Become a more confident language teacher.
I’m closing out 2018 with FIVE blog posts, each one featuring a collection of FIVE fast and furious reflections on 2018 or glances toward the future. I invite you to join me by sharing your #MyFives each day in your own way: blog them, tweet them, Facebook them, comment them, Insta them…however you share, share!…
Read More
ACTFL was, as it always is, inspiring and overwhelming. I didn’t make it to all the sessions that I had hoped to, and even still I left with a renewed passion for the important work that we do as language educators and more ideas than I could ever hope to implement. In this post, I…
Read More
My journey to ACTFL began today with a road trip to drop off my kids with their grandparents—how about you?? Are you already in NOLA or flying in tomorrow? For me, ACTFL is just as much about personal connections as it is about professional learning. It is an opportunity for me to meet mentors that…
Read More
You have done your research and planned your year with lessons and activities that are guaranteed to help your students make forward progress on the path to proficiency. Your planned lessons are input-rich and you know how to keep it comprehensible. You can’t fail! …except, you are failing. You’re a few days in…a few weeks in maybe…and…
Read More
As language teachers, our goal for our students is to be more proficient in the target language when they complete our course than when they began. We probably have other goals for our students (being more kind, more empathetic, more responsible, more culturally aware), but all of these objectives fit into the overarching mission of…
Read More
If we want language to come OUT of our students’ mouths, we must get language IN to their heads. They need INput so that they can produce OUTput. » Input is reading and listening » Output is speaking and writing This is common sense. A learner cannot utter an expression in a new language if…
Read More
If you are at a conference this summer and you have Twitter and you want to use it, send out as many SWEET TWEETS as you can! Sweet tweets: Not sweet as in the opposite of sassy; sweet as in…awesome. So…what makes a conference tweet sweet? CONFERENCE HASHTAG Use the conference hashtag (#xxxx)! Make…
Read More
Want to make the most of MovieTalk this coming year? Join Rachel Lucas & me this week on Thursday to learn about Movie Talk Strategies for World Language Classrooms! » What is MovieTalk? » How can you maximize the impact of MovieTalk? » What can you do before and after a MovieTalk? Date: 6/28/18 Time:…
Read More
“I love CI. But I have 7 large classes a day. My voice begins to give out by my 4th period. What can I do?” Señora Spicer emailed in this question to the We Teach Languages podcast after listening to me chat with Stacey about how to write comprehensible texts on Episode 56 (click here to…
Read More
I am thrilled to be participating in this year’s Express Fluency Language Teacher training in South Burlington, Vermont this summer, and I hope you will join me! Like iFLT, NTPRS, and Comprehensible Cascadia, Express Fluency offers this annual summer training for language teachers that are looking to learn how to help their students understand the language that…
Read More
