This is my third and final post in a series about seeking sanity during the intense teaching month that is #MarchMadness. In my first post, I invited teachers to put down the red pen. Next, I encouraged teachers to step back and allow students time to reflect on their progress. I also popped over to Path to Proficiency to share ideas about feedforward with student-led ideas for growth. To wrap up, let's talk about the power of our best lesson go-tos.

My absolutely least-favorite household chore is adding to the grocery list for my share of the week's meals. What on earth are we possibly going to eat this week, I fret. I frown at the dozens of cookbooks on our bookshelf. I pick up the pen. And put it back down again. And then I go back to my years-old list of standard go-to dinners that everyone (pretty much) will eat. I just can't be bothered to invent at 8 a.m. on Sunday morning as my husband warns me he's about to head out to Trader Joe's. I need to get it done and move on.

And that's why we eat the same 18 meals all year long, at least from me. And you know what? They're GOOD meals! I can make them fast. They are healthy enough. And did I mention that everyone will (pretty much) eat them?!

So goes it with teaching in March, dear readers.

When you're as tired as many of us are at this time of year, it's time to savor your go-tos. You know what they are: those activities that give students repetition without being repetitious, that get them moving (ideally), and that push them to use their language in purposeful ways. Good stuff and lots of it. Like fajitas or baked potato bar chez Blouwolff, but in lesson format.

If you've been teaching awhile like I have, your go-to list is probably so long that you can't even remember all the powerful teaching moves that you keep in your back pocket. So my third March Sanity tip is to catalog and savor your go-tos. 

Here are my Top Ten Go-Tos, arranged by mode.

INTERPRETIVE:
1. Edpuzzle (here are recent ones I've made on la qualité de vie and les Jeux Olympiques)
2. Textivate (here's one for a simple fingerplay about family)
3. Tweets (here's an example where students learned je suis allé for narrating in the past)
4. Sequencing tasks (putting song lyrics in order using paraphrased English sentences here)

INTERPERSONAL:
5. Taboo (students sit in pairs with one facing board and other facing away; sample list & circumlocution sentence starters here)
6. TALK conversation stations (blogged here)
​7. Ask, ask, switch (students ask & answer questions, changing which questions they ask as they go)
8. Interview a clock partner (sample table for recording answers here)

PRESENTATIONAL:
9. Popplet double-bubble mind map (here a student compared 2 rescue pets up for adoption using the Popplet app, though a paper version would be just dandy, too)
10. Mannequin challenge write-up (follow Annabelle's directions here, then have students watch the video and write up a brief narration of it)

Now I'm going to go print out this list and tape it to my desk so that I can rinse and repeat for the rest of March. What are your go-tos for #MarchSanity? Share a few in the comments section, and maybe when April arrives, we'll have enough oomph in our step to experiment with something new!

P.S. Just for kicks: Here's the recipe for crispy Korean pancakes and another for squash tacos. Because great teachers need to eat. And sometimes, we have to feed other people, too.

Welcome to my second post during the interminable and challenging month of March. While we're past the half-way mark, veteran teachers know for a fact that the second half of the month feels at least twice as long as the first half. N'est-ce pas? ​Therefore I'm sharing strategies to combat March Madness and promote March Sanity, because March drives me a special kind of crazy. In last week's post I encouraged readers to try putting down the red pen and assessing student work without marking it up. Has anyone taken the plunge? What'd you think??

When I'm not too grumpy or busy to notice, March actually turns out to be a great month for taking stock. Therefore my second sanity tip is to provide an opportunity to celebrate your students' progress. Now is the time to step back and appreciate how far they (and you!) have come. We need celebration to fuel us forward into spring, to help us believe that we're getting somewhere, and to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Here are some ideas for taking stock:

1. Ask students to journal (in English) about what they've learned this year. What can they do now that they couldn't do back in September? What are their hopes and dreams for the rest of the year? Reading this kind of journal entry and writing a bunch of short, upbeat responses always buoys my spirits.

2. If you have access to student work from the beginning of the year (Google Classroom? Anything you might have copied for your teacher evaluation process? Students with overstuffed binders they've never cleaned out?!), give students the opportunity to review a piece of their own beginning-of-the-year work alongside a current piece of work. Ask what they notice. Ask how they feel.

3. Have students revisit the goals they set for themselves in September, if they've done this with you (and if not, here's a great website that will help you do this next year). Have they met their goals, or perhaps even exceeded them? Maybe it's even time to set new, more ambitious goals to meet before year's end.

4. If your course has a proficiency target, review what the target looks like in your language, and have students review a piece of recent work according to that standard. In what ways are they showing characteristics of Novice High / Intermediate Low / Intermediate Mid / etc. learners? How are they advancing on the Path to Proficiency?

I hope this sanity tip will encourage you to "hop off the hamster wheel" just long enough to see all that you and your students have achieved this year. All that growth helps us hold our heads up a little higher so that we can plow forward.

Keep reading for more sanity tips later this month.

Is this what you look like when you grade student work past your bedtime? Taking home grading has been a major source of stress for me, and my biggest roadblock when trying to create thematic units and effective lessons.

This (long, long) month, I thought I'd blog about some of the practices that help me be a more sane teacher. I'll be sharing my tips to foster March sanity, and avoid March madness. Because usually, March is a month that drives me absolutely mad. So let's dive into my first pro-sanity tip: grading without a pen in hand.

As Laura Terrill asked at a workshop back in 2014, "How would you rather spend your time: planning or grading?" No contest there: planning wins every, single time. While I've made several changes to streamline my feedback process, one of the most transformative has been to put down the red (well, purple) pen. I was inspired not only by Laura Terrill but also this post and video on Musicuentos (which doesn't say NOT to give corrective feedback, but rather that the research on its effectiveness is inconclusive: all things being equal, why bother?). When I'm assessing my students' presentational writing, I now hardly make any corrective marks for accuracy on their papers. Instead, I might point out a particularly strong complex sentence or cultural example, and leave the rest for the rubric.

Here are three reasons that I find skipping corrective feedback to be a useful practice:

1. My students can't (or won't) process all those marks, even if I do make them. It's just way, way more than they can take in. 

2. As an assessor, my brain can't stay focused on key rubric domains such as text type, vocabulary, and culture if I'm marking up every mis-conjugated verb, every missing article, and every wrong preposition. In the past, when I did make corrective marks, I had to read each essay several times in order to comment on each domain. Now, I can read through once (okay, maybe twice) and get a good sense of where the writing falls in terms of our rubric domains.

3. Corrective marks serve little purpose, unless I'm going to have my students rewrite the entire assessment with corrections for accuracy. They are a good example of feedBACK rather than feedFORWARD. I'd rather have my students focus on proficiency in terms of text type, vocabulary, and culture. I am working to trust the SLA process and believe that with more input, they will eventually become more accurate, comprehensible French writers!

Stay tuned for more tips to combat March madness.

As some of you already know, I spent most of my free time from 2014-2017 pursuing National Board Certification. I can't believe it, either. I wrote about my experiences with Component 2, Differentiation in Instruction, here and Component 3, Teaching Practice and Learning Environment (where you film yourself teaching), here. Last year, I worked on Component 4, Effective and Reflective Practitioner, and Component 1, Content Knowledge (a big, computer-based test that you take at a center).

While I will describe my work on these Components in detail later on in this post, let me begin with a spoiler: I am now a National Board Certified Teacher! As promised, it was a very challenging, and at times overwhelming, experience. I felt deep self-doubt and was scathingly critical of my own teaching some days; other times, I felt like I'd climbed the highest mountains of my practice.  Ultimately, National Board is a very rewarding process that forced me to stretch my teaching in many new directions. Here are a few of the ways that I've grown, phrased as Can-Do statements:

• I can describe my teaching in terms of national standards and best practices
• I can analyze my teaching, planning, and assessing in a deep way
• I can forge professional relationships with experts and peers to seek guidance and grow
• I can present at conferences, give workshops, and write for professional publications 
• I can be disciplined and focused in finding more...and MORE...time to do this work

I also want to make it clear that becoming a NBCT will not crown you Queen (however: check out these sashes shared on Twitter after score release...jealous!), nor cure your case of impostor syndrome (thinking, If I just become X, then I'll finally know and believe that I really am competent). 

When I began the process, I remember thinking that I wanted to either find out, or prove, how good I was. Having an audience of middle school students for nearly 20 years may have created that hunger in me. During the application, I often felt like I was facing all of my weaknesses head-on. Now that it's over, I still feel this endless striving in a few ways. For one, I now appear to wear a permanent set of "laser vision" glasses that allow me to see all the weak spots in my planning, instruction, and assessment. Before I was blind to some of the areas where I wasn't intentional or effective - no more. I can choose to cut corners now, of course, but I see the consequences very clearly. Secondly, the Component that I completed last, when I ostensibly had learned the most about the process and improved my teaching the most, was by far my weakest score. Somehow I managed to spend far more time on it, solicit help from a larger group of experts, and yet - totally screw up! As a result, I feel like I still don't know if I "get" this business about being a Effective and Reflective Practitioner. And I really, really want to get it - so that I know that I know what I know (are you still with me?), and so that I can coach others who want to complete this process. So that is frustrating. Right now, all I know is that I don't know that I know what I know. And I like to know what I know, people!

Here's a description of my work on these two Components, likely only of interest if you're preparing these yourself:

Component 4 has many, many parts, and I spent months trying to understand what I was expected to do. It was by far the most involved component and the hardest for me to wrap my head around. I worried a lot about questions such as: Which parts needed to connect to one another? What evidence was sufficient to demonstrate my actions, yet without revealing my identity? How could I possibly explain all of this work in just 12 pages? I began by creating a profile of one of my French 8 classes based on many sources (eg French 7 teacher, school data, student surveys, parent surveys, observational data, state testing results). Then, I gave a formative assessment (in my case, a quick write/fluency count) to those students, analyzed the results, and asked students to self-assess. Next, I planned instruction to help students improve their writing with a focus on reaching the course target of Intermediate Low. Finally, I gave a summative assessment (in my case, a polished written letter to ePals) and analyzed students' growth. A whole second portion of the component wasn't directly tied to any of this: I also needed to identify a professional need and document my participation in PLCs and the outcome for student learning, so I focused on assessment by mode; and identify a student need that required advocacy, collaboration and/or leadership and show how I collaborated with others to meet it, which I did by working to increase contact with authentic resources and authentic audiences so that students could focus on real-life communication skills.

Although I wish I could say that the hundred(s) of hours I spent on this component changed my practice and for the better, I think I was mostly spinning my wheels. Nonetheless, I can say that two new professional collaborations yielded rich learning for me. One was very close to home (actually, someone IN my home!) and the other was a totally new face.

From my husband, who's a research scientist:

• I learned how to record data about my students
• I learned how to share my findings in table and chart format
• I learned how to use Microsoft Excel

This was the first time that we ever worked together on anything professional, and I loved it! We each got insight into one another's worlds, and we had something totally new to discuss at night once the kids were in bed. 

From our district's data coordinator:

• I improved my ability to write in a descriptive way without judgement
• I learned new ways to show the impact of my teaching through 

This very generous woman spent hours brainstorming with me and then editing my drafts. She was able to point out places where I was unconsciously revealing my own biases, and she scaffolded a lot of my data collection so that it was focused and purposeful.

Component 1 is a half-day test that I only began studying for once I'd submitted Component 4, and I suggest that you do the same. I had from late April to early June to prepare, and that was it! I was quite intimidated by the idea of this test because: 1. I hadn't taken a standardized test since the GRE in 1998, and 2. I'd never taken a computer-based test before (other than the OPIc). However, my 30+ years of French learning, traveling, friendships, and 20 years of teaching built up a depth of knowledge that made this a relatively painless experience. Because one's proficiency in the language is now assessed by the OPI for NBPTS, Component 1 is about language, language acquisition, language teaching, and culture. I found that I was able to answer most questions with confidence because I'd done so much reading about the standards and SLA as part of my work on the other components, and because I'd brushed up on my French for the OPI through speaking with natives (whom I found on The Mixxer) and reading and listening to French in a more regular way (podcasts of France Culture, reading 1Jour1Actu & Okapi to find articles for my classes, reading short novels & memoirs). On the day of the test, I came in well-rested, did some light exercise, ate healthy snacks, drank a lot of water, took advantage of the free earplugs, and did my thing. It is amazing that this short, rather pleasant experience counted for far more than the cruel slog of Component 4!

And that, dear reader, is the end of my National Board saga. See you in 2023 when it's time to renew my certification!

You can see the entire slideshow for my presentation here.
Grit handouts for students, written by the Wellesley Middle School Classical & Modern Languages department, are available here: how to study, test-taking strategies, being resilient, getting the most out of classwork, attending extra help. 
​My go-to movement breaks are on Pinterest here.
Learn to use the TALK rubric for group interpersonal speaking tasks here. 
​Teach students about ACTFL proficiency levels with this lesson plan.
Do EPIC goal-setting with your students by using this sample document.
Speaking mat to support students during interpersonal work can be found here.
Tips for writing in French offers introductory, connection, and concluding expressions.
Strategies for interpretive & interpersonal tasks offers practical tips for students.
This blog post by Colleen Lee-Hayes, called "Thank You for Having an IEP," explains how teaching diverse learners helps us become more effective teachers.

It was such a treat to present this 3-hour workshop with my dear colleague J.J. Kelleher, whom I've had the pleasure of teaching with for nearly 20 years. She was a very good sport to agree to this, and spend time over summer vacation planning it! I also think it's valuable for participants to hear two different perspectives on the how, what and why of our practices.

​Our entire slideshow can be found here and the accompanying handouts here. Natalia DeLaat's handy description of TALK, including feedback cards for students, is here. I wrote a blog post about how I do interpersonal assessments with TALK here. Many ideas for formative assessment, compiled by Wellesley High School German teacher Devon Ellis during our time at Proficiency Academy, can be found in this handout.

Participants' answers to questions can be found here:
Do you assess interpersonal speaking?
​​Why?
How?
What's working?
What would you like to change?

You can see the entire slideshow for my presentation here.
Grit handouts for students, written by the Wellesley Middle School Classical & Modern Languages department, are available here: how to study, test-taking strategies, being resilient, getting the most out of classwork, attending extra help. 
​My go-to movement breaks are on Pinterest here.
Learn to use the TALK rubric for group interpersonal speaking tasks here. 
​Teach students about ACTFL proficiency levels with this lesson plan.
Do EPIC goal-setting with your students by using this sample document.
Speaking mat to support students during interpersonal work can be found here.
Tips for writing in French offers introductory, connection, and concluding expressions.
Strategies for interpretive & interpersonal tasks offers practical tips for students.
This blog post by Colleen Lee-Hayes, called "Thank You for Having an IEP," explains how teaching diverse learners helps us become more effective teachers.

You can see what participants said about my opening session questions by clicking on these links:
How do you support diverse learners?
What's working?
What would you like to change?
.

It was truly thrilling to attend ACTFL for the first time this year. As a gathering for 8,500+ world language teachers, the conference was a veritable "This is your life" professional experience. On the escalators, I crossed a teacher from Falmouth Academy where I interned in 1997; reconnected with the once-young chorus (now French) teacher who left my middle school over a decade ago; and got to catch up with my former student teacher at a session on proficiency-based grading. Not to mention getting to meet all of my tweeps from #langchat and blog heroes like Megan & Kara from Creative Language Class, Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell, Amy Lenord, Stephanie Schenck, and Laura Sexton. Very, very cool.

Throwing my former curriculum (aka the textbook) out the window and designing my own thematic units has been a messy process for me. While I'm in Year 3 of the change with my French 8s, I'm rolling out a brand-new French 7 curriculum this year. Therefore I am reliving the confusion, worry, and mistakes that I made when I began this journey. However, I am not the educator I was in 2013. I've learned so much from my #langchat PLC and Proficiency Academy experiences with Greg Duncan and Thomas Sauer that I've actually set a much higher bar for my units today. It was in this mindset that I came to ACTFL hoping to gain clarity on some areas that remain especially challenging for me and my students:

• Getting more out of fewer & better-curated authentic resources 
• Allowing students more time & ways to process in class: "repeating without being repetitious" as Laura Terrill said in her session
• Designing a realistic & informative standards-based grading system 

While I did not follow Thomas Sauer's sage advice to craft my conference path for a particular goal, I focused on seeing my heroes in the flesh and learning from them face to face. Each session got me thinking about ways I can be more intentional in my practice and more effective in my teaching. 

Here are the questions I'm asking myself after ACTFL, organized by session I attended:

Do This, Not That (Megan Smith & Kara Parker)
• How can I write daily Can-Dos that engage learners of all levels?
• How might Yelp restaurant reviews strengthen my units on Quebec City & food?
• How could I introduce students to new vocabulary in the shopping unit using the Bon Marché website?
• When can I offer pecha kucha as an option for presentational speaking tasks? How will I engage the class audience during this task?

5 Steps to Making Vocabulary Memorable (Laura Terrill & Donna Clementi)
• How can I be more intentional about assessing active vocabulary actively, and passive vocabulary passively?
• How can I incorporate vocabulary practice in all 3 modes into my lessons?
• What could I do with Wordle to support vocabulary practice?

Liberation from the List (Amy Lenord)
• How can I provide more opportunities for students to process, make meaning & draw attention?
• What is the difference between processing, making meaning, and drawing attention?
• How might examples from her Bright Lights, Big City unit apply to my Quebec City & shopping units?

Textbook as AID (Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell)
• Truly communicative tasks allow students to find out new information and create original meaning
• Valid Can-Dos are ones that would make reasonable answers to questions asked at a bus stop (exemple: "I can count to 60" is not a reasonable answer to the question "What time is it?" whereas "I can answer simple questions about time" is).

Moving Toward a Much-Needed Proficiency-Based Grading System (Lance Piantaggini)
• How can I adopt this method even if I'm not a "CI teacher" because I require output?
• What would happen if I scored work but did not count most of it?
• If I don't average grades, what can I do instead to represent overall achievement?
• How do I allow students to show growth & how do I document this growth?
• How can I make provisions for students having a bad day?

As I work toward answering these questions, I look forward to sharing my emerging understandings here with all of you.

 My slideshow can be found here and my handouts here. Below is a sneak peek:

This is Part 2 in what I hope to make a three-part series about my long, long journey toward National Board Certification in World Languages. In 2014, NBPTS began to revise its process and started rolling out revised Components at the rate of 1 or 2 new Components in World Languages per year. As a result, completing the 4 Components will take me at least 3 years. National Board used to be a grueling 1-year sprint. Now it's more of a grueling marathon. While I won't lie and say that I'm savoring every minute, I can see that what I learned the year before really informs my work going forward. I am getting better because I am not in a rush. In a slow process, there is enough time to make mistakes, notice them, change your practice, and try something a second, third, or even fourth time. And I have found lots to change as I examine my teaching in a deeply critical and reflective manner.

In Part 1, I addressed the what, why, and how of my first year of this process when I completed Component 2, Differentiation in Instruction. Now I'm going to describe what I learned from filming my lessons for Component 3​, Teaching Practice and Learning Environment. 

Watching yourself teach is painful, and there's just no way around that. I found myself groaning, wincing, and covering my eyes with my hands nearly every time I watched a video that I'd filmed of my class. My husband could actually tell when I was watching them just by the expression on my face. However, I also saw things about my teaching that I had never noticed when I was busy leading the lessons myself. And these were important things that really helped me refine my practice. For example:

1. My activities dragged on. National Board only lets you submit 2 videos of 10-15 minutes each, so I needed to show more than 1 task in each video in order to provide evidence for every standard. This was very difficult initially because I was playing out each task to the fullest: allowing every student to finish, correcting every question with the full class, recording answers on the whiteboard, etc. I knew intellectually that I was supposed to keep things short, cut activities off when the energy reached its peak, and so on...but I wasn't doing it. Now I'm working on designing activities that still have merit if some students only get partway through in class, and wrapping things up with the first students finish.

2. My lessons didn't reach my least proficient or compliant students. I had a few meltdowns watching videos where I had planned everything to the hilt, maintained my best French...and then discovered too late that one or two students were off-task or speaking English while I was leading the lesson. Clearly, I needed to keep these learners in mind when planning subsequent lessons. As I reviewed my tasks for the lesson, I'd ask myself: "What will W... be able to do during this task, given that he's really at the word level in a class with an Intermediate Low target?" or "How will I keep A... focused during an interpersonal speaking task when I know that he will gravitate toward his friends, whether or not he's paired with them?"
​
3. I did pseudo learning checks all the time. "Everybody got that?" "Are we good?" "Okay?" I chimed in with these non-questions at nearly every pause or transition, yet...mysteriously...no one ever answered in the negative or asked a clarifying question. I'm sure you're not surprised that my 8th graders didn't want to admit when they were lost. Or didn't even know if they were lost. This issue revealed how much I needed to elicit tangible output from my students so that I could assess their learning and respond accordingly. And half a dozen "ça va?"s weren't going to get me there.

4. I needed to plan for target language use during interpretive tasks. Readers of my thematic units already know that I'm a huge fan of the ACTFL IPA template for interpretive reading. Via key word recognition, important phrases, and a brief summary, students write in English to show what they've understood from an L2 text. Which is fine and dandy unless you're trying to make a film that shows 100% target language use by teacher and students. It's virtually impossible to hold class in L2 while working on a task in L1. So, for my National Board submission, I used paraphrased sentences in French which students marked true or false (thanks to Mme Shepard for this wise suggestion!). It was positively dreamy to hear students reading the French paraphrased sentences aloud and debating them. Which reminded me of Laura Terrill's suggestion to "teach in L2 but assess in L1." Now I'm thinking I should save my IPA template for assessments (and practice assessments) but do the bulk of my interpretive questioning in French.

I could go on about my own epiphanies from this process, but what I really want to do is challenge YOU. Film yourself! Watch yourself! And when you're done cringing, think about what you could do differently next time. I can almost guarantee that you'll want to make some changes to your practice immediately. 

And if you're considering starting the National Board process, I highly recommend reading Cult of Pedagogy's blog post on this topic. While not specific to WL, it's spot-on. You can also read Sra Spanglish's post here in which she bemoans the higher standard to which NBPTS holds us WL teachers. You will notice that words "beast" and "wrestling" appear frequently in these posts. And with reason! Wrestling the beast of watching my own teaching was a major challenge...and a valuable one.