I can't begin to tell you how pleasantly surprised I was about how informational these professional developments were! At first when I read about the Twitter community, I thought to myself, "hmm...I don't even have a twitter account and haven't a clue how to tweet. What type of language instructors will be on twitter at 8:00pm on a school night anyway?" On the contrary, there were tons of FL teachers online this past Thursday on the twitter community of #langchat! I signed up for a twitter account Wednesday, and joined this FL teacher community called LangChat, and it was so interesting! The topic for this past Thursday's conversation was how to manage the logistics of speaking assessment? Well, with twitter, there can be hundreds of people tweeting at the same time, so there was always like eighty more tweets in the feed and it was hard to keep up! I did try to write down good advice when I saw it. The first piece of advice that caught my mind was from a French teacher who said she uses an area of her room and sets it up like a cafe. Students meet there for speaking quizzes. Unfortunately, she didn't have time to explain how she manages her classroom while the quizzes are going on, but I plan on asking her this coming Thursday. Another teacher said that with the Interpersonal/Presentational mode, she preps her students by using self-rubrics that ask questions like "Did I use English?" "Did I respond to questions in TL?". Another suggestion was keeping track of participation by walking around with a clipboard to check off lists of students by the groups there in. Another conversation activity suggested was Speed dating. Every turn of the activity the teacher can make the questions more challenging. So I just got a ton of great ideas and links to websites about speaking activities that I wouldn't have gotten if I hadn't joined this twitter community. I am actually really glad that I joined and I can't wait for the next conversation!
The second professional development I went to was the fall Outreach workshop of the Department of Modern languages and Literature at Grand Valley State University. This outreach focused on addressing the community standard in your classroom. I gained a lot of insight as to what it means to create an "In-out" relationship with the community in your school district. That Teachers don't always have to teach inside the classroom, that we can go to restaurants, to community centers, to libraries and experience learning with our community. Even is it's just going to another classroom inside our school, we can still create a community. Professor Moret explains, "once you have created community, that wall of anxiety in your students will come crashing down." I really related to that. Looking back on my own experiences as a Spanish language learner, the classes that I thrived in were the classes where I felt I knew everyone. The classes where we were leaning together and not individually. Learning together is a great way to build trust with our students. I absolutely loved the idea of "Virtual homework" presented by professor Gomez, it was brilliant! I think connecting via Skype with native speakers is a great way to engage our students in "real-life" conversation! This is what they need to practice. Also, when speaking with a native speaker, our students can practice their listening, their pronunciation, and they can also teach their Skype partner English as well! That way they can feel good about their native language as well. Other presentations such as the "Screamers" and the Puppets, were all great ways of building community in the classroom. Ultimately, I think my perspective on the community standard has changed from being a standard that I thought would be hard to implement into a fairly easy standard to implement into my classroom. All in all, these were two great experiences that helped me as a student, develop my understanding of the professional world of FL teachers and encouraged me to get creative and try new things!
