Thursday, December 18, 2014

Narrate a video in the TL like this to captivate your students and create useful input that they will give back to you



Abstract:  This method creates a process for digesting an artifact (a video short taken from YouTube) and creating a series of mini-lessons about it that each have a beginning and ending.  As you give these short lessons, you will be speaking the Target Language in a meaningful way that will be slightly more than most of your students can handle for much of the time.  By the end you will receive evidence that almost all of them heard and retained what you said and were able to leverage the new constructs to create meaningful output that narrates the story of the video short that you selected. 

Introduction

I would like to before offering any details of this awesome technique give credit to Dr. Bob Patrick, Latin teacher extraordinaire in Gwinnett County, Georgia, for taking the time to talk to me about this tool.  His blog is first class and highly well known, and if you haven’t taken a look at it, go to http://latinbestpracticescir.wordpress.com/, by all means.

The longer I teach, the more I understand the power of input as the single greatest predictor of fluid, useful output that will come out of my students.  As often as possible, I want my students to have heard from me (and elsewhere) many, many times the phrases, chunks, and stubs that I expect them ultimately to produce.  We all know that this input must be “meaningful,” but I would like to tease apart what that means a bit here.  In my first career I studied Speech Communication, which is the study of communication between pairs, small groups, and one person to many.  In that world, the focus is the communication of ideas memorably and persuasively.  In this context I learned about the concept of primacy and recency, which says nothing more than that we tend to remember the beginnings of messages and the ends of them, and that what’s in the middle, not so much (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_position_effect for more explanation).

At the time, the message to me as a student who was interested in being memorable was clear:  Create lots of beginnings and endings, and retention of what you say will go up.  This will ring true to you in the classroom who feel that sense of satisfaction and relief when you can finally get the kids to study transitional words and phrases (in Spanish, primero, entonces, luego, and the like, and then later phrases like por eso, es decir, and the useful asi que).  To me these are satisfying because they help students to create signposts in their speech, to say, “OK, pay attention, here comes the next ‘beginning.’” (or in the case of por fin and others, the next ending).  We instinctively know we have a shot at being memorable with those in the mix.

What the activity that Dr. Patrick taught me does is to create a process for digesting a long message (a video short taken from YouTube) and creating a series of mini-lessons about it that each (naturally) have a beginning and ending.  As you give these short lessons, you will be speaking the Target Language in a meaningful way that will be slightly more than most of your students can handle for much of the time you do it.  By the end, however, you will receive evidence from the students that almost all of them heard and retained what you said and were able to leverage the new constructs to create meaningful output that narrates the story of the video short that you selected. 

Backward design

To decide what video short you wish to go get, start with the end in mind, like in so much of what you do.  Will you be using your short video primarily to recycle or to introduce new material?  For my case study, I knew that my Spanish 3 classes were going to see sports vocabulary in a narrative context in the coming weeks (an early chapter in Realidades, level 3, for those who use that), which is to say, preterit(e) and imperfect.  The students had been introduced to some sports and some narration the prior year, but they were rusty, as this was September of a new year.  So I knew that looking for a brief movie about sports would be appropriate.

The way Dr. Patrick teaches this technique is that he uses (or tends to use) movies that have no spoken language in them.  They are all action (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Anw_bhEzsys for an example).  I chose to use a movie that occurred in English with Spanish subtitles, although I also looked for the entire thing to be dubbed into Spanish.  This case study occurred in the fall of 2014, with the World Cup having recently finished in Brasil.  I knew from a technique known as “Circling with Balls” also learned from Dr. Patrick (see http://www.benslavic.com/circling-with-balls.html for a valuable exposition on this), a great deal about my students’ interests, and several of my students in my various classes were avid futbolistas.  The commercial is hosted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7VQna0VovA, among other locations.

To me, this commercial was nearly perfect, in that it used sports vocabulary, set a scene and then told a story (ergo, perfect for reviewing preterit and imperfect), and was highly topical with what was going on in many of my students’ lives.   It, of course, had disadvantages, and yours will, too.  First, at 5 minutes long, it had a lot of detail, and performed actions that I was not comfortable scaffolding/squeezing into their Spanish lessons in the month that I knew that I would be teaching using this tool.   Secondly, the characters spoke English, but this was a minor distraction.  Third, it used a kind of perspective-switching technique that I did not relish having to work around, as the perspective of the film switched rapidly in the opening minute between boys playing “pick up” soccer games in Rio and famous futbol players doing similar movements in a stadium.  My fears, however, were warrantless.  There was little to no issue and when the kids produced their own version of the commercial for me at the end of the project.  That’s the idea I’d leave you with.  A good video choice based on topic and relevance will carry itself past any potential snags.

Procedure

Every day for a month, I stopped class with 5 minutes to go and we played the video, in pieces (using the terms from my intro, I created a daily dose of primacy and recency).  On some days, I played a piece first, and then narrated it.  On others, especially after the routine was established, I narrated first, and then played a piece, drawing out from the students what they could hear and understand before reinforcing it via the video.  We never saw the entire story of the video in the beginning, but slowly worked our way towards it.  They saw the first “trozo” or chunk many more times than the sections deep in the interior.

Sometimes I orally presented my narrations, sometimes I wrote them on the board.  I never asked the students to write them down, and therefore few did much note-taking during these last five minutes of each day.  I “popped up” any grammar that got addressed by quickly confirming any rationale for why I was using preterit or imperfect.  Here are two examples of the level of Spanish I used in my narrations:

Al principio, unos chicos jugaban fútbol en las calles de Río de Janeiro.  Pasaban, rebotaban, y cabeceaban la pelota, jugando entre los callejones, techos de zinc, y el graffiti de la Flavela.  De repente, apareció un tren en la calle y casí pegó a uno de los muchachos.  Sin embargo, apenas lo evitó, girando de su camino.
And
Un fan brasileño, aburrido con el nuevo futbol de los clones, secuestró a los futbolistas más famosos en el mundo, y los convenció a jugar un partido más contra los clones.

Thus, each day I would play the video, usually from the beginning, in pieces, and then hit pause.  I would then narrate that piece back to the class, or, depending on the day, narrate the next piece.  I would also hit pause here and there and ask a lot of “circling” questions (see link above) about the content of the film, trying to make the pieces of Spanish I was offering more “sticky” in the minds of my students.  I said things like:

¿Jugaban futbol en Río o jugaban beísbol en Río?  ¿El chico cabeceaba la pelota o comía la pelota?
¿El fan brasileño secuestró a los futbolistas o los futbolistas secuestraron al fan brasileño?  ¿Cómo se dice “secuestró” en inglés?

I would also play back pieces in review after having played them in the prior days and ask the students in pairs to write a bit of narration for that particular segment, or narrate the pieces on the fly to each while I went around and listened. 

The technique was not very strict or very fancy, but I want to be clear that I always gave several examples of input for any part of the film before asking for output from the kids.  I wanted chunks and pieces getting sticky in their minds only to then have them be utilized. 

Sub Day

And how was this output to be produced?  That is my favorite part of this little experiment, although you certainly wouldn’t have to do it this way.  Dr. Patrick taught me that using this technique would be an excellent way to get the kids productive on a “sub” day, because as long as someone could run the projector, the class could then play back the chunks of the film while you aren’t there and narrate the commercial in a meaningful way that would occupy the period.  This beats doing “busy work” worksheets, in my estimation!

In the days leading up to my planned absence (I was presenting at a conference), I designated someone to be a timekeeper and someone to be a media person, for each class.  I wrote their names on the instructions that were distributed to all students, and created a procedure for how the period should occur.   The substitute teacher gave out this sheet, as well as some screen captures (images) from the commercial that they could use as focal points:
















To make images like this, use the "PrntScrn" button on your keyboard and then "Paste" the image into Word, double click the image, then manipulate it using these two tools:















I also looked at my students’ levels performance in the class and created teams of two and three, associating students of similar ability together.  I tend not to place “strong” students with “weak” ones hoping that one will teach the other and that one will be full of gratitude for the example, but instead let two “weaker” students at least try to produce what they can.

Results

The results?  You can see them here.  I’m showing several highly comprehensible examples, but these were not the only ones, by far.  These students who were the most successful caught the nuance of the turns of phrases that I was repeating and produced them on their works.  You can see the vocabulary and phrasing throughout their work, even though some of it had not yet formally been “taught” except for inside this five-minute, closing section.  To zoom in on the text you want to magnify, hit "Ctrl" plus the + sign until you are able to see the writing.  To get back to a normal screen, hit "Ctrl" plus 0.



































Here is one example that I would consider slightly less comprehensible, although every student represented here demonstrates the tendencies you see in this example, albeit not to the same degree.  These students clearly were not only relying on what they might have acquired but were instead forcing some language onto the paper that they had never heard or processed before the day of the assignment.  You can tell right away from the several infinitives:






































Conclusion

What strikes me most about this method is that it teaches a level of narrative sophistication and complexity that without the structure of the daily five minutes of media would not be possible.  Indeed, in other subsequent contexts, my students were much less comprehensible in their writing (when doing typical “exercise,” cloze-type activities), but because I could make reference to this experience, they could self-correct much better than if we had not done it.  In my layperson mind, I imagined them using two totally different parts of their brains to perform the two types of tasks.  And I prefer the Spanish they produced here!!

Motivation is key to learning a new language, I don’t have to tell you.  Because we weren’t seeing the entire commercial in one sitting, the kids wanted to close strong at the end of every lesson so that we could open the curtain a bit more on the “FIFA” story.  Many students went outside of class and watched the commercial on YouTube. They came back to me at times asking me how to say this bit or that in anticipation of what we would do in class.  Bits of speech from the commercial became "catch phrases" inside the other parts of the classes, and became part of our identity as a cohort.  That was an unintended benefit.

Don’t forget my intro, that primacy and recency are memorable.  By digesting this big message into about 20 little beginnings and endings, I found that my students could produce ideas at a higher level.  What I’d like to hear from you regarding this technique is how you think the input should be designed.  Written?  Passed out?  Spoken?  Before, or after showing the artifact?  Thanks for reading!

Greg Sanchez is a FL teacher consultant in the metro Atlanta area.  You can see more about him at:

GregSanchezConsulting.com and
TeachersPayTeachers.com/store/PicantePractices

Thanks to the Cobb County students where Greg taught this semester for allowing him to practice this technique with them and to those who allowed me to share their results!



Thursday, October 30, 2014

Using Kahoot.it, a free, interactive assessment tool, as part of my foreign language instruction

You are about to read about a free technology utilizing cell phones, tablets, and/or laptops, in class, that totally hooked my students.  Most days, several of them would enter the classroom with “Are we going to Kahoot today?”  Kahoot has limitations from a FL pedagogical perspective, but increases motivation and fosters interpretive mode like few things I’ve seen.  It has been worth the tiny amount of extra administration, and is fun to use as a closing activity to reinforce the day’s lesson or check for understanding before a summative.  Read on!

Starting about five years ago, I began noticing that administrator types would take a poll at the end of a talk by asking the audience to vote using phones.  The results of the poll or knowledge check would post as bar graphs on the projector screen and we would see either what we believed or what we remembered, depending on the purpose of the assessment:



















 "You can see on the screen behind me that many of you believe  ____ while others of you...."

I poked around the internet a bit to try to include one in my practice, but nothing was “sticky” at that point.

This year, I got the chance to attend a vibrant technology conference in Griffin, GA (http://www.griffinresa.net/,) where I was presenting about using PowerPoint more interactively.  One of the other talks was by a principal who had integrated lots of new technology into his communications with teachers and students, and he demonstrated several of them during his talk.  That’s when we got to see “Kahoot!”.

Kahoot! 

Kahoot! uses suspenseful music, bright, clean, graphics, and a countdown timer to draw students in to taking a multiple choice quiz.  You, the teacher, type the questions ahead of time into their web interface, type in 2 or more possible answers, designate the correct answer with a button, then repeat those steps for the number of questions that you have (my quizzes are all between 5 and 12 questions).  You could also easily copy and paste from a Word document to save time, although I did not.  Here’s what it looks like when the kids play (although this is not my classroom):

http://blog.getkahoot.com/post/47536212854/a-year-9-class-at-ratton-school-in-eastbourne-are

Before we “Kahoot,” a bit about the teaching context

This is a Spanish 3 class in the Atlanta suburbs early in the fall semester.  We are reviewing tenses and vocabulary from Spanish 2, including the re-teaching to the kids of how to narrate a story in the past tenses.  I have included “Pobre Juan,” a song by Maná, in that context a few times in my career because it is topical, as it discusses illegal immigration from a different perspective, and it uses a decent mix of the preterit and imperfect, all while inside a set of vocabulary that coincides with what a lot of students are learning in this phase of their FL careers. 

Okay, back to Kahoot!

The administration is so easy.  Once you’ve created your game and given it a name, it appears in a list and you, the teacher, simply click “Play,” like I’ll demonstrate for the quiz below about“Pobre Juan:”


Moments later, while seated at your classroom pc, you’ll click “Launch” and the students will see a unique number appear on your overhead.  They visit Kahoot.it (notice the suffix is NOT “.com”) on their device (phone, iPad, etc.) and they type in the unique number.  You see their names pop up on the screen similar to this, and then you can begin administering the assessment:




  I’ll talk later about the types of questions I pondered creating, but do notice in this screen shot that the question uses a visual.  That’s a nice feature!




Notice the clock!  This playfully torments the students, urging them on.  You can’t hear the music on this blog, of course, but it’s like the soundtrack of a movie when someone is being pursued through the woods or running through various rooms of a building while trying to escape a guy with a mask and a blade.  It’s tense, and the kids love it.

Once they’ve answered the question by pressing a button on their personal device, a bar graph appears showing the correct answer and the distribution of selected choices.  I’m simulating it here for five students: 


Are you seeing the immediate opportunity this tool provides as a formative assessment?  Since 2/5 of my class chose “fui” (the “fui” answer appears in faded-out colors below the triangled “iba”), I can talk about how this part of the song should be imperfect, since this lyric occurs at the very beginning of the song/story, which often provides context.  Further, I can also point out that “fui” is the “yo” form, and thus not an option for third-person “Juan.”  However you would approach that in your classroom, I can tell you that seeing, in real time, the misconceptions of my students right up on the screen was an amazing benefit to using this technology.

What happens next is a real motivator.  I will typically have about 19 students or pairs (I’ll explain that later in the article) who are playing, but only the top five get placed up on the screen, similar to this:













Many, many of the kids thrive on the competition, and their destinies change as the quiz progresses, as some surge and some fall.  For example, I’ve used this tool to “check” homework, as so many students copy someone else’s work just to get the grade.  However, if late in one of these quizzes I pop in a few questions from last night’s reading, those particular students will fall in these rankings quickly and may think twice about their homework strategy next time.  Those who engaged the homework the night before suddenly can bask in their new limelight.  I’ve seen this happen.

Are you seeing the potential?   When the students have finished, you can export a database of results and see exactly who got what right and wrong:


On occasion, I have recorded these as a sort of “daily” grade, but there are reasons not to do this, in certain cases.

General observations, pluses:
  • This tool provokes interest!  The kids will want to play it and they will read and listen while the game is engaged.
  • The game is easy to administer and very easy for the kids to enter.  There are no student lists to type in or permissions to create.
  • The tool shows you what needs reteaching, to a certain extent.  You can easily identify misconceptions held by the students in a short amount of time.  The issue is that once you have done so, the kids are so hyped to move on to the next question that you really need to reteach the misconceptions at a later time when they aren’t so driven to continue the game.
  • You can produce data very easily about what needs more coverage, to show student progress or to follow up later.  You can show the database file to a parent, for example, to celebrate progress by a student or to support your assertions about him or her.
  • It is incredibly easy to share your quizzes with other Kahoot members, or everyone, in general.  If I were teaching a workshop about this, for example, during the lab portion we would delegate various parts of the curriculum across the room and then share final products with each other.  In today’s high-student ratio environment, efficiency is critical, and this product lets you delegate, create, and share final products without a bunch of administration.

General observations, minuses:
  • .         Technologically, the game does not interface perfectly with every phone every time.  Some phones lag or get kicked off the session, and of course, not every student will have a cell phone every day (or ever, in some schools) nor will you have tablets or laptops to loan them.  For this reason, I let students choose partners at times (or I might choose for them), so that two students can work on one functioning phone.  This hurts your ability to distinguish who knows what, so that is why I use this principally as a formative tool.  If you can have a relaxed policy about students working together for a grade, then you can record a grade here and there using this tool without issue.
  • .         If you are trying to isolate who knows what, this tool has a high-energy social component that makes it fun to use but difficult to utilize for measurement.  The students can see what each other are doing on their glowing screens and they talk about what to click on while the assessment is going on.  As such, it should be used with humility on our parts, because a student can indeed sneak a few correct answers in without really knowing the material.
  • .         This tool does not measure proficiency, but rather the ability to take assessments well.  For this reason I would never choose to use it daily or even more than once or twice a week.  Placing multiple choice questions on a screen is not a best practice, no matter how fun it is to answer them.  I’ll say more about this in a subsequent section.

How to do two important things!

To get started, go to Kahoot.it, and click at the bottom of the screen, to “Make your own at getKahoot.com.”  From there, you’ll create a login and begin creating and managing your quizzes.

One thing that tormented me a bit as I was setting up my first quiz was that it was difficult to find all of my saved work once I’d created it, as the interface was unfamiliar to me at first, of course.  The key to this mystery is the all-encompassing “My Kahoots” menu in the upper-left corner.  Click on that, and you can find anything teacher-related that you require.

The reflective practitioner – Things I would do differently next time

My goal in everything I do is to get my kids to want to interact in the Spanish that they have and for them to be able to do so as quickly as possible and with little anxiety.  For this reason, I dislike conjugation drills and fill-in-the-blank exams where the verb is missing and the kids have to write it in the correct form, preferring instead to leave things more open and let the kids show what they know via description or simple problem-solving (see my article in an earlier blog about “Performance-based Assessment.”)  I also believe in tons and tons of input, with repeated opportunities for quick response from them, aimed at the level of their proficiency.  Usually their proficiency means no more than a few words in a row.

That said, I still use drills and I still employ cloze activities on occasion.  It’s a question of balance.  Kahoot.it can be part of that balance, but I see a few tweaks that would keep it more cutting-edge than the straightforward “Here’s some text with a piece missing” and then “Here are some possible answers to fill in that piece” as you saw in my second example.  Here are three suggestions if you want to try them:
  •       Play a piece of realia, as in a CD or video, in small pieces, and place your questions on Kahoot.  The kids will really have to listen to the language to be able to sniff out the quality of the answers you place on the screen.
  •       Pass out a reading some time before the Kahoot games begins and have the students demonstrate their processing of it via Kahoot.  They’ll have to read your questions, look at (if you want it to be in front of them) or reflect upon the reading, and then choose the answer. 
  •       Place a picture on the screen that requires or reinforces knowledge about the target culture.  Examples might include a metro map of Mexico City, 4-5 photos in an array of places to go in downtown Madrid, a restaurant menu, etc.  Your questions will require that they digest what they see and make a calculation about what to do next.  Examples might include (written in the TL) “You are at the ‘Chabanco’ metro stop.  How will you arrive at ‘Las Bellas Artes?’” or perhaps, “You have about 10 dollars, US, on your debit card.  You want to order a drink and dessert at this restaurant in Puebla.  Using this menu, which two items could you order?”  You get the idea.


These sorts of questions take time to prepare, so please know that I am not suggesting that every question be written this way.  2-3 per quiz would be my goal.  The benefits are great, in that you have created a true Interpretive-mode class of question(s) as well as have climbed up a couple of rungs on Bloom’s taxonomy.  And don’t forget to share with your colleagues and divide up the work!

January, 2015 addendum:

Kahoot! has received user feedback and made changes to the product, notably helping to cut down on the ability for students to peek across "the aisle" and sneak answers from classmates.  See the changes here:  http://blog.getkahoot.com/post/108167281287/new-on-kahoot-google-drive-export-cheating

Greg Sanchez is a foreign language teacher consultant in Atlanta, GA, offering workshops on technology, backward design, music and reading in the foreign language classroom, and performance-based assessment.  He just finished a 12-week stint as a supply teacher in Cobb County, GA, trying several techniques like this one.  He'll continue working on more articles in the coming weeks about that experience.

You can find Greg many ways:

GregSanchezConsulting.com
TeachersPayTeachers.com/store/PicantePractices
Facebook.com/PicantePractices and
Greg@GregSanchezConsulting.com





Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Today I Got Reminded of What Happens if I Don't do What I'm Supposed to...

I had a bit of a breakthrough today that I hope will promote a conversation among all of us.  Late for work due to a lack of shoes for my son and then also later not feeling well myself, the "meat" of my lesson today was hastily put together and in contrast to my normal stuff.

To practice using the theme and grammar of the unit, I threw up on the screen a couple of workbook pages and they got started.  I then called on volunteers to read their work out loud in order to earn "puntos," or participation points, something I learned from a colleague long ago.

I couldn't believe how dull it was and how incompetent the kids seemed.  If I asked them a follow-up question or even tried to role play the "person A" part of the activity, they seemed so lost and stuck as compared to normal.  It hit me that it was the type of activity that was doing it, not the lack of proficiency of the kids.

Using techniques I learned from Jo Ellen Nott (my former chair at a different school) and "circling" from Susie Gross, a well known teacher educator, I usually pepper my kids with structured questions that vary one piece of content at a time, like "Is it raining or is it snowing in the picture?  Is it raining or is it sunny?  What kind of weather is it in the picture?  What kind of weather is it outside right now?  Do you like the weather today?  Why do you like the weather today?  Did you like the weather yesterday?" etc. etc.  Dozens and dozens of 'em.  And boy, when we get going, it's so much fun, because the kids start chunking together pieces of the language that I've been feeding them to make up their own original ideas.

Yet, there were these same kids today, inert, fossilized, and bored.  I realized the beauty of the "right" way that others had taught me.  It's about the reaction.  Keeping kids reacting in my class inside of a fixed structure, as opposed to having them prepare something ahead of time to read out loud, gets them firing those neurons that create more proficient-looking behaviors.  Either way, they are conjugating and using vocab.  But the latter type of in-class work forces them to hear, seek clarification, and react, something they'll need to do a lot of outside of the class if they ever use the TL away from school.  It feels less scripted, more fresh, and so much more authentic.

I invite your commentary.  Thanks!

Monday, September 1, 2014

Taking Data to See if a Cool New Reading Tool Actually Makes a Difference to the Kids

Using Strips to Teach Reading in the TL:  Does it Increase Acquisition (or Perhaps Recognition) Even a Little? 

     As long as I was a high school teacher, I believed that there was too much antipathy or nonchalance exhibited in my classroom for me to yet feel satisfied with my teaching. I saw the vapid stare, the look of exhaustion, or the ferocious interference of other parts of my students’ lives, and I wondered, “What will keep their interest?” On the way, I learned about music, technology, computer labs, centers, etc., all the while trying to make my classes engaging and entertaining, frankly. Most of the high-power innovations that I employed were learned during workshops. The one I’ll tell you about today was no exception.
     I was at FLAG (GA's state FL conference) about 3 years ago, and the speaker was the coordinator of the largest county in Georgia, and very successful at raising the game of those who taught FL in his county. He put up a slide that asked if we FL teachers taught reading by having students read in “round robin” fashion, going around the room and reading a few lines of a piece of realia before moving on to another student. I mentally acknowledged that I did, and I knew of colleagues who did, as well. (You can see that slide and more HERE http://readingstrategiesflag2011.wikispaces.com/file/view/Get%20them%20Reading%21DeKalb2011.pdf/252407804/Get%20them%20Reading%21DeKalb2011.pdf)
      He then gave out strips of paper that had pieces of text, parts of a larger artifact, on them, and gave us some quick assignment that asked us to find another piece that was held by someone else in the room. We had to go around and find that person (I’ve detailed the steps for how to create an activity like this at http://www.flageorgia.org/publications/Journal-2014-5-rev.pdf, p. 25). Of course, the first person I encountered was not the holder of my needed strip, nor the second, third, etc. While finding my companion, I got a peek at other pieces of the whole and started, without realizing, to make guesses about what the themes and tone of the general reading were.


It was enticing as anything
     What I wanted to describe to you here that I didn’t talk about in the FLAG article linked above was how palpably intriguing it was to hold that strip of paper and wonder about the rest of it. It was like peeking through a keyhole to watch your parents’ dinner party. It played right into my psychology. By the time the presenter put the whole reading up on the wall, I really, really wanted to know what it had to say. And I then hoped that my students (and, later, your students) would have that same desire.
     Cris Tovani, an author I discovered thanks to this workshop, talks about the two types of voices we have in our heads when we read. One of them distracts by daydreaming, complaining, or bringing up competing outside topics, while the other pushes us on by making predictions, connections, and the like. I felt the power of that second voice when the presenter finally put up the whole reading on the wall. I was GOING TO SEE what the author said, no matter what. My inner voice had been making all kinds of guesses about the general nature of the reading, and I wanted answers. I went on to employ the technique in my own classroom, enjoying the 100% engagement that comes with this sort of method (a variation of a jigsaw activity) and honing my craft a bit. I never, however, thought to take data as to its effectiveness. After leaving the classroom, I wondered, “Will this fervent interest create more measureable comprehension?”, because although I believe in engagement, if learning then can’t be measured, then the technique gets called into question in today’s teaching environment.
     Toward this end, I started looking (as a consultant) for a chance to test this “jigsaw” method of interpretive mode while measuring its effects. As a teacher coach at Kennesaw State University, I had developed some new relationships in the metro Atlanta area, and so I asked one of the mentor teachers I was working with if I could do a guest lesson: One day, one period, to see if the kids learned. She said yes, even suggesting that I guest teach in two of her classes (back to back). Bonus!
     To determine what reading would be appropriate for this class, I asked the teacher to tell me what content was coming up, and she sent me a vocab list and the following themes:


1.       To talk about clothes, shopping, and prices
2.       To describe plans
3.       To talk about what you want and prefer to do (recycling)
4.       Point out specific items (demonstrative adjectives)
5.       Understand cultural perspectives on shopping.
The second chapter of the theme has the following objectives:
1.       To talk about buying gifts
2.       Tell what happened in the past (introducing the preterit)
3.       Use direct object pronouns

     To this end, I did a search for short stories on the web that involved clothing, and came across this gem: http://www.eljardinonline.com.ar/10cuento06.htm (I teach Spanish, so some of you will benefit from this more than others). I vetted this with the teacher, got approval, and then rewrote it to meet the objectives more closely, getting approval for each “tweak” along the way from the teacher. The resulting short story is at the end of this article. The process worked well, as the students had received about a week of exposure to the preterite when I visited, an appropriate amount to have seen for the level of proficiency necessary to navigate the story.
      Again, if you would like a generic explanation of how to use this technique, go to p. 25, here: http://www.flageorgia.org/publications/Journal-2014-5-rev.pdf. I am attaching below the specific PowerPoint lesson in this middle school, Spanish 1 context. You can see how the jigsaw method unfolded specifically, which you are welcome to adjust to your use.


A brief summary of the lesson is that I...
1.  introduced myself,
2.  passed out a pretest,
3.  passed out strips from the reading (where only half of a sentence was present), stressing that the students find partners in the room who had the other half of their strips,
4.  gave the students a few minutes to scurry about the room looking for partners and asking teachers for help with vocabulary, and then,
5.  asked them to return to their seats to take some guesses about the general nature of the reading and the meanings of some of the key vocabulary. 
We then affirmed their presuppositions about the text by looking at it in its entirety (very briefly), and then I administered a post-test.

Here are the questions that I asked of the students in the pre- and post-tests:


__A__1. Carlo no limpia su recámara. Nunca saca la basura, no barre el piso, no hace la cama. El ___ mucho sus responsabilidades.
a. descuida b. mantiene c. se afeita d. quita el polvo


__B_2. “Hoy es el primero de mayo, 2014, ¿correcto?”
a. -No hay moros en la costa b. -Tienes razón c. -No vale la pena d. -La media naranja

__B_ 3. ___seis años ___ George W. Bush fue presidente.
a. Son, de b. Hace, que c. Descuida, hasta d. Tal vez, a lo mejor

__D_4. Vestidos, camisas, faldas y chaquetas son ejemplos de __.
a. Manchas b. joyas c. bufandas d. prendas

__C_5. Hombre viejo <-------> chico joven; Ella es una persona cuidada<------> Ella es una persona __.
a. madura b. dependiente c. descuidada d. sudadera

__A_6. En la historia Margarita _____ sus deberes en su casa.
a. ignoró b. ignoro c. ignoré d. no lavé

__C_7. El suéter y la bufanda se ______ mucho de su tratamiento.
a. quejó b. mancha c. quejaron d. manchamos

__D_8. La madre de Margarita ___ mucho para mantener los vestidos de Margarita.
a. trabajar b. hago c. cansado d. trabajó


A test of the Input Hypothesis
     As you can see if you know some Spanish, the first five questions are vocabulary-centered, and the last three are seeking a correct verb conjugation.  I wanted to know if after seeing all the input of looking at several strips and then discussing them in class (in Spanish, with the teacher doing almost all of talking, in the form of summarizing the story), if these middle schoolers could then discern what made sense in Spanish and what didn’t utilizing terms and constructs from the story.  All of the examples are concepts that are part of the reading and that I emphasized in the lesson, repeatedly.  You can find my lesson in a PowerPoint format below.

The theme:  Be interesting when it costs nothing
     I’d like to tell you two things before I move on to the results. First, this activity assumes that you pass out parts of the reading, on strips, as explained in the FLAG article. Which parts? To decide this, I reflected on what happened to me at the workshop in Augusta. I found out what the author believed and said in little pieces that made me want to know more. The voice in those texts reflected strong opinion, conflict, and drama. I looked for a similar level of emotional value in my story, and would recommend that you do the same.
     My results are compelling from my non-social-scientist perspective. What you can’t tell, even after seeing the data, is how the results compare to some other method, such as the round-robin method mentioned in the intro, with a nice, long vocabulary list to accompany it. Let’s assume they are comparable. The technique I am suggesting creates near 100% student involvement kinesthetically for several minutes at a time and compels the kids into the ZPD by fostering motivation and curiosity. I want student who construct their own Spanish and create and then satisfy their own curiosity about the language this technique has a shot at doing these things for many.


Results
     I’m not a professor or statistician. You who are can do a better job of examining my data than I can. What I see is useful, however. Here is some of the analysis that I performed, based on a random sample of 22 students, or over a third of everyone. As an average, this group scored a 35% on the pre-test and a 57% on the post:



 Results, A:   Average results of all students in sample, per question, pre- and post-test

On average, here’s how students improved from a wrong answer to a right one, per question:

1
32%

2
36%
3
27%
4
45%
5
36%
6
32%
7
18%
8
36%
Results, B:    Average of all students who got a question wrong on the pre-test but then went on to get it correct afterwards

There were also students who got questions correct on the first pass, and then went on to get them incorrect (There’s no scholarly sounding way to say >facepalm!< here).

1
0%

2
0%
3
9%
4
23%
5
9%
6
18%
7
18%
8
9%
Results, C:  Average of all students who got a question right on pre-test but then went on to get it wrong afterwards

Thus, their correct distinction/identifications of key words in context (I would argue that it wasn’t yet acquisition) almost doubled for the sample, although some students actually guessed (I myself am guessing that they guessed, heh) worse after the stimulus of the lesson.
     Imagine for a moment the environment which these youngsters entered on this day. A teacher they had never met came in to teach them, using a different variety of the Spanish than the “real” teacher. Further, I was using a method of teaching they’d not experienced with vocabulary and phrases that they either had never heard, or very many times (particularly the word “prenda,” #4 in the “Results, C” section).

Conclusion
     I’d say, then, that the method worked well enough in a way for me to keep it in my bag of techniques and to recommend that others use it. Generally, it appears that students who receive input via small pieces of a level-appropriate reading, a summary of the main points of the reading afterwards, and then a look at the whole reading, can then improve in their discernment of correct usage of the newer concepts. It also appears that they can distinguish vocabulary (questions 1-5) in context better than verb conjugation in context (6-8). This makes sense, as a conjugation in Spanish requires two sorts of recognition of the input (both recognizing the vocabulary and then also the orthography of conjugation, at least in Spanish), so it makes sense that simply hearing input of verbs would not lead to their correct usage as fast as other parts of speech. The next time I try this, if I’m teaching for around 50 minutes, I’ll try a shorter story than what you see below. I wonder if by having less content and perhaps having more repetition in the lesson of that content if my post-test scores will rise.

Story, as re-written:

My goals, in re-writing the story this way as well as choosing what to highlight, were:

Notice the repetition of phrasing and give meaning to it,
See lots of examples of the preterit and try to give them meaning, and
Be able to see the major components of the story at the activity’s and story’s end.

Los vestidos de Margarita, por Barthe, Raquel Marta (y editado por G. Sánchez)

La gran mayoría en el pueblo de la niñita Margarita compraba su ropa nueva en las tiendas y almacenes de su centro, pero no esta familia.  Como de costumbre, la mamá de Margarita hacía toda la ropa de su familia, preparando las camisas, faldas, y otras prendas a mano en su cocina.  Esta vez, estaba cosiendo un hermoso vestido para su hija.  Fue blanco con margaritas bordadas.

Pero ¡Margarita no mantenía su ropa en orden para nada!  Nunca tenía cuidado y siempre obtuvo una mancha, un agujero u otra imperfección por ser tan descuidada. Margarita rató su ropa como basura o una cáscara de banana.  La pobre mamá estaba siempre muy ocupada cosiendo, lavando, planchando, y reparando la ropa de Margarita.  Por eso, cuando la mamá bordaba las flores del vestido blanco nuevo, las viejas prendas, desde el armario, se hablaron con tristeza:

“¡Pobre vestido… tan lindo y tan blanco…!” lloró la primera prenda, una bufanda roja, “y ¡sólo hace dos semanas que yo llegué y ya estoy arruinado!”
“Sí, tienes razón,” continuó el suéter de cuadritos desde su estante, “hace tan poco tiempo, el invierno pasado de hecho, que yo fui nuevo también, y ahora me siento barato, con estos doscientos manchas…,” y empezó a llorar.
“Con una dueña como Margarita, uno no se puede ser ‘nuevo’ por mucho tiempo!’ se quejaron las pijamas de rayitas.
“Tienen razón, hermanas pijamas, después de un día de uso, ya somos ‘viejos’” se lamentó el vestido de los lunares azules.
“Sí, no es justo,” dijo un vestido rosado con una mancha horrible y negra, escuchando desde un rincón, “yo llegué hace apenas una semana, y ya estoy aterrorizado todo el día.  ¡Quiero escaparme de esta chica que descuida a todos nosotros!”
Entonces habló una de las prendas más importantes del armario de Margarita: el abrigo amarillo.  “Todos tienen razón, claro.  Yo ya estoy cansado también de este abuso, particularmente estas manchas de caramelo y chocolate.  Hace tres días que las recibí y ¡ahora son permanentes!  ¿Por qué no le damos una lección a esa niña descuidada?”  “Estoy de acuerdo, pero, ¿qué podemos hacer?” preguntó la sudadera con la manga descocida.  Y después de conversar un poco más, decidieron hablarle a Margarita, la dueña de todo de ellos.  Y esperaron y esperaron hasta el anochecer, cuando la luna apareció.  “Miren las manchas en la luna, también” declaró un zapato de tacón.  “Ssssss, ¡silencio!” respondieron los demás.

Y así fue que cuando Margarita se acostó, todas las prendas salieron del clóset, saltaron sobre la cama, y, uno a uno, le protestaron en voces bajas de su abuso y mal tratamiento de la ropa.  Cuando terminaron, volvieron a sus ganchos y estantes mientras Margarita continuó durmiendo.

Al día siguiente, cuando tomaba el desayuno, Margarita vio el vestido que su mamá estaba bordando y dijo:
“¡Qué bien está progresando! ¡Es tan bonito! Y, ¿sabés qué, mamá?  A este vestido lo voy a cuidar mucho, mucho… A toda mi ropa la voy a cuidar tanto.”
La mamá quedó sorprendida por la declaración tan, tan rara de su hija, pero antes de poder decir algo, Margarita la interrumpió, diciendo:  “Anoche tuve una pesadilla espantosa, pero ahora no te la puedo contar porque no quiero llegar tarde a la escuela.”  Le dio un beso grandote, y se fue.  Y toda la ropa por la primera vez se sintió apreciada y amada en el armario de la chava Margarita.
Y la mamá, satisfecha y sonriendo, se sentó a terminar el bordado de esas flores que, como su hija, se llamaban "margaritas".