In December and January, my Cohort 21 Action Plan had very clear goals<\/a>. I generated a meaningful list of items I could check off a to do list.<\/p>\n And check them off I did.<\/p>\n You see, I\u2019m really good at organization.<\/p>\n I surveyed my students<\/a>. I visited and observed a teacher<\/a> I admired in Ottawa. I reviewed some old materials I want to start using again. I read a book<\/a>. I started making changes in my classroom<\/a> with new technology.<\/p>\n But I\u2019ve finished all of the \u201cthings\u201d on my list and now I\u2019m testing out what I\u2019ve learned. I\u2019m living in a phase of experimentation, and it\u2019s messy. It\u2019s absolutely not organized.<\/p>\n Initially, I had this great idea that I would give myself permission to only experiment with one class. If I\u2019m only playing around with one grade, I\u2019d save myself from this exact feeling of hot mess-ness everywhere in my day.<\/p>\n But (unfortunately? fortunately?) I kept learning new ideas that were perfect for each of my different classes, and I was too excited to wait. I wanted to test them all, so I decided if I was going to play with my program and my teaching practice, I\u2019m going all in.<\/p>\n It\u2019s exciting and fun, and I kind of love it. It\u2019s make me more flexible as a person, that\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n However, my Cohort 21 Action plan for February to April has pretty much two things on it. Try out new interactive oral communication learning activites in the classroom. Decide which ones work and do them again.<\/em><\/p>\n This is not what I thought the end of my Cohort 21 year would look like. I\u2019m sure by April, I\u2019ll still be in this experimentation phase: Discover\/Create new ways to get my students speaking to each other in French. Try them out. Repeat.<\/p>\n In a future post, I plan to share exactly what I\u2019ve learned about interactive oral communication in the FSL\u00a0 classroom and what learning activities have, so far, been successful in my classes.<\/p>\n For now, it\u2019s been a learning curve for me, a person who craves a plan, to live in this space of the unknown. This phase of testing things out. It\u2019s ironic that while I feel a bit less certain of what we\u2019re doing, because much of it is new to me, my students are building their confidence with language.<\/p>\n I can already tell some of our experiments are working. Many of my students are speaking more French in class than they have in a long while.\u00a0 We moved into a new classroom a few weeks ago, and I think that has helped as well. It was a fresh start in a different, new space with different, new expectations.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know if I would have been brave enough to try out so many new things in my classroom all at once if I didn\u2019t have such wonderful support from my Cohort 21 team, my Montcrest colleagues, and our school administration. Their encouragement that I\u2019m on the right track definitely keeps me going on days where I\u2019m feeling particularly hot mess-y.<\/p>\n Jenn<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If my professional learning has done anything this year, it has turned me into a hot mess. A good hot mess. But a hot mess just the same. Last year I was organized. I knew what lesson came next in my unit. I knew which Google Docs to use and when to use them. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":261,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-plan","category-classroom-reflections","category-teacher-life","category-teaching-french-as-a-second-language","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferbairos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferbairos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferbairos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferbairos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/261"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferbairos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferbairos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":157,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferbairos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferbairos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferbairos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferbairos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/jenniferbairos\/files\/2019\/03\/school-1974369_1920.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n