Summer is so precious.

Last year was so insane.  Take one hour to learn 7 Sanity Savers for this upcoming year and enjoy the freebies!  I updated to 7 but the video was made last year when I had 5 steps.  No, I am not spending time making another video, I am going to do more self-care.  We can all live with imperfections!

5 STEP CHALLENGE

1. Use a daily tech guide (slideshow) – my version will be sent in the 5 step challenge below.  

             Each day copy and paste your structure and change out the activities – at the end of the year you will have 180 slide shows and be set up for next year.  Insert Spanish transition videos and your students will stay on task and in the target language. Want more info?  click here

2. Redefine teaching bell – to – bell for Spanish 1 and Spanish 2.

             Each period is a complete entity – you and the students walk out with whatever needs to be scored being scored – except for writing assessments. You need to structure  your class so that there is time for grading for completion and in-class work and quickly recording the grades.

            In the daily tech guide is a musical slide for taking attendance.  Insert attendance into the school’s program in the moment. We use Skyward and I take attendance on my phone with the students helping me with “X no está” as they learn it from the transition videos.

          Whatever work the students are doing, show the answers on the board, and circulate for corrections.  They take a picture of it with their chrome books and submit it on the first slide of the day’s work. (On the other slides are there listening and reading activities.)  I teach from one monitor and use the second monitor to pull up their work and check for completion during little moments – while the are listening to an audio, listening to the text’s grammar videos, working with their partners, etc.  If their work has multiple slides, I can glance at them all at once rather than rolling through each slide. Some teachers have the last 5 minutes of class be practicing on Quizizz while they record and verify with students who didn’t hand in work.  They can be receiving comprehensible input from vocabulary and listening activities without  you physically doing it, and that is ok.

                For Google Classroom, I score them and can record them in Skyward.  Then I go back and remove the due date.  This way parents do not receive messages about incomplete work.  In Google, they only receive messages about work with a due date.  Granted, in Skyward it is recorded and determines their final grade, but parents seem to focus on items that crop up in their reminder list.  This had virtually eliminated students goofing off in class, not doing the work, and then their parents demanding that they re-do for a better grade.  Your goal is to start looking at moments when you could be checking and recording grades, while students are practicing and listening and watching.

3. In all of your info home refer to your prep time as “office hours” as in I will return phone calls and emails during my office hours 10:10 – 10:55.  

4. Prepare for things to go wrong with preparing now your emergency activities that can be done without internet or electricity..  

            In the 5 day challenge you will receive a cultural ‘find the difference’ sheet that can be pulled out and enjoyed at a moment’s notice. The collection is here.

 5. Schedule a monthly  independent day for you to take a mental health day – in or out of school (even with a non-Spanish speaking substitute.) 

             Try one from this collection.

6. If your school has weather-related or covid-related asynch days from home, prepare those lessons now.

             Here is my collection. 

7. Which holidays must you prepare a lesson to acknowledge?  Make those lessons now.  Here is mine on Dr. MLKing, Jr.

The talented Devon Gunning invited me to write my first guest blog (below) for her Target Language Expert Interview Series.   

She interviewed me and a video of that interview is at the end of this blog.

Have you ever had a class that made you feel like a first-year teacher all over again?

The behavior is so challenging that even your disciplinarian agrees that the roster is a combination of characters that should never be scheduled together.

Your colleagues offer you chocolate and coffee gift cards as tokens of sympathy and to make sure you don’t send any students to their classes.

The last time I had such a stomach-clenching low-ability Spanish One class, my newly hired, inexperienced supervisor * interpreted  “the 90% Target Language for all levels goal” to mean that during observations, teachers earned ‘needs improvement’ scores for every student’s English utterance!

I earned five times more ‘needs improvements’ in one observation than I had cumulatively in the past twenty-five years in the classroom.

*This supervisor is no longer in the educational field.  My current supervisor is a dream – hold on if you are in a similar situation – I would never have predicted how quickly things could change for the better, but they can and do!

HOW TO ACCELERATE TARGET LANGUAGE USE IN YOUR CLASSROOM

Until then, I believed the Comprehensible Input theorists when they said to not force output.  However, I needed to accelerate target language output to avoid being put on an improvement plan.   These students were talkers! During the post-observation I asked the supervisor how to stop this challenging class from blurting out in English, and was told that was my problem to solve.

At that point, I had a daily PowerPoint presentation with my daily routines, a slide for each transition, and a few slides for each activity.  I called it my “daily tech guide” or “DTG” for short. I did a different song of the week and a daily headline from BBC Mundo. I used my remote presentation device so that I could move around the room and stand behind the students who created the most problems.

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT TIP: WORK WITH YOUR CLASS PERSONALITY

I knew enough to not try to get these students to be quiet but to be engaged.  Rather than telling them “silencio” I would always have the next activity on hand and say “listos” and they would answer ‘listos’ and quickly move to the next activity.

Once I started to analyze when they would act out and blurt out, I realized that transitions were an invitation to go off task.

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT TIP: THE POWER OF TRANSITIONS

I also realized that while I taught the usual classroom phrases of commands and requests, I wasn’t teaching them the phrases they need to talk to one another, nor was I teaching them the important self-talk phrases.   So I created The 50 Classroom Survival Expressions

TARGET LANGUAGE USE TIP: PUT IT TO MUSIC!

I also observed that anything set to music seemed to drop out of their mouths with very little effort, faster than the CI experts would have you believe. The 50 Classroom Survival Expressions were put to music.

Around this time, my friends in Venezuela were suffering financially.  I started to send songs for transitions and class routines to the unemployed music teacher to record, transition videos to the videographer, and multi-cultural clipart requests to the graphic designer.  I started to sell their creations on TpT and send them all net proceeds.

GETTING STUDENTS TO USE MORE TARGET LANGUAGE WITH VIDEO

As I started to add musical class routines and transition videos to my DTG, I added more slides with options for students’ responses.  The videos are so engaging that after hearing the “Saquen la tarea” video just once, students are able to tell me “la tengo” or “no la tengo” – after two weeks it just flows out of their mouth more easily than the English.

As my students were drenched in Spanish from minute to minute of class time, they grew to handle spontaneous speech activities after a month of instruction.  My DTG also grew and sometimes has as many as 100 slides.

I have a template for my daily lessons and label them from  “day 1 – greetings” to “day 180 – closure activities” and everything in between.

At the end of each day, I take a few minutes and discard what I didn’t use and change anything that didn’t work.  I save it as ‘rd’ for real deal – the version that will be my starting point next year.

This week was my second week of classes.  I pulled up my DTG from last year and with fifteen minutes of tweaking the date, adding school messages about Picture Day and new bus routes, and checking handouts, I was ready to teach a class worthy of a walk through or even an observation.

While many teachers are seeking unscripted, no-prep classes to better interact with their students, I have found that by having my scripted class, I am able to be more emotionally available to students.

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT TIP: WHY REINVENT THE WHEEL?

I don’t have to remember whether I taught something to period three but not period seven.  It is all in the daily tech guide, freeing me up to be more present for my students. I teach in a large building with three other level one teachers and I know that I have taught all that was required so that next year my students are prepared for new teachers.  Since using the DTG, no one has ever come back to complain I didn’t teach something.

All of us teachers need to craft our own ‘teaching voices.’  They may be pure TPRS, ci, owl, traditional or our own eclectic blend.  But, if you are struggling with classroom management, make a slideshow with an outline of your class and start inserting musical transition videos to help keep your students on task.  Watch my template video for inspiration.

By creating a classroom management tool for a very difficult class, I inadvertently created a system for keeping any level one class in the target language.   While I still use English to discuss matters of the heart and to clarify something new, the students are accustomed to most of the class being conducted in the target language.

Click here for a preview of frequently used videos.

Click here for a collection of videos explaining the day’s daily tech guide.

Click here for the daily tech guide template – it will help you to start to create your own daily tech guide.”