Your students often praise your ability to not only engage with the material but with them as students. What are some techniques you would highlight for your colleagues as especially successful?

Take a sincere interest in them and their lives. I like to get to class early and chat with them informally about what is going on in their lives. Often, they like to be reassured about something and I can offer them that.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. For example, I love to listen to their modern day jargon and incorporate it into my own lexicon; however, often it’s not quite as up to date or it’s said in such a way that shows them that I’m trying to relate to them but often it comes across awkward or as a performance. To clarify that I’m having fun, I’ll follow up most of these attempts with the phrase, “Like the young people say.” Nine times out of 10, my students chuckle as they carefully inform me that they don’t say that anymore and we all have a good laugh.

Have fun. It’s difficult to learn when one is stressed out or anxious. Some subjects inherently bring anxiety; languages are one of them for many people. I enjoy finding ways to make the students laugh (usually at the expense of myself) so that they forget that they believe that language learning is hard for them.

You teach all levels of Spanish to students of very diverse backgrounds, including some heritage speakers. What are some of the challenges of teaching Spanish across such varied experiences of the language?

The main challenge is that many heritage speakers come with the attitude that the class will be an “easy A.” I always warn them that the class will be a “boring A” to them and that often my heritage/native speakers end up with worse grades than my students with minimal or no prior experience with the language because they end up not showing up to class. More often than not, these students stay in the class so the responsibility is on me to reach the students with basic knowledge as well as engage those who know more. Finding a way to prove to them that there is always more to learn (spelling, grammar structures, vocabulary) tends to keep them engaged. Having them paired with a non-native speaker helps as well so they can use their skills to teach their partner.

Not only do you have a Ph.D. in Hispanic and Iberian Cultures, but you also have a master’s degree in Secondary Education and Teaching. How has your pedagogical training sharpened or focused your approach to undergraduate teaching and research?

I started teaching Spanish at the high school level and earned my masters in education while teaching there. Language teaching is very different at that level: you have more time to go over vocabulary so I used to incorporate a lot of games, grammatical structures were broken down more simply and I was given more days to present them so the students learned fewer elements of the language, but tended to have more mastery of what they learned. Obtaining my masters helped me to fuse the two worlds of higher level and high school level language learning.

In the Collaborative, you’ve run workshops on Beginning Spanish that focus on games and game-playing (including a Spanish version of “Apples to Apples”!). What other games have you found helpful in promoting learning?

Though I don’t have the opportunity to play as many games as I’d like to in class, I get to with the Spanish conversational roundtable (I affectionately call Pizza con Profe) that I have the honor to lead here at Trinity. I love the challenge of adapting any game I come across. Sometimes they fall flat, but usually they are a hit. In general, if you’ve played it at a baby shower or if you played it in college as a drinking game, then you’ll be playing it with me in Spanish. I’m always on the lookout for a good game! I’ve adapted Jeopardy, Family Feud, Concentration, Go Fish, Bingo, Wheel of Fortune, Twenty Questions, Jenga, Candy Land, Tic-tac-toe, Cootie Catchers, Would You Rather?, Never Have I Ever…, charades, Taboo, Scatagories, To Tell the Truth, as well as a slew of improv games I’ve learned over the years. (I do family-friendly competitive improv on the weekends and bring a lot of what I do there to the classroom and Pizza con Profe). My motto is, “If there’s a smile on the students’ face, then they most likely are learning,” so I love to make learning Spanish fun. I often say, “Some people would like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony; I would rather teach it Spanish.”