Mosaico - Challenges and Successes

One of the challenges I'm having with Mosaic so far is also one of the successes. Seminars have been going well and students are responding well to my ideas for how Spanish will look this year, but everything is moving slowly. "Go slow to go fast" is one of our mantras in the group, and that alone is a challenge for me. Once I have a goal (ie: getting a specific set of students more proficient in Spanish), I want to just do it! But getting the kids rounded up for seminars is part of the trouble: I offered 4 of the same "Get to know you" seminars last week. Of my 22 kids, 19 made it to at least one. That means that there were 3 of my students I wasn't able to connect with AT ALL in an entire week! 19 out of 22 isn't bad, but with four options I really hoped they would make at least one. I definitely can't afford to offer the same seminar 4 times in a week with only one period dedicated to Mosaic. I found I spent a lot of energy tracking kids down whom I don't yet know to tell them to do things that they should already be doing in Mosaic- checking their email and Project Foundry for tasks I sent them. I'm slowly getting to know them, though, and they're slowly getting used to the expectations we have of them, so this is improving.

Another challenge that arises from this is the lack of tangible consequence if they do fail to check and complete tasks, check their email or attend seminars. I have a fear that my students will just decide that Spanish credit isn't important enough to them and I will end up with 1 or 2 students total at the end of the year. I also feel a ton of pressure to make every seminar unforgettable, perfectly leveled and über-engaging so that this doesn't happen. When I get wrapped up in my fears though, I need to remind myself that those come along with risk-taking and nothing rewarding in my life so far has come without a little risk.

One thing that has gone really well is the Google+ Community I set up for Spanish. I've been posting popular items, such as famous Spaniards doing the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and infographs about ebola, for students to respond and reflect on what they grasped from each. This week, their task is to interact at least twice there, and the challenge is to find something in Spanish to share themselves.

Seminars:
I have 2 planned this week for each level. One they have an option to attend during first or second for a half hour on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the other is required on Thursday and they have only one option. That's a total of 6 seminars that I'm offering. For those without experience, I'll be dappling in TPRS and using a fun little chant/song/game called "Manzanita del Perú" to learn the basics of asking and answering basic questions, and following up on the in the second newbie seminar. For the experienced ones, Seminar 1 will be a brain flow of the structures they know to talk about themselves to review, and then we'll play a game called "Where the wind blows" in English. Seminar 2 for those with experience will be a day for us to go to the library together and pick out novels to read this term. There are only 5 each of the novels available, so they will be reading mostly different things. I'll probably do seminars based on the specific books they're reading starting next week so that we can start the books together.

Future Seminar ideas:

• Experienced students develop a lesson for the newbies
• I model a cooking show type presentation and the experienced students create their own to teach each other structures and newbies foods.
• Novel specific seminars
• Exchange student highlights- we have a lot of Spanish speaking students and exchange students; I think I'll highlight one a week with a profile on the Google+ Community and have the experienced students come with a few questions based on this information, and then have a Seminar with that student introducing him/herself and chatting.
• Blog, Vlog, and Blog carnivals- hopefully eventually student created blogs in Spanish, as I'm doing in my other classes. The seminar would be a chat about blog highlights from the week or month, or a blog carnival.

Mosaico - Dreaming Big

I follow a blog called "Spanish and Illinois" by Dr. Ann Abbott who teaches some really interesting Spanish courses at the university level, including classes for business and community service. This recent post shows part of where I hope to take Mosaic Spanish "classes" at the high school level once my students gain a little more proficiency. It discusses how she is making her business class more real - bringing real professionals into the classroom and having her students prepare real products for the real business world, rather than centering instruction around fictions created for practice. Some adjustments need to be made for Mosaic, since my students are not adults and are working from within a public school, but I think really engaging my students in the Spanish speaking world is doable.

One of my biggest struggles, though, is how often I feel like I say "when they get more proficient." This is an important balance because a real, Spanish-speaking businessperson probably wouldn't have a lot of patience for a 14-year-old that has a hard time even introducing herself. However, I need to figure out ways to keep it real even for my newbies. I think I'll start by sharing these big goals and visions of my own that I have for them and their Spanish so that they can see where I honestly believe they can go with their Spanish. Then, I want to provide them with as much information and as many avenues to explore Spanish locally and globally as I can so as to empower them to figure out how they want to authentically interact with a new multilingual world. And who knows? If I can inspire them to orient themselves toward a big goal like developing business relationships with Spanish speakers in the area, perhaps their proficiency grow way faster than in the classroom which by its nature has to be a more fabricated environment than the Mosaic one.

And so it begins...

And this time I really say that enthusiastically!  Today was, as @ryanmcclintock called it, Day 0 of Mosaic. I've come to appreciate the fact that we're figuring this out as we go, which isn't exactly my personality nor is it how I was trained (backwards planning?). I think it's true transformation though, and that is what makes it so exciting. There's a possibility that the Mosaic product will barely resemble the education world from which it evolved. This is not a time for fear, even though I predict that this year will be full of challenges and setbacks.

Roger Ebert said, "Start. Don't look back. If at the end it doesn't meet your hopes, start again. Now you know more about your hopes."

We've started.