Fishbowl/Socratic discussions in an FL class

Socratic seminars have become a big thing in English classes, and they go a long way towards fostering discussion in a structured way. This is a handy way to discuss issues raised in a novella you're reading, discuss cultural ideas, or simply talk about a topic or two.

But it's harder in an FL class, especially when we're trying not to force production. So here's how we've been doing it.

Warning - I have only tried this with threes, and I'm not sure it's suitable at other levels. If you try this with lower levels and adapt it, let me know.

1. Choose the passage or passages you want kids to talk about, if it comes from a reading. If not, perhaps create something to have them look over to prime their brains. Have them spend time reading that however you wish - groups, individually, whole class, etc. That's up to you.

2. Write some questions to get them thinking about the topic itself. Would you like to have a pet? If your sister had a pet, and you didn't, would you be jealous? Etc. I wrote four questions, and then I gave them three minutes per question to write as much as they could in answer to the question. We went over each question and established understanding before they wrote, and then they had to answer all four (twelve minutes in total) - I told them when each set of three minutes was up.

3. Have them share some or all of their responses in groups, or with the whole class. We do it in groups, and then each group selects their favorite response to each question, and we share as a class and discuss a little.

4. Then each student writes four open-ended questions about the topic we're going to discuss (the last one we discussed was the Siege of Masada). We spent some time discussing what kinds of questions would be good for this (would you prefer... what do you think is... would you have...) and which ones are less good (yes/no questions, questions that require a factual answer). I typed up eleven of my favorite questions and projected them for support. Kids could ask their own questions, could make up questions as they went raised from the conversation, or the questions I was projecting.

5. We set up five chairs at the front of the room and a hot seat. Everyone else sat in a semi-circle around them. The hot seat was there in case you had a statement or response you wanted to make in the moment, but didn't want to be actually in the circle at that time. You had to make your response and get out. If the hot seat had been abused (people using it to get out of being in the circle, etc), it would have been removed, but no one abused it. The five volunteered themselves, and began. Students were told if they didn't understand something, they should ask for clarification or repetition whenever they wanted, and they didn't need to be in the circle for that.

My role was to answer "how do you say" questions and then write those on the board, to clarify as needed, and to gently steer if something got out of hand or off-topic.

People not yet in the circle tapped in when there was a question they wanted to answer, or they'd begun to have thoughts on a topic. To tap in, they simply came up, tapped someone's shoulder, and switched seats. They were required to wait 'til that person wasn't speaking, and they had to tap out people who'd been there longer first.

If you were ready to be tapped out, you could put your hand on your head, so that when someone was ready to tap in, they knew who wanted to be out. If you got tapped out but wanted to contribute again, you could use the hot seat, or you had two extra tap-ins left if you needed them.

Often by the end of the period, I had a few kids who hadn't been in the circle. Those students were required to choose one of the questions raised that day and make me a 1.5 minute video, to be turned in to Flipgrid (which is free!). They had a few days to do it and could practice, which for most of them alleviated the anxiety of impromptu speaking, and also allows them to produce at their own pace. I did NOT announce this as an option before fishbowl - I told them at the end.

Y'all, my classroom looks different now: flexible seating

This is my fifth year deskless! I distinctly remember myself, a colleague, and a student carrying desks out of my room to a trailer. We got our workout that day. We've had chairs for the last four years - just chairs - but this year I'd been reading a lot about flexible seating, and I got to thinking:

Things That Foreign Language Teachers Need To Do More

There are a lot of things that push us to get better as language teachers, and many of them are things we forget we can do, or forget to incorporate on a regular basis. The ideas listed below are either things I've done to great success or have seen other people do with great success, and that I think really need to happen more.

Designing a Unit Around Culture

Last summer, a friend of mine said something that really stuck with me. He told me that language is culture, and that we have to examine our reasons for teaching kids certain cultural things. Do we just want them to have the information? If so, just tell them. But if we want them to be able to discuss that information, they have to have it in the target language. So with that in mind, I wanted to teach theater this year, and I wanted to do it in the target language.

So I designed an entire unit around theater. One of the dangerous parts of topical units is we teach a bunch of specialized vocabulary (like greaves?!) that never gets used again. So when I do this, I try to pick vocabulary to focus on that I think is going to be useful universally. When we did magic, we acquired 'sermone secreto' and "pallent superi," each of which phrases was present in the reading, but has been otherwise useful for communicating. In medicine, we learned 'iuvamen vitae' and 'ex consuetudine.' While it's true that we also talked about livers and some random measurements, those have not been the major vocabulary focuses - the culture-specific words have become icing words, more or less.

How I formulate a unit

It's all well and good to know that you have a topical unit, but then you think about teaching on Monday and realize that you have no plans, no direction and no idea what you're doing when the bell rings. So I thought I'd post on what I do when I start thinking about the direction of a unit.

The first thing I do is identify where the holes in my knowledge are. For this particular unit, I knew that I knew absolutely nothing about magic, so I purchased a book on magic, and then I read it. I let what I read guide me to the next step.

What was my end goal? What do I want students to understand? I determined that I wanted my kids to know how the Romans saw magic and magicians and why, and that I wanted them to understand how we see magic and why.

A unit in my classroom, part 3

The next week of magic class looked like this:

Day 1
We re-watched each of the clips, and I began to use the vocabulary in the types of sentences and sentence-strings in which they were going to see them in the original text. 

The previous night, I had written three summaries: one of each video. I included statements in the summaries that were blatantly false, and others that could be interpreted as true or false, depending on how you read them. They are at school, but on Monday, I'll attach them here. I put one of them in large letters up on the screen (you could do this with a projector, a doc cam, or just by writing) and had the kids sit in pairs with one facing the summary and one facing away. The first student began to read, slowly, to the second student. When the reader read a lie, the second student pointed rudely (on instruction from me :D) and said, "Mentiris!" That student then had to provide the correct information. The reader then had to begin at the beginning of the sentence and read it correctly.

When I hit the bell, the two stood up and switched roles, whether they'd finished or not. They then began again at the start of the passage. It gives students who are struggling a little more with the listening to then have the chance to read the passage for themselves, and it provides repetition for both of them.

After they'd read the passage the second time through, I got up and read the passage, and they got to call me a liar. It meant that I heard various corrections for various errors, and the kids got to hear how other students interpreted various statements. Then we voted on which correction we liked. At the end, we all read the corrected one together. We got through two of the three.

Day 2
We did a running dictation of the third summary - Hocus Pocus. In pairs, student select a runner and a writer. I post the text down the hallway (I always post two copies in opposite directions so it doesn't get overly crowded in the hallway). The runner runs down the hall, memorizes everything they can in the first sentence, and brings that information back to the writer. The writer writes all of this. The runner's job is finished when s/he has conveyed all the information in the first sentence. The two then sit and illustrate that sentence.

Then, they switch jobs. The writer does the runner's job and the runner the writer's.

Any time the group had questions, they sent a runner to me. I sat in a centralized location so that
(a) the kids always knew where to find me and
(b) it never appeared that I was too busy to talk to them, because I was surrounded by a group.

When they finished, I checked their work for spelling, missing words, etc. The first group to get their work to have no errors at all got either a Jolly Rancher or two extra points. (you'd be shocked at how many wanted the jolly ranchers.)

Day 3

We read through the dictation together, and anyone who still had errors corrected them. We made sure everyone understood the whole thing. Then I gave them a quiz. They had two choices:

1. Find four false statements and write down the false information.

2. Find four false statements, and rewrite the sentence so that it's true (but not by just putting non).

If they chose the second, they got 1.5 points instead of just 1.

Day 4

I told them about Apuleius and Quintilian (Latine). We talked about where they were from - which meant discussing Carthage, directions, etc. briefly - and interesting stories. I explained to them what the story The Golden Ass is, because we're going to read selections from it later, and we talked about how Apuleius was accused of bewitching an old woman. We discussed the Apologia, what an apologia is, and how, precisely, he got into trouble. We acted out what Apuleius was accused of doing (bewitching an elderly wealthy woman so she'd marry him).

Then, I asked them to, with a partner, read the brief text from Apuleius' apology, out loud. Then we re-read it together and asked any questions. Then together in their partners, they - in their own words - made a list of the things that Apuleius felt the Romans felt defined a magician. I asked them whether what Apuelius had written in that sentence represented his opinion or peoples' opinions, and they felt, due to existimant, that he was representing others' opinions.

Then I asked them what was on their lists, and we made a collective class list of Apuleius' definitions of a magician. We then reread it and we asked the following questions:

1. Quis est?

2. Quid magus agit?

3. Quid ille pollet?

4. Quomodo?

5. Cur?

They said it helped them separate out the sentence and tell specifically what was going on.

Monday, we'll read Quintilian's version, and we'll make a Venn Diagram suggesting what Apuleius thinks, what Quintilian thinks, and where those overlap. Then, we will look at statements in partners or small groups and determine whether:

(a) fieri potest

(b) veri simile est

and 

(c) patetne sententia?

A unit in my classroom, part 2

All the stuff that we more or less pulled off in five days - and it did actually take a little longer than that, because on Friday, they'd earned lots of PAT, so we only had eight minutes of class - is easily stretchable into two weeks. In some of my upper level classes, it did take longer, and we just took our time with it and enjoyed ourselves.

Friday, the eight minutes of class essentially amounted to the weather and days of the week. After that we played Versipellis. I need to post on Versipellis, because it is the best game I know, and the kids are obsessed with it (credit to Keegan Potter for it). Friday, therefore, is not included in my plans, so day 5 is really day six...and actually is going to be day seven, and you'll see why below:

What a unit looks like in my classroom, part 1

I've been asked to post some information about a Latin III/IV unit I'm doing right now, so here's what it looks like:

Last May, I asked my Latin II and III students to throw out some ideas of topics that interested them. They gave me a list of twenty-seven ranging from Roman-occupied Britain to fairy tales. Then they voted, we tallied the votes, and we ended up with:
magic
military
sports and games
mythology
fairy tales

Preferred Activity Time

This is something Bryce Hedstrom has talked about in great detail, and it actually comes from Fred Jones' book Tools for Teaching, which I highly recommend.

Preferred activity time is spent, as it sounds, doing activities your students prefer - but the catch is that they have to be activities you're happy to spend the time doing. I.e. they still need to have curricular value.

We manage our classrooms in a lot of ways - teaching our kids the daily routines so that you don't have to clean up your disaster of a classroom every day, because kids know where things go. Walking around your classroom while they're working to keep disruptions to a minimum. Individually speaking with kids who do cause disruptions. But so often we resort to punishment for behaviors contrary to what's expected. Why don't we reward them for behaviors we do want them to exhibit? Well, that can be hard. First, how do you reward them? Second, how do you choose which behaviors those are? You can't look at at kid and say, "I'm so proud of you for not throwing that pencil at Jasper today!" Who does that? So you identify the most important and most time-saving things, and you work with those. Here's how my kids earn preferred activity time:

1. If they're all in their seats when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
2. If they're all silent when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
3. For every three minutes the upper levels spend in the target language, they earn one minute of PAT. For the first years, we begin with every minute gets them a minute.
4. When they hustle, they get time. For example, I gave them three minutes to set up the chairs in pairs the other day. They used 48 seconds of that. The remaining 2 minutes and 12 seconds were added to their PAT.

They lose time when they choose to waste time. If it had taken, for example, 3 minutes and 15 seconds (which would have been egregiously unnecessary) to set up the chairs, they would have lost 15 seconds. If they choose to use time exhibiting inappropriate behaviors - we're telling a story, and they choose to constantly hold side conversations - they lose the amount of time they spend doing that, until they've done it three times. When it's happened three times, we take a different tack called omission training, and for that I refer you to Mr Jones, whose book is spectacular.

Imagine my second period has earned 29 minutes and 18 seconds. 30 minutes before the end of class (this gives us about a minute of buffer to set the classroom back up if necessary and follow leaving procedures) on Friday, we stop and select a game. These are games I offer them, so all of them are to my liking. None of them will waste time, and I'm happy to relinquish those thirty minutes to playing those games. We then spend the remainder of the class playing that game, and whatever didn't get done on the other portion of Friday will get finished Monday.

When they earn an entire class period - this is cumulative. Two weeks ago, they earned 27 minutes. I put this in my spreadsheet, and then I added the 31 minutes from this week. They've now got more than a class period in saved up time - we will spend it celebrating Kindergarten Day on the closest Monday. On Kindergarten Day, they can bring snugglies, we sit on the floor, if they want to bring a mug, they can use my electric kettle for hot water and can make tea or hot chocolate, and I will spend the period reading them a story in the target language. They love this because they feel like they're doing no work when in fact they're doing the best kind of work - being totally relaxed, utterly safe, and getting nothing but input.

(we're doing this Monday. we're reading Doomsday in Pompeii because it is Volcano Day - August 24th. Doomsday in Pompeii is a book in English, so although I will be looking at English words, I will read aloud in Latin. I am spending part of this weekend translating about 2 more pages than I think I'm actually going to need and taping over the English so it's not quite as stressful for me Monday. normally I'd read a book in Latin, but I don't have any kids' books in Latin about volcanoes. yet.)

fREADom

I gave a presentation this morning on reading and reading skills. Below please see links to the dropbox location of both the PowerPoint and some notes to hopefully help it make sense. :)

Powerpoint
Notes

Putting together my classroom

All links in this post will take you to where you can get those materials, if you should want them. Most are free, but the expectations posters, alas, are not.

This is one of my bookshelves. I'm working on installing rain gutter on my cork board as well. Both of these things allow me to display my books cover-out. Studies indicate that kids are more likely to want to read if they can see the covers of the books, so I have displayed my books that (a) are light enough to put in this and (b) have interesting covers. Those that don't have interesting covers or are too heavy (or don't have pictures in them) are displayed on this bookshelf:



                 


This bookshelf is painted so that it's graded by level. Blue is beginner, red is intermediate (which is a HUGE range), and yellow is advanced. The top shelf is for dictionaries and songbooks.

 This is my corkboard. On the far right, I have our class calendar. This includes everything from JCL events to stuff we've scheduled actually in class. The middle is my Craig's List. I'm teaching mixed level classes this year, but let's be honest - all classes are mixed level. This whiteboard (they make stick-on whiteboard!) allows me to write phrases or synonyms that allow kids to use the words they know or try to level up if they want. The left is divided in two - memoranda and roganda. There's a basket with little papers, and there are pushpins on the cork strip above the board. Memoranda are things kids have asked me to do and are reminding me to do by writing me a note. Roganda are questions that are either off-topic or that the kid didn't want to ask in the moment, and so they pin them to the board. I will answer them on the paper and pin them back up, or find the kid if they write their name on it.


This is my board. The center is for use, the left is for club info, and the right is for weather. Posted along the board are my question words. Each poster has the word, colored, in huge font (at least 90 pt), the word in English smaller in a less interesting color, and pictures that you could associate with the word. I add words as my kids ask me to, but right now, they are to where, from where, where, when, what time, to whom, who, what, whom, whose, where, what kind, how many, why, how. I may have forgotten a couple.




This is my costume corner. I have a massive collection of stuffed animals hung on chains, which are attached to the wall using massive command hooks. (all these are findable on amazon) All my fruit and small plastic toys are in the hanging blue and maroon boxes, which I got at Home Depot. I sewed a piece of fabric to the back and slid them through a dowel rod, which I put on the wall using massive command hooks. There is a smaller hook with fly swatters on. On the table, there is a football helmet that doesn't fit in a box, and a box of cool and intriguing props (ranging from cat toys to I don't even know what). Underneath the table there are milk crates that are zip-tied together. Each is labeled, in Latin and English, with the type of clothing in it. To the left there is a hat box (hats are very important to my students. this also includes wigs and beards). Behind the arch (which represents all buildings all the time), there is a giant urn I got for twelve dollars that contains my foam swords. Above all of that, there's a green do you understand? poster, and it shows them how many fingers to hold up depending on how much they understand.

 These are my expectations posters. One shows what I want them to do in class (sit up straight, respond when I call on you, etc.), and the other is what they call my level up poster. If you're earning a zero, you're not here. If you're earning a 1...etc.

These are my file cabinets. The left hand one is my teaching materials - glitter, ribbons, extra paper, printer paper, classroom decorations, paint, etc. The chest of drawers is paper plates, miscellaneous paper, club files, cleaning supplies, etc. The right hand is the art buckets. You can see art buckets on top of it. I got the buckets, as well as the jackets around/in them, also at Home Depot (pretty cheaply). There are nine (enough for each group of four to have a bucket), and each has markers, scissors, colorful paper, sharpies, glue sticks, colored pencils, etc. The green drawers on the right hold my socks (so we can erase white boards), mini white boards, markers, games (like story cubes and Jenga). The tall tubes of colored paper are in a cheap folding laundry bin I got from Target for five dollars years ago. This way, I always have butcher paper, and they have a place to turn butcher paper projects in.







This is my idiom wall. I have found, especially in reading, that having knowledge and comfortable use of idiom is unbelievably helpful. Each week, each class chooses one, and I put it on the board. Every time someone uses it correctly, they get a piece of candy. I add idioms throughout the year, so the wall never gets stale.

This is my weather board. I include the day of the week, the time of year, and the weather itself. We do the weather daily at the beginning of class. It allows us to practice all three tenses (yesterday was, today is, tomorrow will be...), and we get used to questioning, and we get some basic idiomatic vocabulary in. I made all of these in Word and laminated them at the school, and then I stuck magnet tape on the back. You may note that I have two the moon is shining. There is no good reason for that.

A quick and dirty guide to telling a story

Story-telling was one of the hardest things for me to start to get good at. I spent my first two years shoving twenty-four words into a story, saying them once, and then wondering why they weren't sticking and weren't helping. People kept telling me 'slow,' but it wasn't really processing, and it's only been over the last couple years that I've gotten anywhere even closer to being good at doing it. The guide I'm putting here is mostly a collection of lessons I've learned in the journey so far.

1. Come in with a plot. This week, the plot is 'someone has something they don't want and so tries to give it to people.' It doesn't have a lot of details in it. Maybe your story has a lot more details in it (at the beginning, mine always did, too. I knew where I wanted them to go, or what the object was going to be, or so forth. no shame in that), maybe it has even fewer, but either way, I always go into a story with an outline of a plot so I can drive the story in that direction. If it doesn't end up there, fine, but at least I wasn't flopping around helplessly.

Games: Snatch It

I do not have a catchy name for this. If you have one, tell me.

You can really use this for whatever you want, but I like to use it for comprehension - true/false, questioning about stories, etc.

Sit students in pairs across from one another. Give each student a whiteboard and a dry-erase marker (this isn't strictly necessary if you don't have them, but I find it keeps them honest). Between them, have them put an object that's easy to grab and won't hurt them if they grab it quickly. I, for example, have eleven thousand stuffed animals in my classroom, so these work nicely. I do not recommend things like paper.

Games: Show-and-Tell

There's been a lot of discussion on Ben Slavic's PLC (it costs about $5.00 a month, and the community that comes from it really is worth it) about games not really promoting CI, and that's pretty true. A lot of games do not promote good comprehensible input, discussion, reasonable output or communication. A lot of it is just spitting out of words or grammar without any context. So I've spent the last couple of years putting together games that do encourage CI, encourage conversation, useful input.

There are people who argue that there's little point in asking the kids to produce at all in front of a class because any input for the rest of the class that's not correct is damaging. I don't think that's necessarily true - I think forcing kids to output can just be dangerous because they aren't always ready and so it stresses them out and upsets them.
So when I go to play games that require my students to output, I have to make sure that

Popcorn Reading

This is something that's been running around our county a lot, and I'd love to give credit where it's due, but I can't remember where it came from. Since it landed in my inbox the first time, I've done some tweaking with it, and here's what I've come up with:

my classroom has chairs instead of desks, so I put half of them in a circle, and then the other half in a second circle inside the first, so that the chairs are facing each other.

You should have a circle that looks like this, and then a secondary circle inside it. Each kid should have a partner facing him, basically.

Embedded Stories

There have so often been stories I wanted my students to read that were simply above their heads. The most recent example is Catullus' carmen V. It's a lovely poem, and the concepts are really pretty simple, and I spent a day or two teaching them some of the the vocabulary they were about to run into, but it's poetry, so the phrasing is hard and, sometimes, keeping the flow of it is hard.

One of the answers to that is embedded readings. Michele Whaley and Laurie Clarcq are the creators and goddesses of this technique. Essentially, it means creating several versions of a text to scaffold it so that students work up to understanding the original. It allows you to work up to new vocabulary with explanations, synonyms and scene-setting so you end up with very little glossing and very little reverting to L1. The first version should be simple enough that they should understand it easily with no questions.

FVR - free voluntary reading and TarHeel Reader

It's hard to do free voluntary reading in a classroom because it can't really be voluntary. You're telling them to read. And it can only be free within boundaries, because they can only read things at their level, and that can be pretty limiting. But I've spent some time building up a pretty decent library, because - as studies have found - when kids read what they want to, they get more out of it than reading what they're told to read. So how do we get our kids to read - since it builds vocab, it builds spelling, it builds idiom and expression - on their own?

We spend ten minutes at the beginning (or end, in the case of my honors IIs, because they said they preferred to do class, get into Latin, and then wind down by reading) of every class period reading. I give them a log they fill out each day that notes what they read (the name of the story, pages of a book, whatever) and a brief summary of it. It keeps them from reading things they don't understand. Some of them read the same four pages every day for a week, and I'm actually fine with that. They think they're getting away with no work, but really what it means is that they're getting repetition, which doesn't do them any harm.

On Untextbooking

I've been doing an experiment for the last couple years, and so far, I'm finding that it's working - not only for me, but also for my students. I've been in the process of untextbooking. That is, I've been phasing the book out of my classroom. My Latin I students don't touch it really at all, and it comes in a little bit (just the first year book, and just because it has good stories in it) second year, but I only pull out the stories I think the kids are going to connect with and find funny.

Three years ago was my first year at my current high school. Our county uses the Cambridge Latin Course, which - at least for a while - has wonderful stories. I had taught out of it for the year I was at my previous school, and so I jumped right into it at GHS, too. But here's the problem - and it's the one I'd found the previous year: while we were interested in the stories we were telling together, and while several of the stories in the CLC are great, many of them feel like a slog, most of them were above the kids' heads (some of the humor is sly, and the kids' sense of the language isn't that developed yet), and it was more about pushing through the reading than it was about enjoying it. I'm not an expert on reading, although I love to do it, but it seemed to me like that just wasn't a good way to teach reading.