LinguaCulture Blog

Wiki. What a great word.
I've set up a wiki for my Spanish class culture capsule project. I'm hoping that the idea of publishing the project online helps to encourage quality work and critical thought from my students. Stay tuned...

We all want our students to move beyond the memorization of trivia into the realm of critical thought. Discussions and projects that attempt to answer open-ended questions are a doorway for our students to enter into the world of high-order thinking.
Curriculum-framing questions that we are exploring in my classroom right now are "How do underlying values and themes drive behavior in the target culture?" and "How are the products and practices of the target culture outward manifestations of the underlying values and themes?"
This is great, but what do we do with that student who cannot tolerate ambiguity? You know, the one who after a great classroom discussion looks up and says, "So what's the answer? What do I write?"
I'm currently attending a series of intel project-based learning workshops. So far, they have been packed with useful information. I'm hoping that the future workshops will help me to learn what to do with that student.

I am so behind at school. We are knee-deep in the culture capsule projects, geography lessons and plans to visit the Pompeii exhibit that is coming to the Birmingham Museum of Art. On top of that, we are missing class after class for pep rallies, picture days and class elections. I'm participating in a technology workshop at Central Office that is taking me out of the classroom for 5 days and- oh crap!- I forgot that tomorrow was club day. Scratch the lesson plans. It never fails that I crack open the textbook and the PA system comes on and calls half of my class out to leave for the library to discuss class rings, yearbooks or early release schedules.
Exactly when does teaching Spanish fit in to all of this? These kids need practice.
We are a month in with this academic year and I'm not even through chapter 1 of the text in any of my classes.
I vowed to give them more homework. But what? Meaningless grammar drills? No...that's just busywork. It's not helping them to really communicate in Spanish.
Just tell them to practice at home? No...there is no way they'd actually do it.
What if I gave them some activities that would really help them practice Spanish (such as having a "Spanish only" night out with a classmate) and found some sort of way to hold them accountable to actually doing it? That sounded like a good idea.
So I gave students a choice of 5 projects- something for everyone. They have to choose one to do before the end of the month and can do more for extra credit.
I unleashed the assignment on them this morning and braced myself for the whining.
Instead, I heard excited whispers and one, "Wow! This is going to be fun!"
I almost fell over.