Written by On November 20-23, I attended the ACTFL annual conference for World Language teachers. Here are some takeaways:
Attending a conference this big with a colleague makes a huge difference
Fellow French teacher Rachel and I had such a great time spending 24/4 together!! I haven’t been this blown away since my last Cohort 21 face to face session. We were able to attend twice as many sessions, check in with each other throughout the day, de-brief over dinner and cram twice as many goodies from the Exhibit Hall in our bags to take home. We even have a collaboration opportunity between our Grade 9 & 12 French classes in the works – stay tuned!
#langchat stars: they’re just like us!
I was so excited to see and meet some of my favourite #langchat personalities in person: Colleen Lee-Hayes (@CoLeeSensei), whose session I didn’t see but I made a point of meeting to thank her for all of her contributions on Twitter; Laura Sexton (@sraspanglish), whose session on Genius Hour projects was very inspirational and timely given that we have been discussing this type of idea as a whole school; Sara Elizabeth Cottrell (@musicuentos), who along with Laura and Bethany Drew (@lovemysummer) presented how they personalize homework tasks for their students. What a fantastic idea and resource they’ve shared! All of these twitter personalities and many more have inspired me to jump back into the Cohort 21 forum to share my adventures in French teaching on this blog.
Time to reflect on vision for my department 
Debbie Callihan-Dingle’s presentation on moving towards proficiency provided a template and a great opportunity to reflect on recent changes to our FSL curriculum and where we are going. Meeting like-minded teachers last weekend and seeing our new curriculum in print – which brings intercultural competency to the forefront – has been a real affirmation for me after abandoning the textbook years ago in favour of authentic, real-world learning!
How to scaffold rich learning tasks for upper year students
I wanted to come away from ACTFL with some new strategies to provide rigorous, yet well-supported learning opportunities for my upper year students. For instance, how can I get my students to engage with one another about authentic texts they’ve researched according to their interests that are also linked to the AP themes? My AP students are working towards their first socratic seminar, linked to one of the AP themes but personalized to meet their interests. I attended two sessions on Socratic circles designed for second language learners, presented by Susan Menand (@menandteacher) and another pair whose presentation notes will hopefully be posted to the ACTFL site this weekend. Both provided great resources and steps for success.
New ideas I could implement right away
- One of the choose your own adventure homework tasks was to use twitter to reach out to the global Target Language community; another was to look up twitter hashtags in the target language and share what comes up – great authentic ways to access the target language.
- In his Enhancing Global Competency session, Paul Lange introduced me to zaption.com, where I found posts by ACTFL TOY’s Nicole Naditz – this must be a great site for curating authentic listening material.
- Using Aurasma to post student presentations around the classroom and have students from other classes listen and respond (this is what I have in mind for my collaboration idea!)
- 20 Time/Genius Hour projects in Target Language: could this be the alternative I’ve been waiting for to the traditional end of year exam?
- Cultural do’s and dont’s: Get parents/school community involved and present a do’s and don’ts video to our e-pals in France; have them respond with their own cultural practices.