Target Language Reset Button
YOU are a MASTER teacher. You are a better teacher than I am, better than I ever will be–better than ANYONE–at least once a month.Picture that day.
Or that lesson.
Hey, maybe you even had a streak going at one point. I think my record is two. It was halfway through my 13th year in the classroom.
My students engaged in 100% target language discussion in their project groups for 30 minutes straight. Some groups came up with clever choreography for the song they’ll perform at the language festival in April, and some came up with the plot for a funny skit about quinceañeras. They shared ideas in Spanish, questioned each other in Spanish, disagreed in Spanish, and even teased each other in Spanish. And THEN?? They did it AGAIN the NEXT DAY!
It. Was. Beautiful.
I worked out a system where I could reward them for sticking to the target language that I think was supremely fair: you actually participate in the group discussion AND keep it 90% in the target language? You get a free pass on the daily project progress blog for a day. The best part is, they had to use MORE Spanish to get a chance to use LESS! Win-win.
It didn’t take too long to whip up a some in Canva, copy them, and change the date. Then I e-mail the winners their own little graphic to substitute for the blog post itself! I could see turning this in instead of a document or video on Classroom too.
Troubleshooting
Problem #1 Losing the groove
We have special 3-hour sessions on Fridays where the whole junior class come together, either for a field trip, a service project, or a class project, ie winning the language festival. They got to use L1 to coordinate plans during that time last Friday while I was about 3 states away. It might have made them lazy.
Weekends might do that too.
So switch things up for a while, do something different where they get to take in some input instead of producing output, and then reset.
Problem #2 Boredom
The great Carol Gaab says in her sessions on higher order thinking “Who wants to ask a story every day?” In that vein, who wants to talk the same way about the same thing day in and day out? You can’t just expect them to run themselves once you get them to do this once. They could learn any number of things on their own, but you are the one with the know-how to set them up with a favorable structure to make that learning more likely, nay, practically inevitable! So, again, vary the input and the output so this isn’t ALL they do. (PS, note to self, this means you have to schedule enough time into projects to allow ROOM for this!)
