Advice for Multilevel Classes

I was recently corresponding with a new German teacher in South Carolina (schöne Grüße, Frau Becker!), and she asked for advice about planning for a class with both German 2 and 3 students in it.  Multilevel classes are pretty common in upper level world languages, so I thought I'd put my reflections here in case they can help anyone else.

The combination of two levels is tough for teachers. Administrators don't seem to understand how much more work it is for the teacher and how the students are shortchanged. They just look at numbers. As I was told, just be grateful we're letting you do this level at all.  At my school it was a 3/4 split. (And one year I did a 4/5 split, though we only had German 5 that one year!)

When facing a multilevel class, first of all, be kind to yourself. This isn't easy and you won't be able to give the students the same learning experience as if they were separate classes. You are one person and can only do what you can do. 

The upper level students (I'll call them German 4 here for clarity since that was my experience) should be seniors and, at least theoretically, more mature, so focus on the German 3 students, and give the German 4 students more independent work. 

You may be able to have your German 4 students play the role of conversation partner or assistant teacher. Give them a note card with a speaking question that they ask of the German 3 students one on one or in small groups. 

This isn't what you'd do if you had separate sections, but it is using the language and does benefit them. If parents complain, explain that it isn't under your control and ask them to take their concerns to administration. Overall, focus your energy on German 3, where you likely have more students, and do what you can about German 4, but don't expect yourself to be two people.

Back to School

 

After starting the school year on August 12 with all students online, our school board voted on Tuesday to return to in-person learning on September 8.

We'll be moving into Phase Yellow, with elementary students attending 5 days a week and secondary students on a hybrid schedule.  Here's the secondary hybrid schedule:

Bloomington North is the only school in the district with block scheduling, and our hybrid schedule now looks like this:

Phew!  It's taken me about 7 years to adjust to block scheduling, and now this maroon maroon gold gold alternating maroon/gold makes my brain hurt!  I will definitely need to write everything down very deliberately.

Our community positivity rate has dropped to about 2%, which is quite good.  The big concern is that we are a university town, and 40,000 Indiana University students just returned to campus and started classes Monday. 

I just hope that we don't get everyone adjusted to being back in school, only to have to return to online learning a few weeks later.  Fingers crossed, and working to be 

First Teacher Day

Today was originally supposed to be students' first day of school, but that was pushed back a week, and it's now it's the first of 5 teacher professional development and work days.

Successes:

• I recorded a very short video clip introducing myself for an introductory video that my school is putting together for students.  

• I participated in our school faculty meeting on Microsoft Teams and was then able to organize a separate meeting on the fly with two colleagues on Teams.

Not yet:

• After multiple tries, I cannot get my microphone to work within Microsoft Teams when trying to record a lesson and share my screen.  Grrrrrr!  Super frustrating.  It works fine when I am meeting with people and share my screen, but once I start recording, my microphone cuts out.  I may give up on Teams for recording a lesson and try Zoom.

Choice Board for Enrichment

Choice boards have become popular in teaching as a way to give students choices in how they learn a new concept.  

I designed my choice board for students who finish their work quickly and are ready to go deeper (or need something concrete to do so they don't immediately reach for their cell phones).  

This board is designed for German 1 students at the beginning of the year.  I hope to switch out some of the elements as we progress, both to keep things interesting and to provide more challenging choices.

I'm very proud that I've learned how to publish my choice board on Google Slides so that I can embed it into Canvas - and this blog!  You should be able to click on any element in the board and see where it takes you.

I've put a button for the choice board at the top of my Course Resources page

and included a link in the daily agenda.

This will be the first time I've tried a Choice Board.  Since we're starting the year online, it may be hard to know how much it's used, but I hope to keep it when we return to the classroom, too.

Dusting off the Blog

I haven't blogged since the end of last school year, and I didn't really have any plans to get back in the habit, but this morning I saw this:

And I thought, maybe it is time.  No promises that I'll blog every day or that every post will be great, but as I often tell my students, something is infinitely more than nothing.  So here goes...

If an image is worth a thousand words, here's mine for my teaching life at the moment:

That's what I'm working on, anyway - accepting and living with the uncertainty of the current moment.

My school district switched last week from an in person start to the school year (with an online option) to all online learning until at least early September, due to increasing virus rates in our community.  

Since the end of last school year, I had anticipated that when we did return to in person school, there would be some students who would still need remote instruction, and I would need to be able to provide both types of instruction at more or less the same time.  So, I've been planning during the summer with that in mind, which makes the switch to everyone online less hectic. 

During the summer, I was part of a group of teachers from my school who worked (remotely, of course!) on creating a common home page for our Learning Management System, Canvas.  The goal was to reduce confusion for students and caregivers when navigating online learning.  

I had fun learning how to make buttons and customized banners, and I got more experience with Google Drawings.  I also learned just enough html to be dangerous!

Here's what my homepage now looks like:

I'm pleased with the result, and designing it helped me think through how to structure online instruction.  

This is the first 3 day week of school:

It's not the same as in person, but I think it's the best we can do under the current circumstances, and with patience and flexibility, we can make it work.

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web... and thanks!

The World Wide Web celebrated its 30th Anniversary March 12, which makes me feel rather old, but also grateful.

On the day before Spring Break, I was pondering what to do with my students on the first day back from break, and I was drawing a blank.  It's more difficult since it is the second day of our block schedule, and on the day before break, I had a lot of students gone, so it was mostly a catch-up day / make-up day.  I don't really want to come back from break to that, so what do I do with my sleepy students who will claim that they've forgotten all their German?

I glanced at my blog reading list, and suddenly I had two good ideas:

For German 1, from World Language Classroom, a "Who is it?" minibook:

The post does not contain a template for German, but I've done minibooks before, so it was quite easy to make my own template.  

I made one following the model from World Language classroom:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_4HTdBgY-_ghly6tO_DyMfYZd4HSCdmE 

and modified it a bit for my students:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XqxS5cBz0lNg1k_TBDlAtOYD_xvEEGjH

Rather than doing a selfie, I plan to number students' books when they finish writing so that they can read each other's books and fill in a guess on a chart:

For German 2, from The German Sector, a March Madness-style German video competition:

I am very, very grateful to Ashley for selecting, previewing, and sharing the 16 German music videos because I'm not very knowledgable about German pop music.

A quick Google search led me to this great March Madness bracket from Plexkits: https://plexkits.com/march-madness-bracket/  

I deleted the parts of the bracket that I didn't need, and Rick very kindly added a winner box for me.  I added hyperlinks to the bracket so that students can click and view the various videos.  

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/138BiHAN3nwxLbM9Ojbyx7eYRNGs_CQRRy52AmAYu5_Y/edit?usp=sharing

This is definitely something that I couldn't have come up with on my own, and I'm very grateful for all the people who shared resources with me.  I hope it will energize my students next Monday morning!

Teacher Life in Detail

Welcome to a (fairly typical) Day in my Teaching Life!

My teacher blogger friend, Sarah of Math = Love and NPR fame, blogged this week about a day in her life.  I love reading Day in the Life posts, so I thought I'd give it a try.  There's a lot of detail here, so I don't blame you if you quit before the end!

5:00 Wake up, shower, get dressed.  It's Friday, so I wear my Bloomington North sweatshirt. Yay for comfy teaching clothes!  (Side note: My 12 year old son, Andrew, wanted to be in the picture.  We live in Bloomington South district, so I told him after I took the picture that I could blackmail him with that picture when he is in high school at South.  Second side note: picture taken at 6:29.  Andrew is neither awake nor smiling at 5:00.)

5:20 Empty dishwasher, make breakfast

5:40 Eat breakfast (cherry almond steel cut oatmeal - so yummy! and tea) while checking school email

5:50 Complete Spanish lesson on Duolingo, keeping my 14 day streak going

5:54 Work on enrichment activity for German 3/4 while finishing my tea

6:30 Kids leave for the bus stop, and I drive to school while listening to Planet Money podcast about the lottery - it has me laughing all the way!

6:45 Arrive at school, check mailbox (empty, which is always good), and head to my room

6:50 Unlock room, turn on computer, and take lunch to the prep room fridge.  Fill up water bottle.

6:55 Update the Macht jetzt (do now) for today and make sure everything is ready for German 1 block 1.  Work on German 3/4 enrichment activity some more and chat with early-arriving students.  

7:20 My student teacher, Matthew Hurley, arrives.

7:25 Bathroom stop and hall duty

7:40 Block 1, German 1: We start with a quick game of Ich habe, wer hat (I have, who has) to review before the vocabulary quiz.  This class beats the previous class's time by 2 seconds and is very pleased.  Students take their vocabulary quiz and then have time to work on their meine Familie presentations.  Manage to keep most students on-track and not playing video games on their computers.

8:30 Finish presentation work time and watch a short video about Angela Merkel.  Then, we read a paragraph (all in German - pretty good for German 1!) about her family.

9:05 Block 1 ends, hall duty, assist teacher next door who had a student pass out at the end of class

9:10 Block 2, prep: I make a cup of tea and eat some yogurt during announcements.  Work with Matthew to edit guided notes and practice activities on the past tense for German 3/4 that he made.  Finish the enrichment activity.  We still have some prep time, so we look at plans for German 3/4 for next week and I get some computer triage on my school laptop from our wonderful tech team.

10:40 Tutorial: I have about 10 students signed up.  Several are here to make up the course pretest which was given on a day they were absent.  I get them started on the pretest.  The other students are here to practice vocabulary for the quiz this afternoon.  They don't need any help, so Matthew grades German 1 quizzes, and I work on speaking cards for the current units.  I also eat most of my lunch!

11:25 Block 3, German 3:  We begin with the vocabulary quiz and a lot of complaining about how difficult the words are.  

12:00 Differentiation: last class students took a "pre-quiz" on the review topic of past tense forms.  Those who scored 90% or better do an enrichment activity about Sternsinger (star singers - children in Germany who go door to door on Epiphany, singing and collecting donations for children's charities), while the rest of the class reviews and practices verb tenses.  

12:30 Not much class time left after that, but get the whole class back together for reading passage about an 18 year old German boy's university and career plans.  Energy is low but we get through it.

12:50  Lunch: Finish my lunch with a few world language colleagues in the prep room.  Quick bathroom stop, check my cell phone and home email, and get my stuff out of the way so Matthew can teach Block 4.

1:30 Block 4, German 3/4: Same plan as Block 3, except Matthew is teaching and having his first (informal) observation.  He does just fine!  

I try to stay out of the way and grade quizzes in the back of the room.  Students did better than I expected, given all the complaining.  The English-German and German-English vocabulary is actually very good, but the irregular verb forms are a mess.  Must think of some way to get the students practicing this more effectively.  

2:15 I take the German 4 students to the language lab to watch a short film while German 3 does the reading with Matthew. 

2:55 School ends: Meet with Matthew and his student teaching adviser to discuss his observation.  He's doing great - just needs the confidence that comes with more experience!  Side note: His observer happens to be the husband of my older son's kindergarten teacher, and his daughter babysat for my kids.  This is typical for Bloomington, where everyone knows everyone somehow.

3:30 Leave school and drive home

3:45 Arrive at home.  Have a snack and watch Elementary with my kids.

4:45 Debate whether or not to go to exercise class.  It's a rainy, dreary Friday afternoon and I'm tired from the week.  It's tempting to curl up under a quilt and relax, but I really should go.  It probably helps that I'm blogging my day, and I don't want to appear too lazy to readers.

5:00 Debate which class to go to and decide to try a barre class at 5:30.  I love to run outdoors, but when the weather is bad and for cross training I go to the IU Student Recreational Sports Center, which is closer to my house than the Y.  Non-students can join for a fee, and they have a huge variety of drop-in group exercise classes, as well as an indoor track and tons of cardio machines.  You have to get used to the idea of working out with people half your age, but a lot of IU faculty and staff use it too, so I'm usually not the only non-student in the class.

6:15 Finish barre class and and SO glad I went.  Though I think I was the only person over 30 in that class, it was a lot of fun and I feel more relaxed and energized.  Not sure my legs and I will be on speaking terms tomorrow, but it was good for me.  I actually exercised 4 out of 5 days this week - proud of myself!  (And I am a more pleasant person to live with!)

6:30 Get home, eat dinner - leftover night at our house.  I have spinach stuffed shells and salad.  

7:30 My husband and kids leave for Friday night indoor soccer league.  I skip it this week and settle in to watch TV and grade quizzes.

8:00 I'm hungry, so I try a new recipe for 5 Minute Chocolate Mug Cake, and it is delicious!  I highly recommend it, and it really does take only 5 minutes.  It's very chocolaty, so I recommend paring it with a big glass of milk and possibly sharing it with a friend.   

9:30 Bed Time.  The soccer players arrive home shortly thereafter and report that both boys' teams won easily.  Next week is the tournament, in which they may play against each other, as they have already once this season.  Swank vs. Swank, the rematch.

That's my day!  Hope it wasn't too long or excruciatingly detailed.  I tried to take pictures during the day for the post, but I noticed that as the day went along, I got absorbed in what I was doing and forgot.  That probably explains why I only manage to post a #teach180 picture abut half of the time! 

Unit Planning

I've been working quite a bit this summer on unit planning.  During my first two years of teaching German, I really had to take things day to day because I didn't have a good sense of what my German 2 and German 3 students knew from the previous year.  Also, I wasn't sure how much I could accomplish during an 85 minute block period.  I really like to plan ahead more, but it just wasn't possible as I figured things out as I went along.

Now that I have two years of experience teaching on a block schedule and we have a new, more useful textbook, I feel like I can finally do some real unit planning.

The first thing I did was search on the internet for a unit planning template for secondary world languages.  I found a couple that were close to what I thought I wanted, so I started with those and made changes until I had my own.  Here's what it looks like:

Each unit lasts about 10 days, and I'm planning for 4 units per semester.  

After a short 4 day review unit, my German 3/4 students will start their first regular unit on Die Alltagsroutine / The Daily Routine.  Here's what the unit plan looks like so far for that:

If you'd like an editable copy of my Unit Plan template, click on its picture.

Looking Ahead

Whoa, school starts three weeks from Monday!  Time flies in the summer.

I've had a really nice and relaxing break so far.  In mid-June we spent a week in San Francisco for a wedding in my husband's family and for some sight-seeing.

Next weekend we'll head up to Michigan to spend a week with both of our families, and after that, there are just 3 break days left before teacher work days.

In between, I've been enjoying the relaxed pace of summer and having a chance to do some big-picture unit planning with our new textbook.  I updated this blog to indicate that next year will be my 5th year of teaching (3rd year in German at Bloomington North).  Next year I will be five-sixths time and teach three sections of German 1 and two sections of German 3/4.  I'll miss teaching German 2 - it has always been my favorite level to teach, but I'm looking forward to teaching German 1 again.  And I'm excited that we will be able to offer German 4 for the first time since I have been at North.  There are only 3 students, so they are combined in with the German 3 classes, but it's a start.  And there are about 50 students enrolled in German 3, so hopefully we'll have more students continue on to German 4 the following year.