When I used the Eisenhower Matrix in the Cohort 21 session, I noticed that the most urgent and important priorities in my practice are establishing a vibrant French program early in on in my tenure at my new school Royal St. George’s College. After bouncing around schools, I have a permanent home so building relationships with students is of utmost importance. I want to invite their engagement and open their hearts and minds to a new language. Building relationships and creating engaging learning experiences may not come with a deadline, but they are vital, important work to my practice. They intentionally set the tone for a new way of teaching and learning French that students will explore and co-construct over several years of my program.
One idea I want to try in my Grade 3/4 classes is establishing centres for learning inspired by Reggio-Emilia pedagogy and philosophy in which children co-construct their learning through active exploration. This pedagogy connects well to the Design Thinking cycle that I am currently refining for my classes in French and my interests in promoting student engagement through interdisciplinary STEAM experiences.
Alongside simultaneous hands-on centres for LEGO sentence building, sculpting, drawing, dictionary detective work and simple engineering, I want students to partake in collective design thinking experiences. These projects are intended to help my boys build empathy with user needs, communicate their ideas, and play and experiment while learning simple French language structures. I am grappling with the time-bound nature of my program and how to reconcile the lack of time afforded to fluency/oral practice with the need for high-engagement and hands-on activities that promote student investment in the subject matter.
For example one of my project ideas revolves around the question” ‘How might we design a guide to RSGC that helps new community members understand the school and its special places,”. In this project, students will identify areas of the school of significance, sketch and label drawings of important school locations, film videos of themselves touring the school and showing off different locations, while practicing communication skills in French. This project will help students foster empathy for new members in the school community, explore their sense of belonging to the school community all while exploring the curricular outcomes of the Ontario Curriculum. This work will also connect to cross-cultural exchanges I am organizing with several teachers in France.
My next step is to experiment in my classroom and investigate and iterate based on student outcomes. This work is meaningful and matters to me as I am a new face to the school and want to feel connected to my students and school community. By experimenting with exciting curriculum design, I am hopeful I can foster meaningful relationships with students and open hearts and minds to French as a Second Language.