Teaching demonstration

Some views of my second home--ROOM 818!!

In My Classroom

Welcome to my classroom...in the cloud! The following recording was from last year's distance learning. Unfortunately, I did not know how to have my face in the video, and the students were being shy (as usual) and were only using chat. I refer to the chat throughout the video. Hopefully this demonstration highlights a few areas of my teaching and philosophy:

• Students must have input that they can comprehend if they want to be able to acquire the second language

• This input can be enhanced or strengthened via visuals, modeling, rephrasing, etc.

• Teaching content takes priority over teaching isolated grammar

• Acknowledging ALL students and their contributions to class is a way to have all students buy-in; no one will want to speak if constantly corrected

• Although there is the ACTFL recommendation of 90% target language use, I do believe in slipping in processing time in the L1 at a certain point in the lesson. Cognitive overload can result if too much information is given at once, especially at the lower proficiency levels.

• I want students to be able to apply the information, but the output is structured and somewhat controlled. I provide sentence frames for students to use to give them a bit more confidence, and you will see this at the end of the video.

In this lesson, we are beginning the unit on our next AP Theme: Families and Communities. I like giving students an outlook of where we have been thus far in the course, as well as what we will be thinking about in the current unit. We usually start very general, as in "What is a family," and then we progress to more abstract and complex topics, such as "How are families changing nowadays, and why?"

The AP Themes are a guide for my class content, and form the curriculum of my course. Students usually feed into AP Spanish Language & Culture following my fourth year Spanish course, so it is imperative they are exposed to these themes and content, albeit on a smaller scale than what they will be doing in AP.