The Post Covid/Hybrid Student

The following are my observations and by no means represent anyone else's views other than my own.

This past month marked the three-year anniversary of the lockdown. Since then, we as teacher have endured the sudden switch to digital learning during that time, the subsequent year of the hybrid classroom, and then last year's return back to full in-person teaching. I have noticed much about the post-Covid/Hybrid student and how much that student has changed since pre-Covid. Quite honestly, I am absolutely perplexed - here are some observations:

• Technology has changed the way in which students view assignments and classwork. I am all for using technology in my classroom. I possess a graduate degree in Instructional Technology, so I understand the educational theory behind integrating technology into one's curriculum for the purpose of creating higher order, critical thinking in students. In other words, I am not one to just assign digital work for the sake of assigning digital work. Plus, I never assign homework which students must complete outside of class - I always give students ample time in class to do digital assignments. Also, this past year, my school went 1:1 with Chromebooks as a result of being unprepared for digital learning during the lockdown and hybrid teaching, so all of my students have access to technology. HOWEVER, in my observations, students seem to think that anything technology-related gives them the license not to complete work, to put it off for completion at a later time, or not to participate. If I ask students to fill out a quick online survey, to complete a digital assignment, or to take part in a digital activity, it is such a hassle to get them to complete it. However, if I give students something on paper to complete physically which they must turn in or we do a in-class group activity, then it does not seem to be an issue. I noticed this prior to hybrid teaching even as early as 2017, but it has magnified greatly since our return. 
• Allowing students to turn in missing work and to retake assessments have shifted expectations. I firmly believe that we need to give students retake opportunities and remediation so that they can demonstrate proficiency and minimal mastery of the material. Once a month, I devote a classroom day to making up/retaking assessments and providing any needed remediation prior to retakes. Students also have until the end of the semester to complete any digital work. But in doing so, have I unexpectedly and unnecessarily created an expectation among students that they do not need to be "present in the moment" when it comes to turning in work and being accountable for knowing material? I will admit that during hybrid teaching, the name of the game was survival, so we teachers were allowing students to turn in late work, half-completed work, anything (!) just so that we could assign these students a grade of some kind and get them to pass the class. Are we as teachers still furthering this model which we created and in a sense are enabling students to further this behavior? Have we conditioned students to expect this? To be honest, there is a limit of how much grace which I can give students on my end.
• I am seeing a lot more student absences than I did pre-Covid. More importantly, it is not a one-day absence, but more of a weekly "2 days at school, 3 days absent" pattern for certain students. Is it because the expectation now is that since much of student work is digital, students think that they do not need to be present in class any longer? As I stated earlier, I am all about giving students an opportunity to make up work and to retake/resubmit low-scoring assignments and assessments, but it is very difficult to do when students are not present in class.
• I am definitely seeing an increase in student failures. The no-fail, CI-model which my Latin program had established years ago and had seen much success pre-Covid is no longer operational. Students cannot pass if they are not doing their 50% or are not present in class on a consistent basis. 
• I have never had to battle cellphone and earbud/AirPod usage in class before like I am now. Daily I begin each class with my cellphone ritual (where in Latin I tell students to put away their phones into their bookbags) - because I do this daily, students know the routine. Plus, I put my phone away too in my bookbag along with them to model this expectation. However, I am amazed at how often I still have to tell students to put away their phones, to remove their earbuds/Airpods, and if they are wearing hoodies, to lower their hoodies so that they cannot hide these listening devices underneath. I am finding that personal devices are distracting students to such a degree that they feel like they cannot be without them at all times.

I write all of this not to complain but rather to ask myself the following questions: Where is it that I need to manage my expectations and to adjust them to have a more realistic outlook about today's students? Last year, in our return back to in-person teaching, I adjusted my expectations of what students should know, moved the goalposts of how much material I would cover, and devoted the year to filling in any knowledge gaps. Do I need to continue? On the other hand, where is that students need to manage their expectations and to realize that the educational model which we had set up during hybrid and last year's rebuilding efforts were temporary and are no longer the norm? 

I do not profess to have any answers here. What are you seeing in the post-Covid/Hybrid student?

Quick Grid BINGO Review

In my last blog post, I wrote about attending the Voces Digital Online Spring Conference and how I attended many great sessions and learned many new strategies. Here is one which Kara Jacobs demonstrated: Quick Grid BINGO.

This is an activity which can be found on Martina Bex's website, and it is a very easy to facilitate. The video below is Kara's demonstration of the activity in which I participated online, and yes, the Keith whom she is addressing in the demo is me!

I tried Quick Grid BINGO this week as a post-reading review of a chapter of Orpheus et Eurydice. Since I was trying this out for the first time, I focused on making it a review of the text as cloze sentences as well as some comprehension questions. Below is the list of terms which I projected at the beginning:

Below are examples of the questions asked:

Observations

1. Wow - students were really engaged in this! I think that it was because although the ultimate goal was blackout, students could still get "BINGO" along the way (much like Kara demonstrated).
2. This activity lasted around 30 minutes! I was able to get in a lot of review both in Latin and in English.
3. In her directions, Martina Bex gives lots of different ways in which this activity can be used. I look forward to using this activity in those ways.
4. This is a great way to play BINGO beyond just vocabulary, to use it as a review of a text, and to make it a more purposeful communicative activity. 

Voces Digital - My Continued Need for Professional Development

Last week, Voces Digital sponsored a free weeklong (3-evening, 1-day) online virtual Comprehensible Input conference. Since I would be part of its CI Summit conference team this summer, I attended to support the company. However, I did not expect to get SO MUCH from attending! There were many great presenters (yes, I still fanboy over so many of them) and presentations - I attended Zoom sessions led by Allynn Lodge, Eric Richards, Paulino Brener, Annabelle Williamson, Bryan Kandel, and Kara Jacobs - I even learned how to make dumplings with Haiyun Lu! I am sure that I will blog about some of what I learned once I try out their strategies!

Observations

• This online conference could not have come at a better time. If you are like me, you hit the February slumps where teaching is just plain HARD! School is burdensome for both teachers and students. This is always the time of the year where I annually question why I am a teacher. However, learning new strategies/activities and being among other CI/ADI teachers were very uplifting and motivating! Plus, with it being virtual, I could attend at home sitting at my kitchen table.
• I was able to attend as myself. I was not Keith Toda - presenter. I was not Keith Toda - coach. I was simply Keith Toda - attendee and participant. In other words, I had no other responsibilities other than to learn and to be present in the moment with no other distractions.
• We all need our CI/ADI cups filled and constantly refilled. Although I have been blogging about implementing CI/ADI for almost ten years, have attended numerous conferences, and have delivered numerous presentations on the topic, I am still constantly learning afresh so much about it. I am so grateful that there are people out there from whom I can learn and who motivate me to become a better CI/ADI teacher. I am also reminded that community is SO important - I need to be around other CI/ADI facilitators who "get me" pedagogically and can encourage me.

I challenge you to consider attending a CI/ADI conference this summer (here is a starting list), whether you are a beginner, dabbler/seeker, comfortable implementer, or advanced practitioner. I will be in-person at both the CI Summit and Fluency Matters Conference this summer - I hope to see you there. Get your cup filled along with others!

Social Emotional Learning - Post Hybrid/Covid

Since our return to full in-person instruction in Fall 2021, my district has been big on the term social emotional learning (SEL). If you are unfamiliar with the term, without oversimplifying it (it is big!), one of the components in a nutshell is that when students feel emotionally engaged with a subject, their peers, and their teacher, then they are more emotionally open and apt to learn from you the teacher and from each other - essentially, the building of a community and the creation/management of emotions needed to maintain it. Years ago, I had written a blog post about how I learned about social emotional learning from Betsy Paskvan at NTPRS and how she had used it in a Japanese lesson with us.

In light of students' return to school after a year of hybrid teaching (and for many students, it was roughly 1.5 years since they had actually been physically on campus since March 2020), the push in my district has been social emotional learning. When we began school last August, my district mandated that our first TWELVE days were dedicated to students doing video lessons learning about its importance (by day 2, they were tired of it already! Honestly I felt that these video lessons had the opposite effect for students, because they HATED them) and that we as teachers needed to dedicate time to incorporating SEL in our classrooms due to what students have experienced these past 2-3 years.

Recently in a live Acquisition Boot Camp session, I shared that while I do agree with the idea of social emotional learning in a post-hybrid/covid classroom, for the most part as CI/ADI language teachers, I firmly believe that we have been facilitating this concept with our students FOR YEARS way before that term became a buzzword - we just never called it that. Through Personalized Questions and Answers (PQAs), we have been interacting with our students in the target language to learn about their interests and their lives. We have been personalizing our stories to include them by making them the main characters. Through TPRS/Story Asking, we have included students in our story creation process by asking them for suggestions. We have been delivering understandable messages in the target language to our students, implementing the establishment of meaning in L1 through pointing and pausing, associating vocabulary with gestures and signs through TPRS, creating a safety net for students, taking time out for brain breaks, etc. - all for the purpose of lowering students' affective filters. All along, our goal has been to create a classroom community for the purpose of learning.

So the next time your administrators and district leaders start pushing social emotional learning and that you need to attend professional development to learn more about it, tell them that you have been way ahead of the curve on this already!

Help - I Have Multiple Preps!

A common obstacle for teachers who are implementing CI/ADI in their classrooms or those who very much want to is having multiple preps. For some teachers, having 4-5 preps is common, especially if they are the sole language subject teacher at their school (e.g., Latin, German, Mandarin, etc.). So often these teachers want to facilitate CI/ADI in their instruction, but big picture, having to create 4-5 lesson plans daily is an overwhelming task!

While I usually only have two preps each year, I also know that upon returning to school after Spring Break, I have absolutely no motivation left - the well has run dry, and the name of the game is now survival. I am doing everything I can to keep my head above water. During hybrid teaching, this dearth of motivation was even worse, and teaching became such a burden. However, what I ended up doing then was something which I had learned about from experienced CI/ADI teachers who have multiple preps. Can the following be applied to your situation?

• "I have multiple preps" - Consider doing the same activities and "lesson plan" for each of your preps each day. Although the material/units itself may be different (especially if you are using a textbook) among the different preps, the actual lesson plan itself would be the same but tailored towards that prep. This way, you only have to create one set of plans per se. This is what I do for the last six weeks of school upon returning from Spring Break - every one of my preps is doing the same things but with different material.
• "I have multiple preps at the same time in the same class" - this is such a difficult situation but not uncommon. What do you do if you have a split level class of level 2 and 3 (for instance) which meet at the same time? If you are able (and this is a very big "able"), teach the same lesson/unit/topic but differentitate the level of "grammar" and "desired output" based on the level. For example, you could teach the entire class about Oktoberfest but maybe the upper level would be focusing on the use of the subjunctive usage while the other level's focus would be on another grammar topic. The idea would be to ensure that the lesson is comprehensible to everyone. This may not work if you are teaching from a textbook.

What other suggestions do you have for these situtations?

Output is Messy

As I continue to direct my classroom towards a proficiency-based curriculum and one based on acquisition-driven instruction, I am amazed by what students are able to output purely based on what has been input. However, at the same time, so often that output is strewn with grammatical errors, while some students still have difficulty "outputting." When I see students struggle with either oral or written output, as their teacher I have to ask myself some questions:

• Have they not received enough of the correct kind of input? In other words, while I may have provided students with understandable input, was the input WAY too overwhelming and too much for them to handle? Just because the input itself was understood does not mean that students were able to handle all of that intake. 
• Was my input even comprehended? While I may have delivered what I deemed to be understandable, was it really?

However, the biggest question which I must ask myself, "Is what I am seeing COMPLETELY NORMAL for language learners in their proficiency journey, so therefore it is I who must be the one to change and to manage my current expectations?"

In many ways we can get a false sense of mastery of output demonstrated by novice-level students, since so often their communication is based solely on an exchange of memorized life skill phrases (greetings interaction, memorized dialogues, etc.). Students seem to progress so quickly through novice-level language proficiency, but then it seems like they hit a wall when it comes to intermediate-level communication. Although there is a higher-level of expectation for these learners since it seems like they should be able to do more with the language, their output is strewn with errors!

I once heard Ariene Borutski, a CI French teacher in Southern California, say that according to one of her professors, "proficiency is communicating using what you know." I really like that definition, because now that I understand more about language proficiency and the ACTFL levels, it makes perfect sense! If you were to take a look at the ACTFL proficiency guidelines, you would see the various indicators which exemplify each level. However, the proficiency guidelines NEVER address grammatical errors (either the amount of or lack thereof) as indicating language proficiency. Grammatical errors at the novice and intermediate levels only matter when they impede meaning for a sympathetic listener/reader (an ACTFL term). In most instances, novice/intermediate level students are indeed using what they know (i.e., their mental representation of language) which probably has A LOT of holes and gaps which need to be filled. Although we may wish to speed up the process of filling those holes and gaps, according to second language acquisition research, no amount of explicit instruction and correction will remedy it. It will happen when it happens.

Intermediate-level communication of any kind is MESSY. While a student at the intermediate level may have been exposed to more language than a novice and therefore be able to wield more language output, this student probably does not possess the language control of an advanced learner. So when I hear a student say "mihi vult comedit Takis," that sentence is SO FULL of errors (instead of "volo comedere Takis"). However, when I take a step back and realize: a) that this is an intermediate level student and b) this student is using/applying what is "known" at that moment (i.e., whether it be right or wrong, this is what the student's mental representation of language is) and c) errors are the norm at this level and d) as a sympathetic listener, I am still able to understand what this student is communicating, then I realize the following: 

It also shows me where the holes and gaps are in students' mental representation of language and where to focus continued input. 

So when I go in with an expectation that Intermediate-level communication is going to be messy and probably laden with errors, it is a realistic view of language proficiency. This is not to say that standards are being lowered and watered down - far from it! Instead, our expectations were way too high to begin with and did not reflect true reality! As an Intermediate-High Latin speaker, I am so glad to know this, because for me, it is absolutely freeing to realize ahead of time that I am going to make mistakes, because it is expected! 

Variety in a First Read-through

Just recently, for Latin 3 following a movie talk, my colleague and i introduced a reading based on the movie talk. My colleague had created Google Slides with the text and screenshots from the animated short for students to follow along. There were 15 slides, since the reading was long (but very comprehensible due to lots of repetition). However, I also knew that since it was the first week back from winter break, students' attention span would be short. But because this was a first read-through of the text, I also did not want to rush students through it. While they had been exposed to the reading through the actual movie talk, for most students, that is all it was: exposure - there was no guarantee any acquisition had occurred, so I needed to ensure that we went through the passage together at least once in order to establish meaning. 

In the words of Carol Gaab, "the brain craves novelty," as we began to read through the story for the first time, for every slide, I ended up doing something different with students to keep them engaged in order to add variety. First off, every had a whiteboard, marker, and a rag:

• First slide - I as the teacher simply read the text and translated into English for students
• Second slide - students wrote out an English translation
• Third slide - students did a choral translation
• Fourth slide - read, draw, and discuss
• Fifth slide - students answered comprehension questions
• Sixth slide - Stultus
• Seventh slide and further - repeated sequence or mixed it up

Observations

1. This took 1.5 days to get through 15 slides. 
2. The change in activity for each slide kept students engaged, since most of the slides involved them interacting with the text somehow, and every slide's activity was different.
3. It did keep students "on their toes," because for each slide, they would have to do something (except for the ones where I translated). 
4. Although I could have just barreled through the 15 slides in one day, I felt that mixing it up and having students do something for each slide kept a first-time read-through from getting stale.