Profa Baros's Classroom

I haven't posted in a while, but I've been hard at work! Remember that 20 Time website I posted (20 Time in Education)? Well, I've been asked to become their featured "emerging teacher" as I integrate 20 Time into my classroom this summer and fall! I'll be added to their "contact us" page and periodically write posts (which will also be posted here) describing our 20 Time experience. I'm very honored to have this privilege and simply cannot wait to get started!

My first post (which will be on May 31st) will provide some essential information before we get started: A brief introduction (who am I and what am I teaching?), my goals, and how this is all going to look. I've gotten a good start on this post and am going to continue working on it until the 31st when it'll be posted here as well as on the 20 Time website. Stay tuned!

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Getting Organized

I have so many ideas and things I want to do or need to prepare running through my brain! I'm going to take a moment to get organized:

Most urgently, I need to focus on my Latino Culture class. I need to figure out the details of our schedule, what resources we'll need, assessment, and coordinate with guests. I also need to solidify my ideas about Genius Hour now that it's approved!

On a related note, I was invited to post about my experiences implementing genius hour on 20TimeinEducation.com, so I definitely want to be organized and make sure I keep everyone updated on our progress!

For my class this fall, I need to:

adjust my curriculum to reflect our Genius Hour time and 20 Time projects.
double check that my structures are reflected by the embedded readings that Blaine just sent me for the LICT stories. If they don't, I'll probably either need to edit the stories or my structures.
write PQA questions for my structures.
write skeleton stories using my structures.
set up my "flipped classroom" pages that students can use to prepare for class and study from.
write basic lesson plans.
create resources including:

Culture resources (going to be created with the help of my summer class)
Inklewriter stories
Fine-tuning embedded readings, including how I'm going to use them and making sure the ones students prepare with are easy enough in both content and supportive materials (i.e. glossary)
Videos (I really want to use the animation program I bought last fall to go with storytelling!)
QR codes for students to listen to as they read along
embedded readings for novels?? (maybe someday...)

Whew! I'm so glad I'll have plenty of free time this summer to get my class ready. This is going to be one awesome year :)

A classroom like none other

Sometimes I have to smile to myself wondering about my students' reaction this fall when the walk into my classroom. It's going to be like nothing they've ever experienced before. And, I'm glad it's my own and I have a lot of freedom with a supportive administration because I'm sure it'd give many teachers a heart attack. Who in their right mind would have a Flipped TPRS classroom with Genius Hour?

Though it's a language class, we will not focus on grammar.
We will be telling and acting out stories in a chaotic manner.
My class decorations include many toys and costumes you'd expect in a child's bedroom.
Students will learn the most important material at home, and then come to school to talk and interact.
Then, once a week, they get free reign to learn about whatever they want to.

Maybe I've gone off the deep end. But doesn't it take just a little bit of crazy for progress and innovation to occur?

Monday, May 13, 2013

20 Time in Latino Culture Epiphany

Though most of my posts and thoughts have to do with my Spanish 1 classes that I'll be teaching full time during the 2013-14 school year, I still have to plan for my Latino Culture elective class I'm teaching this summer! I already had a basic syllabus and outline that I was planning on fine-tuning once school gets out, but now that I've learned about 20 Time, I've been wrestling with whether I could work it into my summer class. I believe it should be a part of this program in some way given he particular nature and goals of the Upward Bound program, but I can only control my class and have such limited time...

And then, I had an epiphany. Another hurdle I was pondering in my head was how to get students jump-started in exploring the culture of the Spanish-speaking world and how they might connect their passions to culture in some way. I thought that some sort of website with interesting links would be great, but how could I possibly manage to think of enough of a variety of resources that might spark an interest in my students? Then I realized - I have the opportunity to let my students this summer put together a resource for me. What could be better than a resource for students by students? And I'd be killing two birds with one stone!

20 Time and Genius Hour

As I'm letting 20 Time "swirl around" my brain, there are a few distinctions and insights I'm having. There is a wonderful website - 20 Time in Education - which I was introduced to this morning. It is getting finishing touches done and will be "officially" launched in the next few weeks. I'm reading through and am excited to use as a resource. I'm just jotting these thoughts down as they occur and how I understand them, so adjustments and corrections will be made as necessary.

20% Time

Just read about this and want to bookmark it to ponder later!

http://edudemic.com/2013/05/10-reasons-to-try-20-time-in-the-classroom/

UPDATE: OK, I'm reading mroe about this, and I'm getting that giddy "I'm SO excited!" feeling for doing this with my students. I'm sold. But, I need to ponder this more before I can clearly articulate the ideas my brain is forming. Here are a few more websites of inspiration!

http://educationismylife.com/designing-20-time-in-education/

http://www.iteachithink.com/2012/07/give-your-students-20-time-to-do.html

http://stumpteacher.blogspot.com/2011/03/innovation-day-2011.html

http://www.geniushour.com/2013/03/29/approching-your-administration-about-genius-hour/

http://geniushour.wikispaces.com/Testimonials

http://www.geniushour.com/2013/03/29/approching-your-administration-about-genius-hour/

UPDATE: I'm ready to write down the ideas running around my mind!

Embedded Reading

In my efforts to flip my classroom, I've been trying to think of an effective way to prepare my students for the reading days. I wanted to find something that they could read (since that's what they're preparing to do), but that would be easy enough that they could be successful on their own. I was having some trouble until....

I discovered embedded reading! This is something that I've been hearing about every now and then without actually understanding what it was. Initially, I thought it was something like supplemental reading - different texts that would support the themes and concepts in a main text, much like was done in both my US and Latin American history and literature classes. I decided to finally take a look and see what all the fuss was about. I found this wonderful blog, Embedded Reading, that set me straight (it's now added to my blog list on the side panel of this page).

The blog is very thorough about them and I highly recommend heading on over to it, but I'll write a brief explanation here. Rather than different texts focusing on a particular theme, embedded readings are essentially the same text, but with various levels created for it that are embedded in one another. The first level is easy enough for anyone in the class to read and understand without effort. Then, each of the following levels has more detail and elaboration, making the text more complex and difficult, until students are reading a text that would generally be difficult, but not impossible for them. However, because students already have background knowledge about the text that was easily understood at previous levels, students are better able to understand the more complex levels o the text. It's scaffolding!

This is the answer to my reading preparation days :) I want to use these in two ways:

Extended Reading - This will be pretty straightforward as I take the Look, I Can Talk! extended stories and create easier levels for them. I imagine I'll probably make 3 levels for each story using the "top down" approach (starting with the hardest text and simplifying it): The hardest will be what is actually written in the Look, I can talk! textbook, while the easiest will be what I have students read at home as part of my "flipped" classroom. I can see various activities we could do in class to read both the "middle" and "highest" levels. Since I'll be scaffolding them appropriately, I can easily see us being able to read the stories as a whole class, in groups, and even individually with me there to support them. One thing I do enjoy doing - especially for independent and group reading - is to have students ask me what unknown words mean and I can write them on the board with their definitions in order to support the entire class at once.

Storytelling/writing - I like this idea to support both reading and writing. After we tell a story, the students' homework and preparation for the next day is to rewrite the story told in class. From the stories submitted, I can choose three to edit and type for students to read the next day - one that's basic, another that's a little more difficult, and one that's advanced. (Another idea I have to support students' writing, especially at first, is to provide a "skeleton story" where students can just fill in the blank to re-write their story, which would be at the basic level). Then, students can read and re-read the stories they and their peers wrote!

Thursday, May 9, 2013

TPRS Post - Judy Debois

Great post on the MoreTPRS goup from Judy Debois that I didn't want to forget!

Interesting questions, Deb. Here are some of my thoughts, for whatever they're
worth.

IMHO vocabulary lists will help some students, those who as you say have visual
memories and those who are interested in languages, as Dr. Krashen says. I
don't see how they can hurt the others, who will ignore them anyway, right?
Unless you tell them to memorize them, in which case they will waste a lot of
time and effort that will not be very productive. Memorization is by definition
short term. I prefer to give my students a story, maybe a new story, that uses
the vocabulary in question. If they read it through they'll get revision in
context, which will give them new associations to help them remember the
structures. Once they have enough associations, the word/structure will be in
their long term memory. You might ask students who are artistic to illustrate
the new story, which will give even more associations, visual ones, with the
structures. So basically, you have to decide whether your limited time is better
spent making up three categories of vocabulary lists or making up a new story
for the most important vocabulary. (And you can cheat by giving them a story by
a student/students in another class using the same vocabulary.)

Illustrated student stories, written and illustrated by students, are a good way
to build up a library for FVR. It's a struggle for us to make the language
simple enough, but they do it automatically with the limited language they have.
In a small school like yours I'm sure they'll recognize the author's name and
will find it "compelling".

I think you're doing it exactly right when you "echo" what a student has said.
This is what "caretaker speech" does all the time. Baby says "peas" and you
echo back "please". Student says "la verte voiture" and you smile and nod and
say "Oui! La voiture verte!" The student may catch what you changed and take
note or they may not catch it, in which case it means that they're not ready for
that yet. But they won't feel humiliated because you pointed out that they had
made a mistake, which will make them think twice before speaking up again.

As for "correcting" written work, I prefer to "edit" it. I've explained this on
my blog, but my examples are from small groups of students. With a class I
would choose three papers, one very basic, one more complex and the best paper
of the lot. Then I would "edit" them so that there are no mistakes. I type the
three papers up, and bingo! You have an embedded reading. (I understand that
this is how Laurie Clarq first started doing embedded reading.) When you return
their papers where you have underlined in green everything that is correct, you
also give your students the three edited versions, telling them that they were
written by students in the class but not giving the names. You will see them
reading them closely. Each time I'm amazed at how attentively students read
texts written by their classmates and how willing they are to read the same
story three or four times. I call that compelling comprehensible input. I
answer any questions about structures and vocabulary, smiling like the cat that
ate the cream because I know that they're going to retain my answers to their
questions. If there were frequent mistakes that you corrected and no one asks
why, it means they're just not seeing them yet. You may want to target those
structures in your next lesson.

Basically, one thing that I have learned from horse riding is that it's much
more effective to teach a horse how to do something right than to spend time
teaching it not to do something wrong. Pointing out mistakes is teaching
students not to do something wrong. Giving them correct models is teaching them
to do it right.

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