Easy Ways to Begin Giving Students Choice and Differentiation

One of the current buzzwords and phrases in education is student choice, or more commonly known as differentiated instruction. To a degree as language teachers, we are probably already addressing differentiated instruction, since language encompasses so many different modalities of input/output such as listening, reading, writing, and speaking. How can we allow students to learn and to demonstrate mastery in a way which best suits them and their interests?

Let me say that the topic of student choice/differentiated instruction is HUGE and cannot be fully addressed in a single blog post, nor do I want to oversimplify the topic. However, here are some initial ways/baby steps in which you can modify some of your current activities/assessments to begin implementing student choice:

• On any type of written assessment (outside of final exams and other standardized assessments), give students choice of the minimum number of questions which they must answer to demonstrate mastery; anything which they answer beyond that correctly can count towards backup credit. For example, if you give 10 questions, students only have to answer 8 of them but may answer more as backup credit. On a recent sight reading comprehension assessment which I gave, there were three sections which students had to address. However, these were the directions for each section:

• 1) Main Idea - pick TWO of the details below to answer in English. You may answer all three as backup credit:
• 2) Details: Marcus experiences a number of different emotions in this reading. Pick TWO of them to answer in English and explain why he feels that way according to the story. You may answer all three as backup credit.

• 3) Drawing Conclusions: Answer ONE of the following questions in English. You may answer both as backup credit.

• For formative listening comprehension assessments such as a dictation, give students the option to either draw a picture of what they hear or to write out a translation of what you are dictating. Do not mark errors in a translation unless it does not demonstrate comprehension.
• Culture Choice - when addressing a cultural topic, give students a choice of aspects of the topic to address. Last week in my Latin 2 classes, since we are reading Emma Vanderpool's Incitatus (a horse whom the Roman emperor Caligula made a senator - yes, most likely this did happen in history!), I wanted students to learn about Caligula (not an easy topic to address if you know anything about him). It turned into a 2-day in-class assignment where on day 1, they took notes on an article called "Caligula - The Embodiment of Cruelty." However, on Day 2, students then had a choice of topics about which to read which focused on "the other side of Caligula". Students then had a Google Form to complete where they used their notes from the Day1 article combined with whichever Day 2 topic they chose in order to "reconcile both sides" of Caligula: 

Observations

1. I have found that when it comes to assessment questions, students are VERY appreciative of having the choice of which questions to answer. While I have found that most students will indeed answer all of them, there are those who like that they do not have to answer every question, especially if they do not know the answers to those questions! In giving students a choice of which questions to answer, they are able to demonstrate mastery to me in those areas where they feel successful. 
2. In a drawing dictation, I love giving students the choice of drawing or translating what they hear me dictate. In either choice, students are demonstrating comprehension in the way which feels best for them at that moment. Plus, I have students who HATE drawing!
3. The Caligula Choice Board went very well, and I was very pleased at what students had to say about this emperor based on the Day 1 article and their Day 2 topic choice. No one topic was chosen over the others, so students apparently were able to pick something which interested them.

Write and Discuss as Pre-Writing Preparation

Update - there is a new blog post detailing "Write and Discuss - the OG version"

Writing in the target language is a skill which we want our students to develop, but so often we give students a topic and say, "Go ahead - write!" Students struggle to put down words, and even as sympathetic readers (an ACTFL term) who are focusing on "Am I able to understand what students are communicating errors and all?", as teachers many times we see that it can be difficult for students to "produce language." I am a firm believer that students cannot output unless they have enough comprehensible input and that students will write when they are ready to write. Personally, I feel like students can never have too much comprehensible input - we want to bathe our students in it to such a degree that as a result, students will naturally overflow with output. So if we are providing students with input, why do they struggle with writing and putting down ideas as output?

A few weeks ago, I gave my Latin 2 students a timed write where the topic was about Incitatus, a novella by Emma Vanderpool which we are reading. We had been back for second semester for 3 1/2 weeks, and I had spent the first week previewing the target vocabulary and structures through a movie talk and a subsequent reading. The following 1 1/2 weeks we read (and re-read!) through the first chapter of Incitatus, and in my opinion, I felt strongly like we had covered it to such a degree that students should be able to write about it, right? I was wrong! Now it wasn't that students could not write, but I could tell that many students were really struggling. My question was why? Was it that students were not ready for it yet? Had I not given them enough input for them to be able to output? Was I pushing them into something which was above their current capabilities? Was I at fault for possibly projecting too high of an expectation on them?

In many ways, there are other factors involved, so I cannot oversimplify the situation and say that comprehensible input is a panacea for all of this. I know that if I were to ask students to write paragraphs in L1, many would struggle even with that. So what are some ways I can assist students in helping them to write in the target language?

In looking over their post-writing reflections, a number of students wrote that we had not done a timed write since Thanksgiving (December was dedicated to exam stuff), so they felt very rusty when it came to an extended write. Other felt that they did not feel like they knew "enough" Latin from the story to answer the prompt. This feedback was very helpful.

This week, we did another timed write, but this time, I did a pre-writing activity the day before to help prepare students for the write. As a class we previewed the writing by doing a Write and Discuss, which is exactly what it sounds like: as a class, you corporately review a story together by asking students to help you retell the story by writing it on the board in the target language, and then you discuss it. We are currently finishing up a Movie Talk reading on The Smoke Seller, so since it was a Movie Talk, I projected screenshots from the animated short as prompts. Each time, I asked students to volunteer responses in Latin for what was happening. I wrote their responses (and edited their grammar when I wrote it but did not call attention to it), and students copied down what I wrote on the board. Many times, I would guide students by asking in both English and in the target language "Who is in the screenshot? What is that person doing? Where is that person? What is emotion of that person?" 

On the next day, we did the actual timed write and used the screenshots as prompts.

Observations

1. Wow, in their post-writing reflections, students told me that they felt MUCH better about this timed write than the one they did in January. In their post-writing reflections, here is what some students had to say about the Write and Discuss activity: 
• "Working on how to write and practice really helped." 
• "The activity yesterday really helped immensely with giving me ideas about what to write." 
• "Going over the story yesterday helped vocabulary stick to me more." 
• "I was able to remember details in Latin about the story better."
• "I felt much more confident in writing this time than before."
2. This was a great way to review a story corporately together for the purpose of preparing students to write.
3. Having students write down the sentences as I wrote them down definitely kept students focused and also helped prepare them for the timed write.
4. Reviewing the story in this manner definitely gave them more understandable input!
5. Due to the hybrid teaching situation last year, these Latin 2 students are probably more like "Latin 1.5" in terms of their foundational knowledge of the language. This Write and Discuss pre-writing activity truly did give them a lot of support for their actual timed write.

Sight Reading Comprehension Assessment

Often I have struggled with how to give a true reading comprehension assessment, asking myself, "Should it be over a known, familiar passage? Should it be a seen passage? How many questions should it be? How long should the passage be? What exactly am I assessing in reading comprehension - what are the skills I am wanting to see in students when they read?" 

I have been a coach for Martina Bex and Elicia Cardenas' Acquisition Boot Camp (ABC), and the final week of lessons addresses assessments and various ways to evaluate presentational, interpretive, and interpersonal modes. One of the assessments discussed is reading comprehension, and I absolutely love how they present it, because it addressed all of my concerns.

Essentially, you give students a sight passage in the target language to read, but this passage uses known, targeted vocabulary/cognates with some unknown words glossed. Students will answer questions about the passage IN ENGLISH in 5 categories: 

• Main Idea - What happens? What is the author telling us?
• Details - Find three details which support the main idea.
• Translation - Translate the following sentences into English
• Inferences - Based on the context of X sentence, what do you think that this unknown word means? Since X word is a cognate, what do you think that it means? 
• Drawing Conclusions - Why do you think that X person does (Y thing) - support with details from the story.

Recently, I gave my Latin 2 classes a sight reading comprehension assessment based on the above. We are currently reading Emma Vanderpool's novella Incitatus, so I wrote up a passage which incorporated the targeted vocabulary and lots of similar sentences (if not identical) to the Incitatus chapter which we had just finished.

I only did three of the categories (main idea, details, drawing conclusions) for the assessment, but I like how Martina and Elicia have set up the categories.

Observations

1. I was unsure how my Latin 2's would do on this, considering that this group of Latin 2's has been more like "Latin 1.5" in this post-hybrid educational setting (and there is nothing wrong with that, considering how things were last year!). As a result, I feel like I have been taking things much slower and really sheltering vocabulary (and not grammar) with them. However, based on student scores, outside of a few outliers, most students scored above 90. And for ​those who scored below a 70, it shows me that they need more work with the language. 
2. Why do reading comprehension assessments in English and not in the target language? I think Martina Bex says it best here. Years ago, I used to assess reading comprehension in the target language, but after reading Martina's post, I immediately switched to English. 
3. Why do a sight passage instead of an already-seen, familiar passage? A sight passage using known targeted vocabulary and some glossed words will let me know what students are understanding this semester based on something which they are reading for the first time using the language which we have been targeting thus far; therefore, it is VERY important that the passage is understandable and comprehensible for students. If I were to use an already-seen, familiar passage, then I am not truly assessing their reading skills - it ends up being a memory recall of what we have discussed and gone over in class, even if I were to include the text on the assessment. In other words, for many students it would not require them to even look at the passage at all, because they already know the answers. That is not the purpose of a reading comprehension assessment.
4. I think formatives are good for already-seen, known passages, but I definitely like this format for summatives.
5. I love the Inferences and Drawing Conclusions sections, because those are great ways to ask higher-order thinking questions based on a reading.

Movie Talk - FishWitch

This is a movie talk which I just created this week. My colleague Liz Davidson is writing up an adaptation of The Golden Ass for our Latin 3's to read this semester, so I decided to preview some of the vocabulary using this movie talk. This is now one of my new favorite movie talks, because I really like both the story and the animation (it is very old school Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer kind of feel). The words which I previewed were witch, to be afraid of (we were introducing the deponent verb vereri), curiosity, limbs (of a body), and to endure.

Movie Talk script - English

Movie Talk script - Latin

Observations

1. Students REALLY liked this movie talk. It is a very good and thoughtful story. It is a bit on the long side (10 minutes - most movie shorts which I use are about 5-6 minutes) so I only covered the first 6-7 minutes, because by that point, I had covered what I needed in that time. Plus, I wanted to be able to finish the movie talk in one period.
2. This movie short really lent itself to some good PQAs (personalized questions and answers) which seemed natural to the movie talk. As the teacher, I really got into the PQAs with students on this one and had fun!
3. Students LOVED the merman - he is absolutely hilarious and clueless in an endearing way.
4. The animation really lends itself to the feel of this animated short - the stop-animation is such a nice change from the 2D/3D animation.

Taking Care of Yourself

When I hear education experts speak of how we as teachers need to be mindful of trauma and anxiety which students have experienced over these past two years, so often I want to shout out, "Hey, let's not forget about us teachers! We have had to live through this pandemic too! We have experienced trauma too, so do not diminish our experiences!" Honestly I do feel that I have some degree of PTSD still from the sudden, unexpected switch to digital back in March 2020 and then teaching hybrid last year. During that time, I think that I just plowed through it all and never truly gave myself time to react emotionally to the situation while at the same time having to adjust (and still adjusting) to maneuvering through this pandemic and its constantly changing unknown.

So as you begin 2022 and a new semester of teaching and continue to adjust to this weird time in education, here are some pieces of advice for you (and for me) which I have learned during this time:

1. Have a realistic view of your job and performance. One of the biggest revelations which has come to surface for me during this pandemic is that teaching is what I do but it is not who I am. So often our view of ourselves is based on what we do as teachers. Much of this change in my perspective is probably because I am now in my 50's and have taught for over 20 years; however, these past few years have really given me a completely different view on the profession. Now do not get me wrong: I still very much enjoy teaching and learning to become a better Latin teacher, BUT I also am not going to let this take over my life like it once did. This has meant cutting back on how much time I devote outside of the classroom to lesson preparation, the number of conferences I attend or present at, and how much personal time I devote to taking part in professional development and even reading others' blogs. I feel like as recent as 10 years ago, all of those things were my life - that what all I did. Granted those things did give me a great deal of pleasure, but now I am very much enjoying NOT doing them as much. Whatever you are doing in the classroom is your best at this time. I am also so enjoying now being an adequate teacher (NOTE - I am an overachiever, so my idea of "adequate" is probably what most consider to be "very good"). It is incredibly liberating.
2. Do something daily for yourself completely unrelated to your job and education. I work out six days a week. While I have always enjoyed working out, even more now I need to do it for my own mental health. I need to put aside time for myself in doing something that I really enjoy that has NOTHING to do with teaching. During the lockdown, I went to Starbucks drive-thru every day at 3:00pm. Outside of the occasional trip to to the store, that was my one time I left the house during that time. That daily routine gave me something to look forward each day during the lockdown.
3. Enjoy your interests. I love Star Wars - I consider myself one of its original fans, because I was seven years old when Star Wars - A New Hope came out, and I saw it seven times in the movie theater during the summer of 1977. I was the perfect age for all of the Star Wars toys and action figures that come out afterwards (yes, I still have them). However, I was not a huge fan of the prequel trilogy and absolutely hated what they did to the sequel trilogy - the last three movies pretty much killed what I had loved about the franchise. However, thanks to The Mandalorian, I fell in love again with Star Wars. During the lockdown and subsequent months afterwards while limiting my contact with others, I binge-watched the two animated series The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels on Disney Plus. Last summer, I faithfully watched The Bad Batch every Friday morning when a new episode was released, and now the Book of Boba Fett just started! Disney Plus has so many new Star Wars series coming out in 2022, so I am going to devote my Wednesdays when I come home from working out to watching whatever Star Wars series episode has come out that day. So while you may not like Star Wars at all, find what it is that you do like and geek out over it like I do with Star Wars!

Find out who you are outside of the classroom, and enjoy yourself!

Top 5 of 2021

As this semester and 2021 are coming to an end, I am going to take my annual winter hiatus from blogging, but I want to leave you with my yearly Top 5 List of Most Viewed blog posts from this year. Considering how we were still in a hybrid teaching environment for the first half of 2021, it is interesting to note how many in the top 5 are technology-based. As always, I am incredibly thankful for those of you who regularly read this blog and feel that I have something of value to say. See you in 2022!

Top 5 Most Viewed Blog posts of 2021

1. Read, Draw, and Discuss
2. Dragonboy - Movie Talk
3. Using Blooket
4. False Sentences Using Google Forms
5. Giving Grace to Myself and to Others

Using Litotical/Opposite Structures

In my district, we are bound to cover specific vocabulary words for each level of Latin. This districtwide list is based on word frequency found in Latin literature and are specific for levels. While these lists do give us guidance and a map for our district-mandated "pretests/post-tests," I have never been a fan of the lists, because I feel like they squash being able to shelter vocabulary, not grammar. Essentially I end up having to do the opposite. Basically, the list dictates what I must cover; therefore, I end up manipulating readings and passages to include these vocabulary words. Luckily, this post-hybrid year there is a reprieve from these district-level pretests/post-tests for students, so I feel like I can truly focus on sheltering vocabulary, not grammar. At the same time, however, I do have a "responsibility" (to attempt) to cover the vocabulary on this list. 

Last year during hybrid teaching, my Latin 3 colleague/team member John Foulk began to use litotical/opposite structures to introduce new specific vocabulary words which were necessary to target due to this list. Litotes - denying the opposite or saying the negative for emphasis - is a poetic device with which Latin teachers (especially AP Latin teachers) are very familiar! Examples in English:

• Person #1: Are you cold?
• Person #2: Well, I'm not warm!

• Person #1: Do you like your gift?
• Person #2: I am not entirely ungrateful...

We had to introduce the word pauci (meaning "few") but also in a hybrid-teaching environment (may that learning situation be forever cast into Tartarus!) so not an easy task! In my opinion, pauci is just a weird word. As a result, John began to target the phrase non pauci sed multi ('not a few but many"), since students were already familiar with the word multi. John used this phrase over and over again in our readings, and soon the phrase non pauci sed multi became a joke among students due to the sheer amount of repetitions. The phrase even started to appear in student writings, which means that they had acquired it and were now using it on their own.

After this, we began to think that he was onto something and that litotical/opposite structures should be taught/implemented very early in language classes, especially in the lower levels. I know of some teachers who do teach vocabulary in pairs - the target word with its antonym. I used to think that this was overkill and too much vocabulary for students to grasp, but now that I see how students associate vocabulary, it makes sense to me. 

So many topics naturally lend themselves to litotical/opposite structures:

• family members - "not this family member but this one"
• emotions - "not this emotion but this one"
• reactions - "not doing this but this instead"
• size/amount - "not this size/many but this size/many"
• animals - "not this animal but this one"
• occupations - not this job but this one"

Litotical/opposite structures allow for natural repetitions of vocabulary, and students do remember them! As part of language proficiency, you are also teaching students a language pattern which they can manipulate as output as novice learners.