Become a more confident language teacher.
My Cooperative Learning class had an awesome all-day session with Laura Terrill yesterday. It was a bit overwhelming in that she touched on so many different topics–assessment, cooperative learning, course structure, social emotional learning…it was a lot to take in. I was pleasantly surprised because she is not “officially” a CI/TPRS teacher, but almost everything that…
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Team Windows is another Kagan structure that works most wonderfully for small-group discussion about literature. In small groups, one member will make a statement, and the remainder express agreement or disagreement with that statement. One group member writes down the statement as well the number of group members that agree with it. How to run…
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I just got back from another Cooperative/Social Emotional Learning class session with tons of ideas from the brilliant minds of my colleagues. The course followed an intensive, full-day workshop with a trainer from Kagan Cooperative Learning, and it is run by the district Director of World Languages, and course credit is offered through University of…
Read MoreWe had our first Cooperative Learning class meeting last night, and thanks to some high-quality ‘Think-Pair-Sharing’ with the lovely, hilarious, and supremely talented Ms. Diana Painter, I left with some great ideas about how to use Cooperative Learning structures with TPRS. This was one of her ideas for using the Kagan structure ‘Hands-Up, Stand-Up, Pair-Up’…
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This is a fantastic idea developed by Michele Whaley and Laurie Clarcq (here is the link to Michele’s original post about the activity). It is a different way of illustrating a story, and I like it because it sets up students really well for speaking and writing assessments. It is also a great way to…
Read MoreI finally remembered to do the awesome activity that Betsy shared at our last monthly TPRS gathering, and it was incredibly successful! Here are the steps that we completed leading up to the re-tell: We created a class story (one class did ¡Siéntate! and another did ¡Saca el boleto!) I typed an abbreviated (bare bones)…
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Betsy Paskvan shared this fantastic activity with our Anchorage PLC last Friday night. (For any of you that haven’t heard of Betsy, she the an amazing Japanese teacher in our district that co-taught a Contrastive Grammar session at NTPRS with Susie Gross this past summer.) I love this activity because it is simple and effective!…
Read MoreI’m sure that everyone has played this game as the ‘name game’ at some training that they’ve attended in the past. Everyone stands in a circle, and one person introduces him or herself. The next person introduces him or herself, then has to recite (from memory) the names of each of the people that have…
Read MoreI made this form to organize my notes and give feedback for speaking assessments. I like to use this instead of rubrics for assessments in which students are speaking 1:1 with me because I think that it gives them very detailed feedback that is specific to them. It helps me, as the adjudicator, to organize my…
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Many very intelligent people have said that it is important to administer a variety of assessment types for each skill set. This will give you a deeper, more meaningful understanding of your students’ proficiency in that skill area. For some speaking assessment ideas, please see this post! Regardless of which speaking assessment you choose to…
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