Robin Watson Mini-conference Reflection

2. Reflect – What did it mean to me?

            One of the things I enjoyed most about the mini-conference was the lesson that Lisa Homann taught about whales.  She taught the entire lesson in German and I was very exhausted by the end.  I found myself engaged in the lesson and also very challenged to keep up.  One of my classmates described the lesson as cognitively demanding which I thought summed it up very well. 

            I liked the lesson for a couple of reasons one of which was that I noticed some very good techniques for teaching content through a foreign language.  At different stages in the lesson we were involved in reading, writing, listening and speaking.  Lisa asked many questions and they often involved choice.  These choice questions allowed her to repeat the words she wanted us to learn and it allowed us to not only hear those words one more time, but to feel success in learning the language because we usually knew the correct choice.  

            Another reason I liked the lesson was that it helped me understand just how cognitively demanding it is for our students to learn content in a language other than their own.  I was very engaged and tried to keep up, but once or twice my mind went away for just a moment and then I was lost when I came back.  I had to work that much harder to follow along and I began to feel like maybe I wouldn’t be able to do it.  The pictures that she provided along with the dialogue, was a big help and critical to any understanding that I did have.   

3. Refine – How will I use the information in my classroom?

            The one big takeaway from this conference is I have a better understanding of what it is like to try to learn academic content in another language.  It truly is very taxing and I realize that more now than I did before the mini-conference.  As I result, I find myself allowing students more time to process.  I am building more time in the lesson for students to discuss with each other and to catch up on missed concepts. I am pausing more frequently, and inserting questions into the lesson that require students to write or to speak.  For example, I may pause in a lesson about perpendicular and parallel lines and ask the students to write a sentence or two comparing and contrasting these lines.  If I am going to ask them to explain to the rest of the class, I give them time to rehearse their answer with their partner.

 I am also making a conscious effort to embed choices into questions and to repeat the target words as often as possible.  I may show a picture of a roller coaster and ask the students, “Is this an example of a linear function or an exponential function?’  I may follow that with a picture of the trail left in the sky by an airplane and ask the same question, “Is this an example of a linear function or an exponential function?’  In this way, students are hearing the vocabulary words repeatedly, they are saying the vocabulary word as they answer, and they are being successful because they have at least a 50 percent chance of being right.

I have also begun to create an electronic bulletin board showing which countries each student is from.  I had wanted it do it for some time but I hadn’t got to it yet.  Listening to the five speakers at the beginning of the conference just reinforced how important our culture is to each of us.  By recognizing that in some way, students can see that I value them as a person and as an individual who is unique and has their own story.