Task Rotation

Are there classroom days where you need to leave something for a substitute or where you just need a break and you want students to work on something independently but you can still introduce some new material in a bite-size chunk way? Well, here is an activity which may work for you!

I am currently taking a gifted certification class, so I am required to implement a number of gifted strategies in my classes and to turn in lesson plans showing that I facilitated them with students. While these strategies work great for core subject areas, unfortunately most of them are not aligned with the second language acquisition process, so I end up having to tweak them to fit my situation (which ends up not really resembling the original but rather the "spirit" of it). Here is a "gifted" strategy which I tweaked and tried with students on a day where I just needed a break.

The strategy is called "Task Rotation," and the concept is for students to work with a concept through completion of tasks which address different learning domains: 

• mastery - ask students to remember and describe.
• understanding - ask students to reason and explain.
• interpersonal - ask students to explore feelings and relate personally.
• self-expression - ask students to imagine and create.

So on this day where I needed a break, I created a Task Rotation for my Latin 2 students where the goal was to introduce four new vocabulary words and then have students do different, short learning domain tasks with them - again, this activity in many ways just reflects the "spirit" of the original strategy. NOTE - I had to label the domains as part of my gifted assignment. When I do this again, I will leave out the domain titles. 

As a class, I first defined the four vocabulary words so that everyone had a common meaning for these words. After that I explained what the three other tasks were but that they could do them in any order.

Observations

1. Because I was using this to introduce some new vocabulary, obviously me defining the words for the class for the "mastery domain" is not true mastery. 
2. The interpersonal examples which were given in my gifted class were "Write a personal letter to a close family relative explaining your feelings about X topic" or "Describe the feelings you have when you must use the quadratic equation. How do you deal with those feelings?" These were level 2 students, and asking students to describe their feelings in the target language through writing a letter or a diary entry seemed WAY BEYOND their proficiency ability, so I just had them write a 3-4 sentence story in Latin which used three of the new words. This was not difficult for students to do, because they were already familiar with doing a 4-Word Story. In addition, it involved higher-order thinking, since students were creating their own meaning using the target language.
3. Afterwards, students told me that they liked doing different things with the new words and that it was not just "only write a story in Latin" or "only illustrate the following story" - they enjoyed the variety and that it was short but effective.
4. Did students acquire these new words as a result? By no means, but they were definitely more familiar with them because of the interaction with them and usage.

So consider this as an independent work day activity or when you have a sub. Also, if you do actually use the four domains as prescribed, I would like to see how you had students do it in the target language.