Tag Archives: proficiency

Now that we know where we want to go, how do we get there?  How do you advance student learning?

Well you build your arsenal of activities, curate authentic resources, continually add to your tool box of techniques for providing comprehensible input, and provide opportunities for students to be autonomous learners.  A really good place to start is at Tellcollab.org/Startalk.  There are videos of classroom vignettes, interviews with veteran teachers, essays, self-assessment tools, and my favorites, the infographics!

An interesting activity that I just added to my arsenal, is the day two opening activity of the Tellcollab Unconference called Powerpoint Karaoke.   Prepare slides with various random pictures that can be described in the target language.  Give each student a minute to describe the images and vote on the best one by audience applause! See the video on twitter #TELLcollab.

Teaching grammar in context was one of the session topics.  Here is an example of how I teach grammar in context.  I prefer to use the pace model and storytelling, Teaching-Grammar-in-Context.  How do you teach grammar in context?

To keep students in the target language, provide lots of practice in circumlocution and clarification techniques.  To teach circumlocution, there are a couple of phrases that are very helpful:  It’s a thing that… It’s a person that…. It’s a food that…Play the Pyramid game.  Have one student with back to board, the rest of the team takes turns to get through list of 6 words.

Another tool I intend to incorporate this year is Interactive Student Notebooks.  In the target language, we will set up interactive notebooks with proficiency charts and their first day writing sample.  In the first day lesson, the students do a 5 minute write, if possible they describe themselves in the target language or list all the words they know.  If they don’t know any French or Spanish I have them write about themselves in English which also gives me information about them and their writing abilities.  I write the proficiency level on the paper and it becomes evidence of student growth for me, the student, the parents, and my administrators.  Here are more websites with information on interactive notebooks. Here is a blog in french and this one too.  Here is one in Spanish and this one.  Most importantly, interactive notebooks are not craft projects. It’s about students organizing and reflecting on their learning and becoming more autonomous.

Check out the TELL videos on Youtube and below are links to those infographics I mentioned.

AdvanceLearning_Engagement_Infographic, AdvanceLearning_TargetLanguage_Infographic, AdvanceLearning_EmpoweringLanguageUse_Infographic

What is Tellcollab?

Wednesday, June 22, was my last day of school this year, a full work day for me, and I still had to get the groceries for my mom’s birthday dinner that evening.  Thursday, June 23, I spent the day traveling to Austin, Texas for the Tellcollab conference June 24-25.  I arrived back at my home in Seattle last night at 11pm, and I am up today, Sunday, June 26^th at 6:00am excited to design my new first week of school unit, teaching the students about the path to proficiency.

What inspired me to start planning the next school year before I even had a chance to celebrate the end of this one?  The Tellcollab conference on Teacher Effectiveness in Language Learning has me excited to take my students away from points, and focus on progressing toward proficiency instead.  This is going to be a huge shift after 33 years of playing the points game, but after this conference, shifts gotta happen.

The Tellcollab conference is an unconference where the attendees set the schedule and collaborate around goals.  We started by identifying something we wanted to learn and something we could teach to others.  We wrote them on sticky notes and created sessions on common topics. There were no presenters or powerpoints, but like-minded educators sitting around a table discussing and creating to improve teacher effectiveness in World Language education.  You can check out the information shared at the conference and the hot seat speakers by clicking on the schedule links to the google documents that were created at the conference.

The Teacher Effectiveness for Language Learning (TELL) Framework establishes those characteristics and behaviors that model teachers exhibit. There is much more information and loads of teacher tools at tellproject.org.  You can follow the conversation on twitter at #tellcollab.

The framework is made up of seven domains that reflect the crucial characteristics of an effective world language teacher.

I am creating my first unit for next year teaching the proficiency levels to students and parents. I like the idea I heard from Alyssa Villarreal of having students describe a circus to an alien by proficiency level. So the group with novice-low can only use words, novice-mid can only use words and phrases, novice-high uses single sentences, intermediate-low uses sentences and connectors etc.  See her complete lesson plans here.  There are some other ideas posted here.

Over the next few days I will be sharing my learning on preparing for student learning, advancing student learning, and supporting student learning.  Two other fabulous resources are the Path2proficiency website and the SCS World Language Weebly.

One of the first activities was to record your self on flipgrid with your goals for the unconference. My original goal was to learn about the unconference, how it is structured, the benefits.  I left with so many new goals I didn’t even know I had before Friday.  Goal number one achieved.  Now on to creating student badges!