Recently my Spanish 3 students read Robo En la Noche by Kristi Placido. I planned the unit a little differently than I had planned previous units. This time, students read Robo independently outside of class so that we could use class time for other language acquisition activities.

The materials and schedule for this unit are from Alison Weinhold's Lit Circle unit I purchased on Teachers Pay Teachers. So first, I gave students a packet that included the Bryce Hedstrom Book Report form and enough Dual Entry Journal pages for every chapter. We scheduled when we would do the speaking and writing assessments for each of the literary elements on the book report form. Each week, we had one day in which we discussed the book and students would do a free write assessment. This was a great way to keep them accountable for their reading.

Their final product for this unit was a one pager. A one pager is kind of like an infographic in that the information is presented very graphically. I gave them rules for what the one pager needed to look look like and contain as well as a rubric which described how it would be graded. They are both included below. I was quite pleased with the outcomes of the one pagers. I think it really helped students summarize the text in a way that allowed them to be creative and expressive. 

Identity is a powerful thing for students. How a student identifies can have an impact on how they act and behave in school. If they feel validated and safe in your classroom, then they will be more engaged and respectful. One of the ways you can make them feel validated and safe is to use media that includes examples of people that identify with them. All students should be represented in the resources we use in the classroom. In West Virginia, diversity is in the state code for selecting textbooks and learning materials. So, for those CI teachers who have ditched the textbook, it's incumbent on us to do the same thing. Finally,  after attending Stacey Johnson (@staceymargrita) and L.J. Randolph Jr.'s presentation "Social Justice in the Language Classroom" at SCOLT 2018, I was determined to do a better job of giving my students lots of positive examples of a diverse population. So, for those reasons, I decided to do a movie talk using the video "In a Heartbeat". This short, beautifully animated film depicts a young man who is struggling with his heart that is pulling him towards another boy. It's a classic boy has a crush story, it just happens that in this story the boy has a crush on another boy and it's the sweetest video I've ever seen. 

This MovieTalk also took place within a larger unit in which we explored identity. My students had just finished the Fluency Matters novel Frida Kahlo. In Frida's story, there are lots of examples of things that influenced her identity: her terrible relationship with her mother, polio, her deformed leg, the terrible accident, the pain she suffered, being an artist, being a Mexican woman, and being Diego Rivera's wife. When we were finished reading the novel, I directed a class discussion in which students made a list of those things that influenced Frida's identity. Then students made a list of those things that influence their identity which included socio economic status, gender, their regional connection (Appalachia), education, opioid epidemic and sexual orientation. We then compared and contrasted what influences their identity to what influenced Frida's. We also discussed how identity is fluid rather than set in stone and as people learn and grow things change. An example from the book was that Frida considered herself an artist after the accident yet stopped doing art and considered herself Diego's wife after they married. It was the day after we completed this class discussion that the class watched In a Heartbeat. 

This video is perfect for Movie Talk because it's wordless and very well drawn. You can see the video here. As you can see, the boy is scared or nervous because of how he feels and the fact that his heart literally jumps out of his chest. Because of his predicament, there are lots of opportunities to go over "estar" feelings and locations, tener idiomatic phrases and actions/movements in general. To start, I created a Powerpoint with the story in the presenters notes. I've provided a copy of the power point below. The slides show how scared and nervous the boy is without showing why. So during the MovieTalk, we have the mystery of who or what he's running and hiding from. I simply called it the "Terror".  I told the story for each slide in the TPRS style and then used circle questioning and personal questions to keep the students engaged and communicating. I used the present tense with the slides to tell the story. At the end of the slideshow, students made predictions as to who the "Terror" is. 

When I showed the movie, I stopped it at the same points as the slideshow and we discussed what happened. I continued to use circle questioning and personal questions to keep students engaged. At the specific point in the video where the boy opens the school door and is mortified, I asked students for predictions as to what he was going to see. Then, when he's sitting under the tree after the incident we again made predictions. And, once students understood that the boy had a crush on another boy, by and large, the reaction was incredibly positive. Virtually no pushback, even from the boys. And students who identified as LGBTQ were smiling ear to ear. A couple of freshmen boys reacted not as positively, but it was merely a matter of quieting them down and reminding them of classroom rules. Nothing more came of it. For me, it was beyond positive for my students and we were able to stay in the language and keep students engaged. The one thing I'll change for next year will be to write a reader to go along with the MovieTalk. 

If you've never done a MovieTalk and want to learn more, I learned from the amazing Margie Snyder (@MargieSnyder). She presented MovieTalk in 2015 at the @WVFTLA conference. Her presentation can be found here.

I don't teach Spanish in a vacuum. In other words, I don't teach Spanish for the Spanish language specifically; I teach concepts, curriculum and ideas using Spanish. To me, that's an important distinction. A method I often use to help my students develop deeper understandings is the Concept Attainment Model. While this instructional model is great for all content areas, it's especially perfect for the world language classroom because it's easy for students to understand and I can keep the instruction in the target language. 

The Concept Attainment Model helps students develop a deeper understanding of a concept through positive and negative examples. For example, if you were teaching a class about human rights, a positive example might be the right to free expression while a negative example might be no access to clean water. A human rights lesson would have many positive and negative examples to work with. Students might even be exposed to human rights and abuses that they didn't know existed which might spark a few discussions. The point of this model is to help students make connections to a concept that they themselves made. Recently, I used this model to review the concept of healthy food with my Spanish 2 students. It was easy for all proficiency levels to understand and we were able to stay in the target language throughout the class.

As students came into class, I asked them to copy T chart on a blank piece of paper found in the first slide below. I had them do this so that they could follow along and copy what I did on the smartboard. The overall theme was Good for Your Health (Buena para la salud). The left column was labeled Positive Examples (Ejemplos Positivos) and the right column was labeled Negative Examples (Ejemplos Negativo). I used an I-We-You strategy for this lesson in which I modeled what we were doing, We did the next step together and then You, the students, did the rest on their own. I created the slides with the app Explain Everything and mirrored the slides onto my smartboard using Apple TV. By doing this I was able to manipulate the words right from my iPad, however, the lesson would work just as well on a white board with post its.

To start the lesson, I put the second slide on the smartboard with the four foods jumbled at the bottom. I then brought each one up and put them in the proper column as I spoke to the class. I said, "Zanahorias son ejemplos positivos de Buena para la salud. Hamburguesas con queso y tocino son ejemplos negativos." (Carrots are positive examples. Bacon Cheeseburgers are negative examples). I checked for understanding then moved to the next slide.  We then categorized the new food together as a class. I then switched to the final slide and students worked independently to categorize each of the remaining foods. When all students were finished, I led the class discussion as we completed the chart on the smartboard. At the end of the lesson, I gave students a writing prompt of "Me gusta comer..." (I like to eat...) and they did a five minute timed write.

I found that the coolest thing about the Concept Attainment Model in the world language classroom is all the opportunities for spontaneous communication. The We and You steps are moments where students can assert their opinions as well as comment on the opinions of others. Take Helados (Ice cream) as an example. Some students disagreed that it was a negative example because it contained milk and was a dairy product. There were also communications that some food, like chili cheese fries, were delicious but bad for us. The more we worked on categorizing the foods, the easier the language came. I was very impressed with students' abilities to communicate in meaningful ways, especially with what they wrote during the timed write. Not only did they write about what they liked to eat, but they explained reasons for liking  or not liking certain foods. Many students were creative and used words and phrases from the spontaneous communication that had happened earlier.

The thing I like most about the Concept Attainment Model is that I'm able to be playful with the activity. I put foods in the wrong column and let students catch me doing it. When they caught me, I would act incredulous and fake argue with them.  I lamented when a food that is delicious but unhealthy went in the negative column. Students laughed and played along and did so in the language because it was comprehensible. As educators, we can't be reminded enough that when students are engaged and having fun they are learning. 

I love my Twitter PLN because it's the best resource I have as a foreign language teacher. Take last week as an example. It was homecoming week and kids are always craziest during that week. Friday is the worst of the week with the shortened classes to accommodate the pep rally. I knew I needed a better activity to keep kids engaged and Twitter delivered. A French teacher shared her Selfie Bingo activity, so I scooped it up and made it work for my classes.

I decided that I didn't want to contain this activity within my classroom because the kids would be antsy and needed to move around, so I made this activity like a scavenger hunt. I wrote the selfie directions with Quizlet so that I could print them out in a large format and change them anytime I want. An added benefit is that you can simply copy the Quizlet set to your own account and edit them the way you want as well. You can find the selfie descriptions Here. Each selfie description was marked with B1 B2, B3...I1, I2, I3...etc so students could mark their own BINGO sheets and selfies. I tried to make sure to make instructions that could be met using Snap Chat filters so students could easily make the selfie and move on. Finally, I cut the questions out and taped them all over the school in places that would cause the least disruption; like stair wells and commons areas. 

At the beginning of each class, I put students into groups of 3-4 and gave each group a blank BINGO sheet. I then showed them my example of a selfie that I've shared here. I showed them that they had to not only take a selfie specified by the directions , but also had to write what the selfie was of and specify which BINGO square it covered. The team that was first to BINGO and the team that filled the most squares would get extra credit. Students uploaded their selfies to an file I created on schoology.com, but you can use any number of collaborative sites for this. After that, I let them loose on the school and everyone seemed to have a good time with very few complaints from my colleagues.

A few take aways. This activity, in the end, turned out to be very entertaining for the students, but don't expect them to stay in the target language while they're out and about. You're going to have to give up the dream of 90% TL with this activity. I'm not sure how much language was learned, but I'm certain they understand "algo" and "alguien" much better than they did before. Also, they misunderstood some of the instructions that had to do with classrooms and teachers. For example, one of the instructions was to take a picture IN FRONT of their favorite class. I did this so that they wouldn't disrupt that class by going in, but that's exactly what many students did. Also, one of the selfies was to be with one of the 4 administrators. Well, I have 6 Spanish classes, so my administrators took selfies with students all day long. So, in the future, I'll change that to include counselors, kitchen staff and custodians so that my poor administrators aren't besieged with selfie requests all day. Finally, I think this activity was the perfect weird week activity. Homecoming, short week, early out, etc are tough to plan for. My students loved it, they moved around letting off steam and engaged the language in a fun way. 

I didn't come to teaching the traditional route. After graduating with a degree in Spanish from Northern Arizona University, I was toying with the idea of working for a few years before applying to graduate school. Like many graduates, I was done with school for a while. The problem was that every job available paid so little. I couldn't believe how little a college graduate would make! With such low paying job prospects on my horizon, I was ready to try something different. That's when a family friend suggested I give commission sales a try. With that, I got a job selling cars and never looked back. I spent the next thirteen years in commissioned sales of one form or another before making the transition to teaching.

In sales, much like teaching, they throw you to the wolves! Sure, like new teachers, you get a little training before you stand in front of an actual customer but not nearly enough to make you feel comfortable! It's almost a rite of passage for new salespeople to slog through multiple presentations before finally getting that first sale. They would say, "Hang in there! It'll get better in no time." (Sound familiar teachers?) So early on I recognized that sales seemed much easier to some salespeople than others. I would watch the great salesmen at work, try to sit in when they were doing their thing and I would try to emulate them. In sales, we even had professional development. You want to know the difference between PD in sales as compared to teaching? In sales, we paid attention because our livelihoods depended on getting better. I wasn't paid if I didn't produce and there was no fall back, no salary plus commission. Professional development was mana from heaven in sales because it energized you, you could immediately try a new sales pitch or close on the sales floor. In sales, very few whined about professional development.

I was thinking the other day about a sales training I attended that really applies to my career as a teacher. The presenter was a famous sales trainer named Brian Tracy. I owned all of his sales tapes and would listen to them on the way into work. In the live training, he was explaining how important it was to have deep knowledge of our own products and the competition's. Then he set up the following analogy. He said we should imagine we've been diagnosed with a grave illness that is curable in the hands of a knowledgable doctor. Then imagine you're in the doctor's private office for a consultation, but there are only a few medical books from the 1960's on the shelf behind the desk. You ask him, "Doc, why do you only have a few medical journals from the 60's and nothing more?" And the doctor responds, "I went to medical school in the 60's and nothings really changed since then so what's the point of buying new medical books?" What would you do next? You'd flee that doctors office is what you'd do! Now think about that in terms of teaching! Imagine a teacher with five, ten or fifteen years experience that's doing exactly the same thing they've been doing since day one. It's easy to imagine because we see it all the time. The issue is that we shouldn't see it all the time. There is real value in professional development because, just like in sales, it will energize us as educators. It will make us want to create the best learning environments for our students so that we can help them succeed. 

There is real value in professional development for teachers! Educators should treat professional development the way sales people treat sales training, like our livelihoods depend on it. Dave Burgess, in his book Teach Like a Pirate writes, "Mediocrity is incapable of motivating. You just can't be on fire about mediocrity. How could anyone be fired up about creating a lukewarm classroom environment...Teaching is a tough job filled with unbelievable hardships, hurdles, and headaches...Unless you find something big to care about, you won't make it." He's saying that without something to work for we won't make it as teachers. Listen, when I was in commissioned sales, I was motivated by one thing, money. Plane and simple, I was selling with the commission in mind. The more I sold, the bigger my paychecks were. But we don't have that in teaching, so there has to be something else and that's where professional development comes in. Professional development can give you the spark to change things up so that you're students are truly engaged in your subject. 

The beautiful thing is that you can find professional development anywhere.  It's literally at your fingertips! You can read great books like Dave Burgess's Teach like a Pirate or Hacking Project Based Learning by Ross Cooper and Erin Murphy amongst a hundred other incredible books about teaching. Great teachers are blogging these days. Find a blogger who's sharing ideas in your subject and get ideas from them. Create a Personal Learning Network (PLN) on Twitter, Facebook or some other social media outlet. Given that I'm a world language teacher in West Virginia, my PLN consists of #langchat, a national group of world language teachers and #wvedchat, a group of WV educators. These groups share real world, real time strategies that I can apply immediately in my classroom. You can also join your state association for your subject. All subjects have an association and they all have conferences and trainings. You don't have to wait for your school or district to give you professional development, it's literally at your fingertips.

The human spirit wasn't meant to be sedentary, it was meant to grow! The human spirit was meant to achieve. Invest in professional development and wake your spirit up if it's been still for too long! Grow as a teacher and make a real impact on your students. Get passionate about what you do because the world needs the better you, the energized you. That's the real value of professional development. 

I confess that I don't do social media well. I participate, but it always seems to devolve into a sea of negativity and politics. For example, I had a Twitter account that I created as my "teacher" account. I could use it to talk about what's happening in the classroom, post Spanish language resources I found online and communicate with other teachers in the school. But then I became the faculty advisor to the Young Democrats club and other people I had followed began to be political and soon enough, It wasn't a great place for my teacher mind or identity anymore.

That all changed for me at the ACTFL 2016 conference in Boston. One of the first presentations I attended was presented by Rebecca Huls and Kara McNeese. They were presenting about their #spanstuchat Twitter chats they do with students. I was blown away by their success, so right there during their presentation, I created a new twitter account for my teacher persona and @profedenham was born. I immediately followed the two of them as well as all the presenters of the presentations I attended. And because I had followed these amazing teachers, pretty soon I was following even more as they retweeted and responded to other incredible teachers. Pretty soon I had developed a strong FL teaching community on Twitter, but I didn't know what I had.

I started to use the tweeted suggestions in my classroom and I saw improvement! Then I started reading their blog posts and shopping at their TeacherspayTeachers sites. Having a twitter dedicated to my profession started to impact my teaching in the best way. I honestly felt like I was a better teacher than I'd ever been in the past. Whenever I scrolled through my feed, I felt like I was in the company of professionals so dedicated to their craft that you couldn't help but get excited and be uplifted. But even then, I still didn't know what I had with this new Twitter community.

One day I noticed that some of my "real" friends had followed me on @profedenham, and without thinking, I followed them back. Within minutes there were political tweets and other nonsense muddying up my feed. It immediately felt wrong, and then it hit me, @profedenham had to be different for me. I had to protect it because it is my professional community. Living in West Virginia gives me precious few opportunities to interact with other FL teachers. And not just interact, but share ideas, opinions and suggestions; I mean really get into the guts of FL teaching. So I unfollowed my "real" friends from @profedenham because it wasn't a place for them. 

Build a professional teaching community on Twitter, if you haven't already. If you need help, you can start by following me. Then guard it against becoming just another social media account. It's the best PD you'll ever have!