1. Year 8 first lesson of the year.

Do you ever come across parents who have low expectations of their child in language because they don't speak a second language? They often have a fixed mindset that they themselves are not "naturals" at language and accept less than appropriate levels of effort from their child in language. They and their child are often focused on marks and ranking rather than individual progress. If progress and success is not immediate, then they give up.

This year in my first lesson with Year 8 I am going to ask them to tell me who are the best two students in the class at English. I will then ask these students, "How many words do you know in English?" "What grammatical structure is your strongest?" I will ask these "top" students, do they avoid speaking English to the rest of the class because their peers are not as proficient as they are? These questions are of course ridiculous and my point will be that the purpose of language is to express yourself and communicate with others. It is not about ranking each other's ability to communicate. Just as they have learned English through exposure and effort, so too is their capacity to learn Japanese.

2. Year 8 first week of the year

Each year my year 8 students take Japanese for the compulsory 100 hours course in NSW. One of the key issues for this introductory course is how to make their progress visible so that they will have the motivation to continue. One of our assessment tasks is a speaking task where they record a self-introduction and interview a Japanese student from our visiting sister school. This year I am going to have them record a script of a basic self-introduction in the very first week of the year. I will give them no tips on pronunciation or what it means. I will have them record the script as a letsrecap.com task. They will do a terrible job!

As we progress through the course, we will return to these videos and gradually unpack what they were saying and how they can better pronounce the speech. We will rerecord it once a term as a homework task. Then at the end of the year we will compare the two and note the progress they have made. These videos can also be emailed directly to the parents. The focus will be on the process of learning and the correlation between effort, modifying your performance based on feedback and successful progress.

3. Year 9 first lesson of the year

After the break my elective class will return with holiday brain fever. They will feel like they remember nothing and may be concerned about their place in the new elective class. My focus is stop them comparing each other and to focus on their own improvement. We will begin with a pop quiz on reading Kanji they learned in Year 8 Jblog 1. I expect no one in the class to remember all of them correctly on day 1. There will be no warm-up, just a shocking quiz. I will collect up the papers and then begin revising those Kanji with flashcards as a group. We will look at the words together and discuss mnemonics to help us remember the pronunciation and meaning. I will then hand back their papers and they will have another attempt at the quiz. I will collect them up and mark them. Students will be asked to reflect on whether they improved on the second attempt and what was the cause of their improvement. Hopefully, they will make the connection that our group study improved their result. They will then be given a week to study the kanji and we will resit the quiz again. Once more we will reflect on whether we improved and more importantly what gave each individual the greatest learning gain. What techniques worked? What techniques didn't? Failure to learn a word is seen as a challenge to be solved, not a reflection on a student's fixed ability state.

4. Year 9 first assessment of the year

The elective class is drawn from 5 junior classes who have been taught by two different teachers. They will arrive on day one with different readiness levels in different content and skills, different interests and learning profiles. Our first assessment is a personal interest project on vocabulary where we give them the option of teaching themselves 50 words in either hiragana, katakana, kanji or a combination of all from an anime or reader. They compose the list, create 2 exams to test themselves on the words in context, and experiment with methods to learn the vocabulary. The teacher will approve the lists to ensure they have set high goals for themselves. Students will be encouraged to quiz each other to help the process in warm-ups but the bulk of the learning will be done at home. This in-class quizzing though has the benefit of exposing their peers to a greater range than their own list. At the end of the assessment on "testing day" the teacher selects one of the two exams they have written for each individual to take. The learning skills and belief in their ability to improve will be the focus of the task which will enable them to better cope with more complex assessments throughout the year.