I’ve been on a bit of a CI roller coaster since iFLT last summer. I kicked off the year with some kickin’ PQA that kids really seemed to get into, a little of the ol’ “persona especial“–which they got into less–but which still had some positive effects. Then I was Read more…
I want to help people get started with their first PBL project, but I don’t have any one set strategy that I, personally use to get started. Even if I did, the chances of everyone else’s brains working like mine are (thankfully) slim. When I’ve conducted “building block” type workshops Read more…
I will never be the SCOLT Teacher of the Year, but I have to admit, I found success at SCOLT. No, not in a Moonlight kind of way, but more in a Ralph Waldo Emerson way. After all, I have always loved his definition of success. To laugh often and much Any Read more…
This year has been a year of growth, without a doubt. After the single most successful semester of my teaching career, I decided to start from scratch on almost everything. I blame iFLT. Since I’m also on an early college schedule, I only got a week or two to process Read more…
After iFLT this summer, I was ready to sprint back to the drawing board. I needed a good solid month to just sketch, doodle, redraw EVERYTYHING. I got a week. And two completely new preps complete with two completely new LMS platforms. So this year has been a bit of Read more…
I’m trying a choose-your-own-adventure format for my talks on authentic texts at the Texas Spanish Language Symposium today! On paper, I’m giving the same presentation three times today, but depending on which direction everybody’s facing, we could go three totally different directions. I had originally planned to get my audience Read more…
I came to ACTFL 2016 with a conference path set for Everything Interpersonal, having had various students freeze up, blank out, and even two start crying during the interpersonal part of the most recent IPA–in spite of low-stress strategies that worked the last two IPAs–just hours before I boarded the plane to Boston. Perhaps Read more…
I could hear Dave Burgess scolding me every second I wasted that first week. I should have had the map handouts printed and copied, waiting on tables with the necessary number of markers for the activity with nice, neat SMARTboard pages with complete maps (sorry, Uruguay–you weren’t in the clipart) Read more…
What a treat to get to join some of my favorite language educators in Texas! I was called in to talk PBL with TFLA teachers last weekend in both workshop and session format. In the workshop, we worked on actually getting started on that first PBL unit using resources I collected Read more…
I was just innocently searching for videos to give my students a feel for Sainte Chapelle, one of the heroes’ destinations in Agentes Secretos, when I happened upon one of their favorite games! (The students’–not the protagonists’…) Pokemon or no, my babies this year are big into video games, and Read more…