The Teacher that Students Remember

My searches through Twitter this week have led me to a site that discusses what makes students remember a teacher. This is a topic that has surfaced continuously throughout the semester in all of my education classes. In this article it lists eleven habits that make an effective teacher; enjoys teaching, makes a difference, spreads positivity, gets personal, gives one hundred percent, stays organized, is open minded, has standards, finds inspirations, embraces change, and creates reflections. I would say that all of these qualities are ideal for an educator, but many times some of these can be discouraged by administration, for example, gets personal. More often than not teachers are dissuaded to become too personal with their students because it can create misunderstandings amongst other people. On the other hand, has standards is an important aspect of being an educator, because if a teacher does not set limits and boundaries students can take advantage of the situation. There is no need to be a dictator in the classroom, but just letting students know that they will not get away with everything is necessary for a safe environment. Overall, I find these habits essential for educators. 

Link to article. 

Reading Comprehension in Target Language

Many students have difficulties with reading in their native tongue, well just imagine the problems they face when attempting to do this in a foreign language. This week in señora Hitz blog she focuses on the tactics that she uses to see if students understand the text that they read. She mentions that the typical way of doing this in any language is by having the children read the story and then giving them questions to answer. When doing this in a foreign language this approach can be utilized in two different ways; one having students read the story in the target language and respond to the questions in target language, or have the students read the text in the target language and respond in their native language. Giving these variations is important because a student can match the question with a phrase from the text and not necessarily know what the phrase means, therefore, having them write it in their native tongue makes them translate the meaning before they write it down. Also, by having them respond in the foreign language they can practice writing in the language they are learning. Both ways are valid in teaching students another language.

Reflection on Salman Khan's Flipped Classroom

Salman Khan began posting flipped classroom videos on math topics to help his cousins. After a short amount of time he started getting views beyond his family, and they were positively responding to his videos. Then he was receiving messages from teachers saying that they were using his videos to use a flipped classroom, which is assigning the videos to watch for homework and doing the actually exercises in the classroom this way students can interact with each other and the teacher can pin point what the students are not understanding.
I can say that I have watched these videos when I was taking AP chemistry and AP statistics in high school, and they helped me comprehend certain topics that I did not understand. More so I used them for chemistry because my teacher was not the best, and I had difficulties passing the exams. After seeing the videos I was able to better understand the subject. Also, I used them to refresh the material the teacher presented in class and that would be on an exam. Viewing this through my personal experience the videos are extremely useful for personal learning new material.

Using Literature to Teach the Subjective Tense

In this week's blog post by Señora Hitz she discusses how she uses the book Bianca Nieves y los 7 toritos to teach her students one of the most difficult grammatical tenses to comprehend; the subjective. The reason why this tense can be particular difficult for an English native speaker is because the manner in which the subjective is used in English is much less complex and similar to the indicative. Meanwhile in romance languages, such as, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish the subjective incorporates the tenses from the indicative (e.i. past, present, future, present progressive, etc.), but changes the way that the verbs are conjugated. Therefore, Señora Hitz uses a story to teach her students this tense. This way they are able to see in what context it is used and how it is properly used. After the students read five chapters she gives them handouts that ask which character said which phrases and all the phrases are in the subjective. Including this method in the classroom helps students fully grasp the idea of the subjective tense.

Twitter Reflection

This week on twitter it was interesting to see what new information I could find. One post that I came across was by Perla Jones, who shared a link to, "The Cold, Hard Truth About Employee Engagement". This article states several captivating statistics about the workplace, starting out with that only 48% of employees are happy at work. A large part of why people are not content at work is because they do not feel as though they have been recognized for their work progress, achievements, or given timely feedback. Another factor is that people feel like they do not fit in culturally, and 70% of employees say that they do not know their companies cultural value. This fact was among the most fascinating for me because many employers strive for a diverse workplace, yet, most of their workers do not the role that culture plays in the workplace. With this in mind people in general must become more culturally sensitive in this ever diverse world.

Instructing Higher Level Classes

When the material that a instructor is teaching becomes harder it can also become more difficult to incorporate interesting and captivating activities in the classroom. For language educators Señora Hitz provides an example of what she does with her students who have 4+ years of Spanish experience. She selects 3 short fiction or non-fiction books for the students to read in the beginning of class. Then she will allow them to share their thoughts and opinions about the readings. This struck   such a discussion among the students that a 20 minute activity took the entire class time. Hitz mentions that this is because we communicate through sharing and having conversations flow naturally in our native language, making it a great way for using a second language. Then she explains that high frequency words can be used to strength the students' vocabulary. In this post the example she gives is the word "crecer" over time this word was used in a variety of different ways to demonstrate all the possible manners to use this word, and sure enough the students began to integrate this term. Using this many be a better manner to teach students vocabulary rather than giving them a list of vocabulary words.

What is ACTFL?

While browsing through twitter this past week I came across the acronym ACTFL. In today's world there are a plethora of acronyms most of which I have no idea what they mean, including this one. My curiosity urged me to look into the significance of this phrase, which lead me to Charla Lorenzen's twitter account where I learned that ACTFL stands for American Council of on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. This took me my surprise because I am a junior in college studying to be a language teacher and have never heard of this council before. As I further looked into ACTFL and Charla's twitter feed I was connected to the site for the program guide for the most recent ACTFL convention. Here I noticed that their conventions focus on new ideas and technologies to teaching world languages, and the more I read the more I was able to learn about the myriad of techniques that can be used to teach languages. Seeing this gave me hope that the days of instructing languages strictly through text books and learning conjugations will come to an end sooner rather than later.

Link to Charla Lorenzen's twitter
Link to ACTFL program guide