New Format

A curious combination of circumstances has caused me to consider who I’m reaching, how, and why, as I attempt to teach children for the second time.

I was scheduled to attend a taping of The Rosie Show on January 24. The taping was rescheduled for January 30, which was then canceled entirely. Why? Rosie changed the format of her show, moving out of the 400-seat theater (former home of The Oprah Winfrey Show) and into a smaller, more colorful venue with no studio audience. Why, you may ask again? She didn’t want to do the same show she did the last time. She didn’t want to do the same thing again. Been there, done that.

Crazy or not (it probably seems crazy if your entire life has not been shaped by and does not revolve around Rosie, as mine does), this inspired me to change the way I teach. I decided I did not want to teach the same way I taught the first time. That way worked perfectly well, I suppose. Children learned, and they liked my class, and some of them even said I was nice. But I just did not want to do the same thing the second time around.

Teaching AP French has been a new experience for which I have had to (necessarily) discover, create, innovate, and all those other inventy-type words. But I had essentially been teaching French I the same way I did it the first time, albeit with some new, more creative activities thrown in. Sounds like Rosie, right? Same old show as the first show, but she added a few new elements. The format – the essence of it all – was no different than before. But I did not want to do what I had already done.

So I changed it all. On the surface, it might not seem that different – I am still the same person with the same personality and the same style – but to me, it is a completely new approach. The old approach was something like this: get through the first chapter, and then the second chapter, and then the third chapter, and then the fourth chapter, and so on and so forth, and create a bunch of activities that will fill 90 minutes two or three times a week.

The new approach (based on the AP model) emphasizes on real-world communication, connections, and critical thinking: create 90-minute lessons that have a beginning and end and that teach students a variety of skills; use authentic materials so that students can understand and produce language that people who actually speak the language would produce and understand; allow the textbook to be a supplement to my teaching, and don’t worry about going in order or at a certain pace; teach the children what it is you think they should learn.

So this is what I have been doing for about four weeks. Without going into too much pedagogical detail, a couple of examples…

1)      Students read an authentic weather bulletin and accompanying article about recent heat waves in the French-speaking world. We discuss strategies for reading articles (using context clues and familiar vocabulary). They answer ten short answer questions about what they have read (even though they cannot possibly understand every word.)

2)      Students view a PowerPoint about two teenagers, Louis and Sophie. Biographical information is presented about the teens, and we learn a bit about their personalities. Students then read a passage in the textbook about possible sports and activities and fill in a graphic organizer. They must then suggest to the teenagers, based on their personalities and preferences, which activities they should do.

I am doing nothing revolutionary or overly complex. I am just trying not to do the same thing I did the first time.

After four or so weeks of this, my students took a test and the grades were... mixed. Half of the students performed very well, and the other half performed… dismally. I shared this information with my colleague at our Professional Learning Community meeting, and her response was surprising.

“I think you need to do more drills and straight translation exercises. You are losing half the class with what you are doing.” (Not a direct quote, so I shouldn’t have put quotation marks around that, but let’s say that was more or less the gist of it.)

Normally, this colleague sings my praises and tells me (so much that it can be uncomfortable) that I am a good teacher. But as soon as I go trying to get students to really think and learn – to use 21^st century skills (buzz word alert!) – I am no longer doing something praise-worthy? (To be fair, she is still impressed by my teaching and thinks it works well in a perfect world… just not necessarily in the reality of our situation. She is by no means a villain here.)

But all that got me thinking. I suppose I have two choices here. Divide the class in two. I can either (a) appeal to the highly motivated students who appreciate my creativity and rigor, or (b) spend 3 class periods drilling the verb faire while my highly motivated students are bored to tears. (Or (c) forget about content entirely and spend 3 weeks planning for our in-class Mardi Gras party.)

The test in question consisted of the following sections:

·         A vocabulary section taken directly from a warmup activity completed one week earlier and discussed in class in great detail

·         A fill-in-the-blank section with the forms of the verb faire

·         True/False questions about Quebec

·         An article to read about snowy weather in France and multiple choice questions to answer

Which required students to:

·         Pay attention in class

·         Study at home, and memorize 6 subject-verb combinations

·         Pay attention in class

·         Think critically and use knowledge and skills without getting frustrated and giving up

(Note: Only one of those sections, which made up 10% of the possible points, was “difficult”. A 90% on the test would have been easily doable; an 80% excusable. Yet the class average was 65%... half got A’s and B’s, half got very low F’s.)

Maybe I am too much of an intellectual snob to realize that I am just way overshooting where my students can perform. But I don’t think so. I think that half of them do not really care, do not have any interest in what’s going on, and definitely do not study. The fact that they didn’t bother to learn the 6 (actually, only 5) forms of the verb faire seems to confirm that. So why should I teach to them? I won’t. I refuse.

Students don’t need more drills and repetition and answers handed to them for the purpose of mere regurgitation. They need to learn how to think. And that’s what my students are going to learn to do, no matter how much they – or the system – try to resist.