In 2020 I was contracted to collaborate with a team of educators to write new State Standards of Learning to be used to guide curriculum and set learner proficiency goals throughout the State. As part of the process, I wrote reasonable, appropriate, and measurable targets and learning objectives that identify what learners should know and be able to do within each proficiency band. In addition to writing learning targets, I also developed progress indicators to help track progress towards objectives.

After conducting a needs assessment with the administrative team, it was determined that our teachers were not consistent in their creation and implementation of learning targets. This was a presentation I created and presented to our faculty about clear learning targets. It was followed up by talking with students during classroom observations. What are you learning today? Why are you learning this? How do you know you have learned it? We began to see that after the presentation teachers were using measurable targets and students were able to discuss the questions when asked.

I was asked to give a presentation on using Comprehensible Input in language classes after the specialist noticed there was a gap between what teachers thought they were teaching their students and what students were able to produce with their language. Comprehensible Input means providing learners with engaging and interesting stories that they are able to understand. In a way, it mimics the natural way that we learn languages as we grow up. Rather than focusing on teaching about the language (grammar, spelling, pronunciation), it focuses on repeated exposure to targeted structures and high-frequency words and patterns. This presentation was followed up by monthly meetings to discuss and mentor new strategies. After the new State World Language Standards were released we began implementing these strategies across the division to align with the new standards.

During the 2020-2021 School Year I was teaching in a hybrid model. I had students in my physical classroom space, I had students logging on to Microsoft Teams, and I had students who worked at their own pace and did not attend some of the live classes. To ensure that students who were not participating in the live class had resources to work with, I made videos of each lesson similar to what I did in a live class. This ensured that I was engaging the learners that were live in a synchronous virtual setting and also providing anytime anywhere asynchronous assignments for those learners who were working at different times. My daily objective is to provide students with a comprehensible story that they are able to understand. Rather than teaching Spanish, we learn about something else or co-create a story together in Spanish. This particular lesson was after Amanda Gorman spoke at the Inauguration, so we spent the day talking and learning about her, in Spanish. Participants would watch the video and interact with a program called Desmos that aligned with my speech and questions. I could then analyze their responses to see where there were gaps and what I needed to create and work on next to fill in those gaps.

Desmos is a program typically used by Math teachers. As I was teaching virtually I needed a way to be able to interact and get immediate feedback from my students. I was able to use this program to ask questions and get answers from my students all while tracking their answers in real-time. I was also able to get immediate feedback at the end of a lesson so that I could analyze and evaluate what worked and what did not work and make adjustments for future content. This was a tutorial I created to assist other teachers in how I was using the program and how they could implement it in their instruction.

www.desmos.com

www.loom.com