¡España! Pay-it-forward Travel Project

We're going to SPAIN, baby! I have 4 Mosaic students and one other CV students going to Spain with me this summer for one whole month! I am working with a small company called Global Journeys, Ltd. that does a great job really personalizing the experience for the students and finding host families with which the students will best connect. The students will be staying with their host families the entire time, though I am thinking about spending a couple of days with them on the back end of the trip in Madrid so we can explore as a group.

One idea I'm rolling around in my head is embedding a "Pay-It-Forward" sort of project. The students will need to come up with some way to use their trip to enrich Mosaic, CV or our community. What I'm thinking off the top of my head is presentations when they get back that can maybe help spread the word about exchanges and home stays abroad as a means of increasing global competency and language proficiency (not to mention enhancing their resumes and portfolios). Also, I have a student that's really into history so I can see him designing a tour and presenting it to Mosaic students as he informs them about things that he saw and learned in Spain. Another student loves Spanish dance, so she might be able to develop a MiniCourse around that. I'm sure the students will have much more creative ideas than I do! Any traveling teachers have advice or ideas to help grow my seedling here?

[Image by Té y kriptonita [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]

learning and relearning, "knowing" vs. KNOWING

As I sat in our canceled-not-canceled-canceled-not-canceled 8th grade parent night last night, I felt a sense of renewed excitement for what we're doing in Mosaic. Michael got it started with an inspiring presentation that he, Shaun and Ryan had created for Educon this past weekend. Questions and comments from attending teachers, parents and students reminded me of the power of our goals in Mosaic.

The year has been filled with ups and downs and plenty of challenges. I "knew" it would be when I got myself into Mosaic, but I didn't really know. It's been tough at times. A couple of the most important things I'm learning and relearning this year are:

• I can't take responsibility for whether my students really learn, and if I try to, I am more so doing them a disservice. This doesn't mean that I don't have a responsibility to my students; I just needed to redefine that responsibility to make sure that I am empowering my students rather than imprisoning them to a rigid set of expectations.
• Progress and learning happens at its own rate, and in our situation it's likely to look like an exponential curve (which is what we want). Unfortunately, the beginning of the exponential curve can feel like no one is getting anywhere. I am learning to keep pushing through that initial "stagnation" so that my students really pick themselves up and take off with their learning. Another thing I "knew" (but really didn't).

Some students in Spanish are starting to take off and it's so exciting. I recently communicated clearly with parents about the stagnation of some students with regard to Spanish, and that has made me feel free to fly with those kids that are really into the language and to be patient with those who really aren't. Four of my Mosaic students are coming with me to Spain this summer to live with a host family; they'll start Skyping with their families shortly and will come back with much more proficiency than I could ever impart in the classroom. We went on a walk and chatted in Spanish this morning because the weather was fabulous. Some of us are practicing yoga after school on Thursday using a video I got from the public library in Spanish. I'm interviewing them about their projects in Spanish as they finish presentations. And I'm slowly letting go of all of the structure that I normally put in place to encourage Spanish proficiency building in order to allow them to more meaningfully construct that for themselves. 

Needless to say, in Mosaic, the learning never stops. 

A Mosaic student and exchange student from Spain teamed up
to teach CV dance and fellow Mosaic students typical Spanish dance.

Students in my Spanish 3 class (outside of Mosaic) collaborated
to create mini-lessons for Mosaic Spanish students. This one
involved a fashion show and game.

Moodsaic

These thoughts are mine, and aren't representative of Mosaic as a whole, but I do know that I'm not the only teacher in Mosaic that's feeling this at least a little:

Many (or at least some) students aren't doing much. They're not getting our content. We compare them to the students in our "normal" classes and their progress, and as content specialists, we're frustrated. We air that frustration and try to fix the problem by starting to create a blended learning environment (using the district supported Moodle LMS) where we can get our content to our students online without the formal classroom setup of traditional schooling.

Are we being too impatient? We "knew" about what Shawn Cornally calls airlock before we even started, but is our frustration evidence of not really knowing about airlock? Before the year even started, I worried about what I have seen to be the tendency of many teenagers to prefer to "not do" than "to do," and I was always comforted by the airlock idea. I thought, They will not do and not do and not do until they organically come to the realization that not doing is not fulfilling, and then they'll get off their butts and do. Is 4 or 5 weeks enough time for students to come to that realization? Have we filled their time with doing that isn't quite meaningful enough so that they're not given the chance to come to that realization? Or is that comforting thought I had in the first place foolish and really it is our jobs as their teachers/coaches to light a fire under them?

Mosaic is not Iowa BIG and it really can't be as part of a public high school starting with more than 10 times the students BIG did. They have to hit all of their core standards and get almost all credits to graduate through their projects, through Mosaic. No matter what, Spanish is hard to work into their projects (especially with most students starting at very low or 0 proficiency) without instruction outside of their projects. I'm encouraged by being able to help students increase their proficiency at their own pace through personally designed online courses blended with my instruction.

Mosaic is quickly evolving and I am lucky to work with so many great thinkers, problem solvers and hackers. We're going to get this going, and it's going to be as great as we imagined because the team of teachers working on this are pros at modeling the resiliency that we hope to impart to our students. I think we (and by we I mostly mean I) need to model some extra patience at this point, too.

Keep on keepin' on

Mosaic progress continues, and as can be expected when lots of challenges hit incredibly bright and creative people, TONS of growth and development has happened since the start of the year. It's hard to be such a small part of something so exciting. This great post made me feel like I missed an important meeting today, and I have been struggling to squeeze my content into others' projects to get myself out there in the bigger group as much as I can (thanks, Shaun and Kayla!).

Still, I'm able to say that while I've been along as much as possible for the challenges, I have taken part in bits of the growth as well. I'm finally getting to place where I'm feeling better about what Spanish is looking like in Mosaic. I used youcanbook.me to set up a schedule and am (slowly but surely) having all of my students meet with me one-on-one. I'm using this time to get to know them, to make sure we're on the same page, and to encourage them to take the lead in their language learning as much as possible.

I told them that I want them producing something once a week in Spanish, no matter what. It can be anything at all, as long as it's in Spanish. I pointed them to my Spanish 3's blogs and blog assingment for inspiration. Their options for this that I came up with (I assured them that they could come up with their own as well) were a blog/vlog, posting to our Google+ Community, or emailing me. The newbies were told that a translator was okay as long as they used their brains too, and they could be assured that I would follow up and ask them what words or phrases they learned from each post/writing. I also created Drive folders for all of them using gClass Folders and got them started creating their own personal vocab list so that their learning is based on what is important to them. I ended with asking them for input on how we could incorporate Spanish into what they are doing in Mosaic and just a mini-convo in Spanish. I haven't met with all students, but I have loved connecting so far.

I was inspired by one of my students that got very excited about the blog post. She sees ways to incorporate Spanish everywhere, and came to my Spanish 3 class today just because she wanted to. She was so excited about the blog idea that she set it up today (same day) and told me that she can't wait to start reflecting in Spanish on it about her day to day life in her first year in a public school. #win

Tomorrow we have a seminar in which we meet one of our exchange students from Spain. We've been preparing all week by going over a profile that he wrote for himself and brainstorming questions and comments for him. I can't wait to reflect on how it goes tomorrow to improve for our next student spotlight!

This is for you, Ryan: #thatkidneedstofigureoutthecalendar #waityou'reholdingphysicsclassinthisroom? #atsomepointwe'llbespeakingSpanish #mosaicisawesome #fearprojectscaresthe!outtame

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.