There is great challenge and value in learning and mastering a second or foreign language. Kathryn Bailey, French teacher at Brevard High School, strives to build students language skills through creative, personalized and innovative instruction and learning experiences.
This past spring semester, Kathryn had her students work on a narrative story from the past. This gave students opportunities to work with the past participle while bringing out their creative sides. Technology was integrated throughout the 3-week unit to provide immediate learning feedback, increase student engagement, display learning and to help develop 21st century learning skills.
Personalization included students completing learning style and interest surveys so that students could learn more about themselves and to facilitate grouping students for certain activities in the unit. Additionally, students helped to create activity rubrics that they used to self-evaluate and self-monitor learning. Kathryn says that “initially, it is tough to let go and allow students to play a role in creating rubrics, however students seem to care more when they have a say”. Additionally, she stresses the “importance of students knowing where they are, through self-assessment”.
The unit activities:
Prior to the unit activity, students had 2 units on past tense, and completed learning style and interest inventories. The teacher began the unit by leading the class through a discussion about Fairy Tales. Students would share their recollections of a common fairy tale and the teacher would work with the students to identify the tense a particular action fell under.
Next, students were placed in pairs and given a common fairy tale to read in English, while searching for and organizing information and events based on tense. Additional practice with past tense was given using various online resources (e.g. Quizziz, UT@Austin French Grammar Practice, Quizlet, and LingaFolio) throughout the unit.
The unit project began by partners planning components of a story, such as date, time, location, weather and 2 main characters. Pairs of students were tasked with creating an electronic visual to present this information. After this was completed, students worked individually, with the information that they developed with their partners to complete their story, while focusing on using past tense. These stories were either presented to the class by the students or students had the option of narrating slides using Vocaroo, which is an online tool to record audio. This allowed students multiple ways to present the same information, in a way that they felt comfortable and confident.
Throughout the unit, students self-evaluated and self-monitored progress via rubrics and checklists. This allowed students to make adjustments and ultimately to be more in control of their learning. This form of formative assessment allows the teacher and students to better understand their learning, and to make necessary changes to be more successful.
At the completion of the unit, the teacher (Kathryn) met with each student individually to “provide meaningful feedback about their projects.”
“This is usually a difficult unit for students to grasp, and utilizing technology helped ease the process by providing immediate feedback of learning, helping students to self-assess learning, and by helping me (the teacher) to learn more about my students to personalize activities”
-Kathryn Bailey
Samples of a few student’s stories (slides) can be seen by clicking the links below: