Here we go, first real post. It is going to be long so please buckle in. My name is Haylee, the author of this blog (duh, you know that). I want to take you on the journey of how I became a Spanish teacher and how my teaching has evolved over the last 6 years. This blog and my ever evolving questions I have about language teaching will make sense to you after this post. To preface, I am a 3rd year teacher but went to a university that had pre-service teachers in the classroom from the second week of Freshman year. I have taught kindergarten, 3rd and 4th grade, 7th and 8th grade, and grades 9-12 in levels 1-4. My “expert” areas are in Levels 1-2 and I am getting pretty good at Kinder Zoom class 🙂
My parents taught me Spanish here and there when I was young and that really inspired me to become a Spanish teacher. I learned Spanish from two awesome teachers named Erin (yes, they had the same name) and it was done in a very “hybrid” way, meaning that I learned grammar, had vocab lists, but the games and activities were communicative based. I thrived in that setting and so did many of my close friends in high school. I believe we had 7-8 of us in Spanish 4 and these were the people that really put in the effort to learn a language. I was forced to speak Spanish (meaning I had to do speaking activities) and I am thankful that I did. I was prepared for college and for that I am grateful.
College
At BGSU, I met someone who would change my life and the way that I looked at teaching. Dr. Burke is the only professor I had in college who actually gave really good feedback and she taught me how to write the absolute best lesson plans. I learned about expeditionary learning and still would love the opportunity to work for an EL school one day. Burke really pushed CLT proficiency-based teaching with as little English involved as possible, focusing deeply on the 90% guide by ACTFL. Never was I allowed to hand her a vocab list, something involving translation, or activities where kids respond in English. Oh, and don’t you dare ever ever think about handing her something from TPT or created by someone else because you will get roasted.
Student teaching was incredibly strange to me because I sincerely had never created materials for novice learners. What did she just say? Yes. All throughout my undergrad, I realized that my materials and activities were for students in at least level 3 or on the other end of the spectrum, for kindergarten. I didn’t know how to make language comprehensible to these baby novice learners and I was drowning. So, Así se dice was definitely my BFF. Dr. Burke is going to read this and take away my degree. Looking at a textbook helped me see how activities for novice learners were structured and I ran with it for levels 1-2. For levels 3-4, I dabbled in using readers and making my own lessons and really enjoyed it. I graduated, got my first job, got engaged, and made my way into my first year of teaching.
Year 1
My first year of teaching was a hot mess express. I used Voces and I really liked it but there was a crucial aspect of my curriculum that was missing…reading. Yeah. I know. It was awful. Voces was built around vocab lists and grammar activities. I wasn’t sure how to really do a lot of the teaching that was required for students to be successful with it. It did have authentic resources and the 4 modes of communication, but lacked creativity. They learned…kinda. (I do not know if this is the case for Voces right now but just my own personal experience).
One day, I stumbled upon a blog called The Comprehensible Classroom and discovered the magic door into the world of Comprehensible Input. Imagine sitting down around 3:30pm to lesson plan, you are exhausted, you just want to find a good idea that will get you through the next day. You find a website that talks about how authentic resources are overrated and you can’t believe the title because your entire units revolve around authentic resources. You get through it and learn more about readers and decide to click around more on this website until 6:30pm, and you can’t begin to describe how overwhelmed you are because you just found the answers to why your kids were struggling with learning…..the materials were NOT comprehensible. Please see below for an accurate animation of me when I realized this horrific mishap.
Comprehensible input. I knew this term from college and I knew that Dr.Krashen came up with the input hypothesis. I also knew of the Output Hypothesis by Swain, but these two didn’t seem to fit together. I never felt like I saw was novice CI looked like but I knew what I could do in upper levels to help students learn (readers and writers workshops, literature circles, annotation walks, etc). These strategies were things that should also work with novice students but I was struggling to make it happen and kids always needed a translator it seemed. In college, we weren’t supposed to shelter words and grammar because we should be teaching decoding skills and ways for students to get around that…but again I had no idea what to do with that on my own. I was really successful with it in my upper level classes because the background knowledge was already there. Now I was left with the biggest question of all….how do I truly make novice learning comprehensible and how will I do that in all Spanish?
How do I truly make novice learning comprehensible and how will I do that in all Spanish?
Me.
Okay, so back to talking about this blog, The Comprehensible Classroom. People, this blog is a gold mine of ideas and PD that you could read for a year and still find something new each time you read it. I found this blog post and then this entire thread. Take 30 minutes to digest and read these if you have not already. It took me a while to come to terms with what I read, like an entire year. I swallowed my pride and began to work.
Year 2
Ahh, year 2. It started out so so so well. I was digging deeper into CI, my kids were reading texts, we did a novice reader in both Spanish 1 and 2, and I was incredibly impressed with the acquisition happening in my classroom. I was lucky enough that my friend from college was teaching across the hall from me and we were a powerhouse team.
I started using Garbanzo with my students and I actually started doing some Freelance work for Martina at The Comprehensible Classroom out of sheer luck because I had mentioned I had a passion for technology in the language classroom on one of her Instagram questions. I literally DIED when she asked to set up an interview. From October to February, I helped format some of the stories for Garbanzo (El Sorteo de Navidad/La Corrida de Torros, etc). Then, stupid ugly Covid came and I started helping Martina make digital activities for what would become SOMOS Flex. This is where I truly saw how to make quality activities that promoted acquisition in Novice learners. I am forever grateful for the time I spent with that team and getting to know some really amazing people (Señora Lovely / Profe.Zulita).
Over the summer, I obtained the SOMOS curriculum and quickly answered my questions about acquisition (for now). I was content and I knew that year 3 would be better. Ha.
Now, go on to part 2 where I talk about my current life as a third year teacher and all of the things I still need to learn and implement.