Progress-3

Rap songs are a powerful teaching strategy. I create rap songs by myself based on the learning objects. One of the songs that I put in the video is the Hamburger song. In most foreign language classes, you just stay in your seat and sing a song. That’s it. Not in my Chinese class. For nearly all the songs we sing in my class, students dance and move to the music. I normally use a flamenco clapper to give the beat. In the video, Queen’s famous song, “We will rock you” is the background music we rap to. I have to say every time students hear this music, they want to dance, and they start to show interest. I will put part of the students’ performance in the final video.

Progress-2

Here is another comparison between sitting/quiet activities and movement activities. For the sitting activity, I have students make a mini-story book to express what they like to do after school. In the movement-based learning activity, I let them work in pairs or groups (they decide by themselves) to prepare a role play. In the sitting activity, one student complained to me that he could not draw. Some students did the mini-story book very quick and did not pay much attention to the task. Of course, a couple of students were doing excellent job.

For the second activity, students were so excited to hear that they would work in group to create a role play. I have to say that they were very creative and motivated. They came up with some crazy ideas which were fine with me as long as they were speaking in Chinese. They came to ask me a lot new vocabulary and sentences. I was so glad to see they were taking notes and practicing. They also incorporated Chinese culture, like dancing, into the show.

I guess in this round the “movement” activities won again.

Progress-1

The lesson was self introduction. I started the class by asking questions like:
“What’s your name?”; “How old are you?”; “What’s your nationality?”; “What do you like to do?”; “What do you like to eat?”; “How many people are in your family?”
I asked every student and checked on their understanding. When I asked one student a question, usually there were two other students talking to each other. One student was looking at the desk and seemed lost. One student was searching for the answers from her notebook. One student was drawing pictures in his notebook. Another student was at the white board with a confused look on her face.

After the review we played a game that I invented, which is a combination of baseball, tic-tac-toe, and reading a Chinese fortune cookie. I know it sounds weird, but students really love it. Here’s how the game is played: I write questions in Chinese on sheets of paper, and then wad them up into a paper balls. Students separate into two teams. Each team picks a ball and pitches it to their team member who tries to hit the paper ball with a little paddle which I made from card board. After a ball is hit, the rest of the team tries to catch the ball. When they catch the ball, they open they open it and read the Chinese question to a team member (open the paper ball to read a message in Chinese – like a fortune cookie!). If they can successfully read the questions (in Chinese) on the paper and answer it, the team can mark their sign (either X or O) on the tic-tac-toe on the white board. The tic-tac-toe game is basically the scoreboard.

All the students suddenly woke up and paid attention when I explained about playing this game. During the game, every student was smiling. Both teams were trying very hard to win the game. When someone read the question, the other students said “Pick me! I know the answer!” Every single student was engaged in the game and focused on the questions and answers in Chinese to win the game.

At the end of the class I asked each student to prepare an oral self-introduction - they all did it enthusiastically. After the class, I asked several students their opinion of that day’s teaching activities.
One boy said, “I loved the baseball game. I’m going to tell my mom that I can learn Chinese through playing baseball.”
Another student said, “I was surprised that I knew all the answers. That’s awesome. It was so fun. ”

Task Five

In the foreign language classroom, the last thing you want hear the kids say is “it's boring.” Think about those young children having to listen and speak some strange language and not having any idea about the meaning; how can they engage the learning? Many articles about engagement suggest the use of movement to get kids to focus. In my class, I switch activities very frequently. In a twenty minute session, I normally have about 10 activities. As a teacher, I have to learn how to read students' faces. When you see “boring” on their face, they start to talk, wiggle around in their seats, and do something else. This is the signal that I “gotta move” to the next task. I have very limited time for each class (20 minutes for most sessions), there is not much time to waste.

Instruction is about teaching the subject material and managing the classroom. There are many issues that should be considered such as age, gender, learning style, cultural background, etc... The first step in building instruction is to learn about the students. If you want to keep them engaged, you have to teach in a way they like and accept.

For my inquiry plan I will focus on how to use movement to engage students since my students are at very young and my lesson periods are very short. I will try to develop age appropriate instruction, and try to address students' individual needs to keep them engaged in Chinese learning.

Task Four

I picked Domain 3 – Instruction. During instruction, there is an array of comprehension among students ranging from “don’t know” to “know”; “don’t understand” to “understand”. Students are learning and gaining knowledge. If an academically successful student is the product of a school, then instruction is the most important process to add value for the children.

The component of the domain that I would like to focus on and that I feel most comfortable with is Component 3c: engaging students in learning. I believe this most strongly ties to instruction.

As required for foreign language instruction in my district, most of my instruction much be given in the target language (Chinese). The communication between students and I will be mostly in Chinese. Of course, many props (puppets, diagrams, dolls, etc…) and gestures will help their understanding. Questions and discussions will help students to make the connection between Chinese learning and their background knowledge. I create various kinds of activities and assignments for students to engage in learning Chinese. They learn through singing, dancing, moving, watching videos, games, group work etc… Hopefully, each student will find a best fit to learn. I use a rubric and “can do” statements for students’ self-assessment. Most of the on-going assessments are oral. Frequently checking students’ understanding, students will receive points by successfully finishing the informative assessment; their learning is monitored.

In my classes, students display a very wide range of learning capability for Chinese. Some students learn very quickly. They become bored and lose interest if we spend too much time in review. Other students never remember what we learned in previous classes. I have to spend too much time reviewing fundamentals. I’ve heard the answer “aim for the middle.” To be honest, this response sounds like the easy answer – it doesn’t deal with the reality of my students. I’m still left dealing with students who either “get it” (want to learn) or students that are lost (probably don’t really care). How would you handle the pace of instruction in this situation?

Task 3

I think that students learn through socialization. In other words, learners learn through communication with others. Every one can learn, although their learning is in different terms of process and speed.

Here is an example to explain how this learning happens. For my students, the only thing they can connect with China/Chinese is their Chinese teacher. I am the only resource for them to learn at this point. Most of the time, they are “repeating after me”. Are they learning? Of course, all learning starts with “copying” someone. Without a “community” (at least two people), learning could never happen.

I believe that all the students have the capacity to learn. Many world language teachers share similar stories as me. We all have some students who are receiving some special help from school concerning their learning abilities. However, in our world language classes, they perform even better than other academic level students. I always think, for foreign language, whenever you start to learn, you are at the baby stage, and no matter if you are 5 or 25. I have a student who has mental challenges. She has problem to learn math, science, but not Chinese (actually she is pretty good). Another student has a speech problem, but she doesn’t have a speech problem in Chinese.

There are many factors that may shape students’ learning capacity: students’ mental development, teachers’ instruction, etc... I believe everyone can learn, but in different processes. Some students are good at memorization, some are good at analysis. Every student has a different capacity and that capacity can change due to environmental influence. Except for parents, the teacher is the most important element to shape each student’s learning capacity.

As an educator, we have very strong influences on students’ capacities. You must hear a lot stories like “I love to learn math because my math teacher from 3rd grade” or “I hate learning science because my teacher at my middle school is so terrible.” What we are doing in our classrooms can either motivate or decrease this capacity. Some of my students love learning Chinese. They told me that they are going to China when they grow up. They learn Chinese language and culture after school through the internet or purchased materials. An old Chinese proverb states “Teacher is architecture of soul” - We are changing the way our students think and believe; they are changing their capacity of learning.

The first thing those assumptions told us is that learning would not happy separately. One object of our instruction should be to help our students connect the new knowledge to their background knowledge, and to help them discover the new situation. I would have more students-centered discussion and performance-based assessments which offer more opportunities for students to socialize in their community to discover the best practices for them to learn.

P.S. 2. Pick one domain that you are interested in learning more about.
Domain 3 Instruction.

Task Two

The purpose of curriculum is to help students acquire basic, important information and skills. Curriculum also serves to make sense of the content by presenting content in a logical flow. It also acts as a guide to connect the knowledge from the classroom to students’ real life experiences at school and beyond.

Three roles are addressed in the article (Wiggins) that supports the purpose outlined above. In direct instruction, teachers help students acquire the basic knowledge and information. Using facilitation, teachers will help students to process information and make it meaningful for learners. In the role of coaching, teachers offer opportunities for students to apply the information and skills into more complex, new situations.

To directly answer the second question, in my case I have little control in designing the curriculum – it is handed down from the district. However, I have the flexibility to design assessment and learning activities for each lesson.

Teachers should have much more control of curriculum design. Again citing my experience, students would be better off if a suitable curriculum were designed for each class since each classroom’s condition is so different (grade level and foreign language abilities). I think it would be best if teachers identified their classroom and individual needs for learning which should be aligned with their curriculum. The design of the curriculum should be both reflexive and dynamic, having the capacity to adapt to student abilities. It should be more bottom-up, student driven instead of an inflexible, handed-down district developed curriculum. The unit design should be especially more flexible for teachers to create more effective units which build upon state and local standards as a foundation.

The curriculum I have is the same curriculum for all the elementary world language teachers in my district. No matter what language we teach, we must teach the same curriculum (e.g. who am I, what color is my hair, etc…). The current curriculum is designed by a group of our elementary world language teachers. It is very new group and is still in the experimental state. Ideally, the curriculum should support well the core content of the appropriate grade level. In other words, the foreign language content should complement the current learning for each grade. Students should easily be able to make a content connection.

The curriculum gives me content by unit. However, not enough content is given to support my daily lesson planning process. On the bright side, I have more space to control my lesson design. The curriculum gives focus questions for each theme, and “I can do” statements as objectives for each unit. These objectives are the outcomes I want students to achieve when I design my daily lessons. This gives flexibility for teachers to create their own unique daily lessons and corresponding activities. The downside to this approach is that it is very time consuming to create 100% of my daily teaching content and 100% of student resources. I don’t have a teacher’s edition of a text book that I can use as a guide, nor do the students have Chinese textbooks. In addition, I never know if my lesson plan and class activities will be effective.

I am concerned with my district’s top-down approach to foreign language curriculum. Foreign language is different than other subjects and Chinese is especially different with other languages. The curriculum does not address these differences in an effective way. Furthermore, the foreign language curriculum as a whole does not connect well with core units, which makes it more confusing for students and for me.