Being a new teacher leaves you to wonder if you're doing it right. Am I reaching them? Or am I just getting by? We dread the days when we are being observed/evaluated, but dread even more the feedback that may come after. We know we try our best, yet we anxiously await the post observation report, only to take it apart and be more critical of ourselves than any report would be. Even if we do well, we look at where we can/would like to improve. It's reflective, it's what we do. Because we want to be the best teacher we can be!
In looking at my own evaluations, I've taken a look at the strand that speaks of developing critical thinking and problem solving skills. Helping students develop their critical thinking skills means we are making them 21 century learners. In the World Language classroom, what might this look like? I immediately thought of project based learning, where students work on a given project, with each part of the project working towards an end goal of learning a particular point. Lucky for me, I came across a blog by a fellow Spanish teacher and blogger, Laura Sexton (@SraSpanglish), who writes about problem based learning in the target langue in her blog PBL in the TL. In her blog, Laura Sexton offers a plethora of resources to use projects as a basis to learn. The goal is always for the students to use these projects as a means to use the target language (in this case Spanish) in a way they wouldn't normally be able to if they only followed a textbook. It invites critical thinking, communication and collaboration, all 21st century skills. The further you delve into the blog, the more resources you find that you can choose from. My task: study the array of ideas and pick one, just one, to start with and use it to meet my students at their level. I'm sure the end result will mean more communication in the TL, more insight for them to things relevant in any language, and a greater understanding that language does not separate people...it connects them!
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