Bricks and Mortar?

After the third full day of work shopping here with my fellow GOA teachers, I feel like I have learned so much from my new group of colleagues and friends.  One of the great gifts of this time is the time itself.  We have been invited to work on our courses.  We have set up shop in one of the beautiful conference rooms here at Islandwood and we have short little instructional workshops, then work time, then show and tells, with fun and amazing meals sprinkled in between it all.  A typical work session is a few hours long and at any given moment there are some folks chatting about an idea, bouncing layout or structure questions off each other, and others with their headphones on, working away.  And then when folks share what they have been working on, in the show and tell sessions-- wow!  So much thought and effort is going into these classes-- I'm thrilled for all of the students that get to take them this fall.  

 

I've also been wondering today about the feasibility of recreating this experience we are having-- an intensive teacher workshop-- in an online environment.  It could be done; the work would likely happen, but I wonder if I would learn as much.  I'm thinking about the dinner conversations, the walks in the woods, the fun post-dinner chatter and sharing pictures of our lives outside of this work.  I guess that can happen on-line too, but I am so grateful to have met these folks face to face.  

Last Minute Changes

I teach two sections of the same class and for better of for worse, I often make adjustments to my lesson plan for the second class based on what didn't go as I hoped in the first.  Yesterday, the first day back from Thanksgiving,  we were starting a new unit.  The first thing we did was to talk about what the date was and then draw a calendar on the board so that kids could get a good look at the time they have between now and the final exams in January.  This is a great warm up for kids because the have a good handle on days of the week and numbers and thing like "Navidad" can be explained by singing a few seconds of "Feliz Navidad".  I was reminded of the value of spending some time on this time management activity when a student said, earnestly, "We have exams after break?"  Then the sophomores or juniors had a quick chance (in English) to talk about exam period, conference day, all the ins and outs of this time of year.  It is a good opportunity for the upperclassmen to demonstrate leadership in the classroom.

Then we were looking at some new vocabulary about things we like to do for fun.  Coming back from break is a great opportunity to talk about this.  So we talked about "Mi restaurante favorito es. . . " and "Mi película favorita es. . . "  Then with that understanding the could catch on to the drawings of the place vocabulary (restaurante, café, cine, etc. . .).   But in my first group,  they were a little flat at this point; too much going from kid to kid and teacher directed repetition.  By the time we were doing some activities as a class I found myself cold calling a kid who wasn't paying attention just to "catch" him.  (I apologized to him after class-- felt terrible.)

So for the second class I tried to get them out of their seats more, duh.  After doing the calendar warm-up, I had them break into groups and draw the different places on the board.  Then as a class we talked about each one, with some prompts

• ¿Qué haces en un resturante?  Yo como. 
• ¿Qué es tu restaurante favorito? In and Out es mi resturante favorito. etc. . .

When they all had a chance to say something in this structured setting (I think all of them?) we turned it into a game.  We broke the class into 4 groups and then I described a situation (all in Spanish, of course) and they had to send a runner to the "place" that was drawn on the board where the situation was taking place and the first team to slap the "place" got a point.  It was a way better way of engaging with the material and they got practice listening for key words or cognates that would give them a sense of meaning.

Guess I will try this in my first class today.