the room we move on to the next activity with seamless transitions.

Here is a video of what my lesson looks like as I teach weather.

 

Step Two: Vary your transitions and take them to the next level with musical videos.

Rather than trying to get them to be quiet, capture their interest with transitional videos that pique their interest and make them tell the others to shush so they can figure out what is next.  At this point, with three months under our belts, my students catch a hint of a video and they start to do the task it requires or else they listen to the airhorn or the vamos a jugar video to see which one applies to the class.  Rather than telling them to be quiet so that they can write down the homework, they hear the song and start pulling out their agendas and looking for the handouts while singing the song.

Here is a previous blog showing how they work.

Beyond Chants in the World Language Classroom: 3 Steps to Move from Advanced to Master Teacher

Thanks for Visiting For the Minute by Minute Spanish!
Thanks for Visiting For the Minute by Minute Spanish!

Regain Control of “THAT” Difficult Class!

By

Emma  asked an eternal question today on a teacher  FB group. She wrote, “I have one class that REALLY is difficult . . . any tips for dealing with “THAT” class, the one that never stops talking, doesn’t follow directions, and moving students doesn’t help because they will talk to everyone? It’s really discouraging.

Emma, you need more than a few tips — you need a five point action plan, and here it is!

But first, the usual suggestions/tips should be followed, and if they work, then you don’t need the action plan. The usual suggestions are:

  1. Call Home – find something genuinely positive to say as well as deliver the difficult message.
  2. Talk to other teachers who have the same students and find out if anyone is successful with them and duplicate what they do.
  3. Talk to you administration about them.
  4. Talk to their coaches.
  5. Use Class Dojo to track class behavior and offer a preferred reward activity for X amount of time of good behavior.

If none of these work, then it is time to start the five point action plan. This will be a lot of work at first, but it will work, and thus be worth the time invested.

 

Step One: Get Your Head in the Game

No teacher wants to admit this but it is true. When a class acts this way, the students are actually bullying the teacher.

I have learned a lot from my dogs. There is always an alpha dog. When we try to interfere and not let the alpha dog take charge, the other dogs are not grateful; rather they are confused and act worse until the alpha dog returns and re-establishes the pecking order.

Be the alpha in your classroom!
Like my beloved pets, students need the alpha to take charge, else they will all jockey to be the one talking the most and in charge. They need you to assert your alpha position.

Children need to know who is in charge and will act out if the teacher does not lead.

In my most still, reflective moments, I have to admit that when a student has more power in my classroom than I do, it is because a little part of my psyche agrees with the student that I don’t have to be respected.

I can blame that on my family legacy of beating us as kids, and most times I have vanquished it.

Sometimes it crops up when:

  • I am stressed with a life event.
  • When there is a really bad combination of students who should never be scheduled together, and I am powerless to make changes because Spanish just isn’t perceived to be that important.

I have a friend who let students talk over and walk over her because she is a French teacher and needs her enrollment. Turns out, only when she took charge did she retain her enrollment. You need to fearlessly address what part of you gives them permission to have more power in the classroom and deal with it.

You need to talk to yourself and tell yourself: I am the adult in charge.

I will be obeyed.

I will not let children take away from those who are here to learn.

When students whine, it is not a moral judgment about me, but more about their own teenage angst. I will not feed their whining and let it grow by responding to it.

I deserve respect and if I don’t get it, that child will be removed for the rest of the period. My other students deserve respect.

There is zero tolerance for talking over me; it undermines my authority and I DO NOT DESERVE IT AND WILL NOT TOLERATE IT.”

You deserve better!
Practice this pep talk in the mirror, in the shower, in the car, everywhere until you exude it!

Scream it to yourself on your way to school. Buy into it. Believe and live it.  (Every teacher has to find his or her own teaching voice. Take my suggestions and change them to reflect your teaching voice, or if you are unhappy with your current teaching voice, borrow mine until you are on firmer ground.)

 

Step Two: Enlist Your Tribe to Help You

Line up a few other teachers willing to help you. Explain to them that you need them to let the offending student sit in the back of their class and work on their packet. My 8th graders hate when they are sent to a 7th grade class as it makes them look bad. Awww.

No fumbling when calling!
Put those extensions right next to the phone.

Have their phone numbers on a post-it by your phone. If they can be the cool teachers or the respected coaches, even better.  You must have worksheet packets lined up for offending students.

Yes, this means 4 or 5 packets each day that relate to the class material so you can’t be accused of giving unrelated busy work.

Step Three: Prepare, Prepare, Prepare

You are about to make a big change and you must have your homework done.

You must plan the next week’s lessons minute by minute so that there are minimal transitions.

You must have an extra ten minutes of activities to make sure there is no down time. I would avoid any competitive games as when this kind of class competes it opens the door for trash talk and over-the-top talking.

I suggest you make a Daily Tech Guide (“DTG”) in either PowerPoint, Google Slides or your interactive board’s software.   You need to vary the activities, embed the videos, embed the songs, insert pictures of the pages in the text, insert worksheet with the answers, everything so that there are no transitions.

This remote will change lives!
This remote will free you to walk around the room and stand strategically behind challenging students. It changes lives!

Invest in a remote presentation device or wireless mouse so you can walk around the room and stand next to the trouble-makers as you click through the lesson. If you are pressed for time, these lessons are available from my store. If you want to learn more about making DTGs, you can get a free template  without musical videos on the first day when you join my challenge  or read my blog on Just Prep During Your Prep

 

If you are still doing paired practices they are not to choose their friends, You choose their partners because you are in control.

Develop signals – my DTGs are sprinkled with “¿listos?” — ready? I say it and they all answer. If some are off task I walk over to them and repeat it and the whole class answers. Then zip into the next activity. Getting their attention is easier than having them be quiet. So train them to do this.

 

Step Four: Give Your Best Heart-to-Heart talk (or steal mine, changing “father” to “grandfather” or ‘great-grandfather” if it fits better.)

Teaching from the heart is good for you!
When everything is in place to make the change, use your most sincerest tone for your heart-to-heart talk with students. It is more effective than any lecture.

Tell your students, “You need to hear my story.”

In 1921, on my father’s 6th birthday he chased a ball into the street and was run over by a truck. No one stopped to helped him because cars were still so new that only the rich had them and they didn’t want to dirty their cars up. The town drunk found him and brought him to the hospital. They stitched his face up for his wake, in order to lessen his mother’s sorrow, never believing he would awaken from his coma.

His father kept vigil for seven days and did not shed one tear. My father never saw his father cry until he was 15.  He found his father weeping that he had been a horrible father. My father asked him why and my grandfather told him “A guy at work was walking with his son past a construction site and realized some bricks were falling right in front of his son and he yelled ‘halt’ and his son halted immediately and the bricks just grazed his toes. If I had yelled halt, you would have argued with me and be dead. I didn’t raise you well enough to keep you safe.”

I have been reading the book on Columbine High school and have been impressed that many students were lead to safety because they listened to a teacher or principal.

I am upset with myself because you don’t listen to me and if anything were to happen, I couldn’t protect you.

I was talking to my brother who hires students to work in his business, and he said if a high school student isn’t trained to show interest, he won’t hire him – and he pays the highest wages.

So by giving you permission to talk over me, I am also neglecting to help you learn how to behave around authority figures and it might cause you to not get a good job or to have the police misunderstand your attitude.

I learned that teachers who train their students with SLANT find that their students do not have this problem. So going forward, to keep you safe, you must not talk when I am talking and you must stop talking when I tell you to do so. Also when I say “slant”, you need to

  • Sit up
  • Lean forward
  • Ask questions about the topic
  • Nod your head
  • Track the teacher with your eyes (move around the room when practicing this)

If you practice this, you will get a better job, and be surprised that adults believe you are really paying attention, even if you aren’t. We are going to practice this and you should try this elsewhere and let us know the results.”

Then, start practicing it with the students and start your lesson with the most engaging activity. Remind them to slant when you sense they are fading.

Practice the signal to be quiet. If someone doesn’t comply and is blatantly disrespectful, go to step five.  

Step Five: Show You Mean It.

When someone disobeys, you call the teacher on the list but don’t say the teacher’s name. “Hi this is Ellen Shrager, I am sending X to you. Thanks.” Go out into the hall and signal the student to join you. (Out in the hall is better and the class will quiet down to hear what you are saying.)

Packets are a go!
Your packets are ready and handy for you to give to student who needs to leave the room.

Give the packet to the student and neutrally send him to the other teacher for him to complete the work. “Today isn’t working for you, so you need to finish the class work with Coach Nopardons. I hope tomorrow is better for you.”

No threats, no discussion, the kid is gone for today. Continue with class. Do not let them talk over you. Repeat with a different teacher if necessary.    After a week they will know you mean business.

You do not deserve that kind of treatment. Emma, your genuine angst motivated me to write my first blog.

Let us know what you decide to do and if it works for you.

Thanks for Visiting For the Minute by Minute Spanish!
Thanks for Visiting For the Minute by Minute Spanish!

Speedy Speaking Assessments

By

Speedy Speaking Assessments Magic

It’s that time of the year to assess 29 students’ speaking skills in two forty-five minute periods. My students need to produce eight sentences, comparing their actual schedule with a schedule from another country.

One common way to speed things up is to have groups of two come up and ask and answer questions. The only problem with this is that I use my speaking assessments as a minute to individually touch base with my students beyond the context of what they have to present, and to convey something personal and positive to them.

Therefore, I must speed up managing the transitions between students and here is how I do it:

1. When students come into the room, they see their names on the board, garnering curiosity. (I am able to export their first names from our grading program to Excel, and from there copy and paste on to my flipchart that I use every day. I can drag their names around using a pen at the board, or my cursor at my desk.)

Since my students are a blended class that will soon be sorted into Honors and College Prep for next year’s scheduling, I tell them that if they want to be considered for honors they need to present first and not hang back. I tell them to raise their hands and start lining up the names in order of presenting. Once they stop volunteering, I just line up the rest of their names.

2. The first person sits in the chair facing me, with their back to the class. The second and third students are hovering nearby to my left, filling out the rubric sheet with their names and numbers so that when they sit, I can start grading. (This saves me many minutes compared to when I would hand out the papers, the students would come up to my desk without their papers, go back to their desks, and waste a half minute . . . almost every student!) The two on deck are helping one another with last minute preparation.

3. When the first student is done, I glace at the board and call up the fourth person to join the third person as the second person slides into the chair. I found that with their names on the board, students were moving to the “on deck” slot on their own.

That’s it – try it and let me know how it works for you! If you want a few more ideas, continue reading . . .

I make notes on the rubric page and grade as I go, sharing the final grade and feedback with the students so that they know their grades immediately. I also freeze the slide with their names and open up the grading program on my computer so I can be putting in the grades as each student is done.

When students are painfully slow because they really aren’t prepared, I tell them their grade so far, “hmm with this you are at a 74” and usually they stop and say “great, that’s what I wanted!” This amazes me that so many just need a passing grade, but it save me the agony of the dead time while they search for the next two elusive words.

I give the students something to read and illustrate for points. If they do it in class, they won’t have homework.  This rewards students who complete the assessment early and keeps them busy enough to not create behavior problems. Many students just use the time to keep honing their presentation.

My students need to mention two of their favorite classes and why they like them. This is the perfect segue where I fake emotional distress if they don’t mention our class. I ask them what they like about the class so far.  I ask how long it took to prepare or how they prepared. I usually end with telling them how much I enjoy them in class and why, giving them the mental paradigm that they are enjoying class sets them up for the long winter months until Spring break.

Thanks for Visiting For the Minute by Minute Spanish!
Thanks for Visiting For the Minute by Minute Spanish!

Compelling Transitions are Key to Creating Classroom Routines, Managing Student Behavior, and Staying in the Target Language!

By

Spanish song and video "Feliz Lunes" is the perfect 90 second transition for students as they come to class on Mondays. Musical Videos make transitions seamless, improve student behavior, classroom management and maintain 90% target language usage.
Spanish song and video “Feliz Lunes” is the perfect 90 second transition for students as they come to class on Mondays. Musical Videos make transitions seamless, improve student behavior, classroom management and maintain 90% target language usage.

 

 

 

 

What if you only have 25 minutes a day to prepare for a class lesson and want to improve class routines, student behavior, classroom management, and stay in the target language?

1. Make a slide for each activity in the day’s lesson.

2. Insert one of my brief 50+ transition videos before the slide and train your students to watch the video in Spanish. Soon they are imitating the voice over or else singing the song. Do this every  day and when you are observed by your administrators they will note your seamless transitions.

3. Buy a remote presentation device or wireless mouse and click to the next slide from any part of the room so you can stand close to students who struggle to behave.

Let’s start with Mondays. Students are coming into your room and an engaging, 90 second video called “Feliz Lunes” nudges them to start thinking in and using Spanish. As the bell rings, click to your slide with your pre-class and start your greetings and attendance taking. Don’t be surprised if the students are still singing it under their breath.

How to purchase “Feliz Lunes”

Thanks for Visiting For the Minute by Minute Spanish!
Thanks for Visiting For the Minute by Minute Spanish!

Six Step Plan for Talking to that Bully in your Class Tomorrow.

By

Capture

A student being bullied in class in August just came up on a discussion on a Teacher FB page. My name was mentioned because one of my classes had helped a student who struggled with social nuances. He was bullied in the halls before we had cameras, and we were able to change his life for the better with direct intervention.

This time it sounds different. The teacher is seeking advice because she needs to have a conversation with the bully tomorrow. It had become physical and she reported it to her administration who told her to handle it.

Many teachers reacting to this scenario, myself included, are surprised that the admin isn’t taking over once it is physical but our surprise isn’t going to help the teacher with tomorrow’s dialogue with the bully.

There have been many great suggestions on what to do. Their diversity make my heart full as each teacher has his or her own teaching voice and the teacher with this issue must find the answer that best matches her voice:

Here they are:bully corrected

Here’s my six-step dialogue that has been effective with 7th, 8th, and 9th graders.

  1. Find a time to have a private chat with the student. Sometimes it means having someone cover my homeroom and seeking out the student and chatting in the hall.
  2. I ask the student if he or she has a little brother or sister or cousin or neighbor or some younger person they care about. Make that connection because I am hoping he will have empathy for that person.Captureffffffffffffffffff
  3. Tell the student that I hope I have him or her in class before I retire. I ask what kind of student does he think the little one will be.
  4. I pose #1 “What if question?” What if someone did a. b. c. to that little one? Would you want me to keep him or her safe? In theory of course the student agrees. (a. b .c. is what this kid did to the victim.)
  5. I pose #2 “What if question?” What if someone  did a. b. c. to you? Would you expect me to keep you safe? Would you expect me to be nasty if needed to make it stop and keep you safe? (Give one of my I-have -been-doing-this for-30-years-and-no-kid-messes-with-me look.) Capture444444Would you expect me to talk to our police officer, parents, coaches, assistant principals, grandmas and everyone to make it stop and keep you safe? (Still a very I-don’t-take-this-from-anyone-without-making you-pay-tenfold looks.)   Capture3333333Pause, (grandmotherly tenderness and love now radiating from my body – the kid will be creeped out by how I can change in two seconds) I will do everything to keep you safe, (and pause as the other shoe drops), and I need your help to give the same protection to everyone including X in my room. I would not let anyone hurt you because you are to valuable to me. And I will not let anyone hurt X or anyone else.
  6. Direct eye-to-eye contact.  Radiant smiles and gumdrops-dropping-from-mouth sweetness. “Do we understand each other? Can I count on you to help me? That is great – I had a special feeling that you and I would understand each other.” (Little bit creepy-like smile from me as one shark recognizes another)sharks

I have used this over the years because bullies are hurting. By offering to protect them and their loved ones, I reach that place that wasn’t protected and probably turned them into a bully in the first place. Bullies aren’t long in the tooth with empathy. But appealing to protecting someone they care about, helps to pave the path of empathy. They understand strength, which this dialogue demonstrates, without putting anyone on the defense. So far, I haven’t yet had someone not respond to this except for one time when the student was put in a self-contained room for extreme issues.

Practice this. Make it your voice. This is mine. It works for me and good luck to all of you who deal with it this year. You are all about to become some victim’s super hero. Make it right. Thank you for what you do for our students.

 

Thanks for Visiting For the Minute by Minute Spanish!
Thanks for Visiting For the Minute by Minute Spanish!