Back to school–with Covid

Posted on

I will be going back to school in less than four weeks,  and I have no idea what it is going to look like. This will be my twenty fourth year in the classroom, but because of the pandemic, I can’t rely on past experiences to guide me.  I will need to be prepared to adapt more than ever every day and every minute.  We still haven’t heard the official word on what the classroom or the daily routine will be each day and we start in less than a month.  A planner like me does not like the uncertainty.

 

And there will be the added pressure of having my eldest son in my class. My son, who unlike his mother likes neither school nor French.  How do I put on a good show if students are social distancing and we are all wearing masks ?  The two things that stand out the most about my classroom is the interpersonal speaking and the group work and games.  Most students sign up for my class because they want to be able to have a conversation with a native speaker, and so I make it a point to practice this skill everyday.  Furthermore, I believe learning is social so the pair work and group competitions are essential to my classroom by providing much needed brain breaks and/or formative checks for me.

 

In order to make myself feel more prepared for the unknown, one thing I can do is go back and look at my unit plans for the classes that I will be teaching this year : French 1, Honors French 3 and Honors French 4.  I can tweak performance assessments, replace outdated authentic resources and envision how what I am doing in the classroom can be done virtually if needed.

 

Prior to teaching at my current school (this will be my twelfth year and the longest I have stayed anywhere), I was an English teacher for six years, and prior to that, a lone French teacher who had learned to teach from a textbook while creating my own performance assessments and personalizing the class with a student-centered approach.  The textbook chose my themes and the order in which to teach them, but my fifty-minute class period was never spent asking students to open their books as we went through one dull exercise after another.

 

Then in 2009, I started teaching French at my current school where I wasn’t the only French teacher and we shared unit plans and assessments with the other high school in our district.  I was assigned levels one through three and for the most part, the curriculums were similar to what I had taught in the past so I was able to pull from past experience. However, the French 3 curriculum included themes that I had never taught before or had only taught at higher levels.  Moreover, few of the themes aligned with the textbook that the school had adopted and I didn’t find the resources to be very good or engaging.

 

Flash forward a few years to our school’s initiative to have every department upload UbD units, (devloped by educators Grand Wiggins and Jay Mc Tighe) which I had read about in their Understanding by Design materials but had never seen what it could look like for world language teachers.

 

Enter Lisa Hendrickson and Karen Fowdy who hosted an all-day workshop at Central States Conference in 2016.  Their presentation was all about Thematic Unit Planning and walked us through how to design a unit based on AP or IB themes.  This was a game changer for me and their template made sense.  I now start every unit by looking at the previous year’s template and make changes as needed.  If you get a chance to see these ladies, do it ! They have an answer for all your questions and inspire you with how they curate and teach with authentic resources. My colleague and I enjoyed their all-day workshop so much that we signed up for another workshop they presented on assessing interpersonal speaking.

 

If you would like to see a sample template for my first unit in French 3 Honors. Click here