As teachers, I think we all have our favorite grades or courses to teach. For me, the consistency of teaching level 4/IV Spanish to juniors in high school for 21 of 22 years, is where I am most comfortable and, perhaps, happy. It is where I am helping students to grow and hone their skills within the Intermediate Low/Mid/High proficiency levels. Over the past 6 years, I have raised expectations more by pushing students to work toward showcasing their Spanish abilities on the STAMP proficiency exam to earn the Ohio Seal of Biliteracy which requires them to score at Intermediate High level in at least 3 or the 4 skills of reading, listening, writing, and speaking. With over 75% of our students earning the Ohio Seal during junior year in Spanish 4/IV, our students are meeting the challenge. And even though teaching upper-level Spanish sits well with me, I am left having a bit of a teacher identity crisis. Why? It is because I am often teaching more novice level classes, and this coming year we will have larger class sizes with only one level 4/IV course and then I will teach a section of Spanish 1/I and three sections of Spanish 2/II. Essentially I will teach four sections of ninth graders. As I mentally prepare for this, as I mentioned in part 1 and 2 of this series, there will need to be changes in my classroom so I can align how I want to be as a teacher and how I need to be for my students.

In continuing my reflection on Mike Peto’s guidebook: The Two Conversations Classroom: A Complete, Student-Centered Approach to Teaching a Second Language, his approach in theory seems simple with regard to curriculum and teaching in the target language, but it is still way more complicated than that. 

“AHA” Moment #2 from Mike Peto’s Guidebook: The Lesson and 2 Conversations

His guidebook provides a recipe for a lesson. In fact, immediately following reading the book, I created a template like he described how his typical classes run. He also articulated well how these lessons change and could vary per level and per different times of the year. And in seeing this, it is not just a simple recipe. It really still must be refined by each individual teacher and their skillset. The crux of the recipe for a lesson is the following: 

1. Reading (working toward independent reading)
2. Conversation 1 about your Students: “Student Voices”
3. Conversation 2 about Others’ Voices
4. Write and Discuss Summary 
5. Exit Quiz 

Now there is also room for something he calls “Bailout Moves.” I actually love his concept of “Bailout Moves.” These are go-to activities or things students can do if class goes awry. Honestly, it’s brilliant, and something I am often envious of because I am a planner. I plan every minute of a class, and I often don’t have “go-to activities” like Mike is recommending here. So this summer, I am putting together a list of new “Go-to Activities” that I will be able to incorporate at any time. 

Here is my tangent on this: I think so often we are trained to think about logical lesson planning with regard to goals and the actual lesson and unit; which is often what we are evaluated on. I, included, create lessons and units like this, but aren’t having some bailout moves and go-to activities more important than just the lesson? I ask this because should a class “go awry” the solution should not be to allow students to get on their phones and do whatever they want. There should be an academic activity that can be done. For teachers reading this, if you need to use one of these “go-to activities” during an observation for example, this is something you need to be able to talk about and explain why you chose to do that and how you were really prepared even though it was not in your day’s “lesson.” End tangent.  

Mike talks about two different conversations happening in a class. The first one is student-based and often is just derived from a Personalized Question and Answer with students, a Student Interview, Card Talk, or Calendar Talk. 

The beauty is in the reliance of the Sweet 16 verbs and based on what I’m reading, it is not his reliance on just the present tense. This will be a huge shift for me as a teacher and I think it also has the potential to be liberating. I’m going to take this time to reflect on non-targeted versus targeted language use in the language classroom. Have I been perceiving it in the wrong way for many years? Yes and no. Even though Mike’s Two Conversation Approach uses non-targeted Comprehensible Input, meaning he is not providing the class with three to six structures that he hopes students acquire in a lesson or subsequent days of a lesson – there is structure. There is structure because the Sweet 16 verbs are the glue that makes the conversations happen and his language comprehended. I know I’ve had this “AHA” moment before but I often think it gets misinterpreted that people just think they can use target language and students will acquire it. I like to talk about Intentional Input, meaning there is great intention with the language that I use to craft any lesson. But knowing this, using the Sweet 16 or what I call the Top 20 verbs in Spanish, it gives us so many more ways of making the conversation more robust, and I am intrigued by the capacity to use multiple tenses even for my novice students. It is not that I shy away from using the appropriate tense when needed but I usually do limit what words I recycle with students because I often teach using a more targeted approach. I know many teachers have been doing the non-targeted approach for a long time. I have heard about it, read about it, and seen it in quick demos, but I have not been fully convinced as to how this would translate into my novice classes. But I think I’m going to see this in practice during the Brazilian Portuguese class and experience it as a novice learner, and I will be reporting back. 

In Mike’s approach, his second conversation in a lesson takes more thought and preparation. The second conversation does not necessarily revolve around the students. It can be a story, a clip chat, a picture talk, an OWI: one word image, a book talk, other cultural content, or a TV series. The goal is hopefully to provide another perspective and not just be about the lives of our students. It includes all of the fundamentals discussed throughout the book or any training we have been to with regard to providing Input that is comprehended. Going back to my notions of big picture lesson planning or unit planning, I’m thinking that conversation 1 and conversation 2 do not need to be linked. I often spend so much time thinking about how to link the two together (this does not even include how I incorporate a song or other aspects in my classes). Perhaps if I could remove that mindset, and just use the connecting link of the Sweet 16 highest-frequency verbs, I will not feel so stressed in terms of my lesson planning. Again, I look forward to thinking more about this as I see how the Brazilian Portuguese class plays out.   

As I end this post, I started it with my Teacher Identity Crisis comment so I am going to bring it full circle. Even though I am so proud of our students who leave Spanish 4/IV at an Intermediate High level and as a fan and proponent of designing curriculum, backwards planning, and alignment – I know that a lot of decisions I make in my novice levels are because I think about preparing students to reach higher proficiency levels, earning the Ohio Seal and/or Global Seal of Biliteracy, and preparing them for AP Spanish.  My last “AHA” moment is to remove some of the stress I put on my Spanish 1/I students and myself with regard to speaking assessments at this level. Mike stated that when they eliminated this from their novice classes the students changed in a positive way. It wasn’t that students were not communicating in class in target language but they removed the anxiety-ridden speaking assessments, and this alleviated many problems in the class. I’m going to work on how this will play out in my novice classes this coming year. I know we are investing in a program called www.speakable.io that I hope could help students foster some more communicative growth on their own by doing so in a low-stakes way instead of the dreaded speaking assessments. 

In my next post, I will focus on some “AHA” moments about part 4 and 5 of his recipe for a lesson: the Write and Discuss and Exit Quiz.

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