Creative Confidence…

I promise to no longer say that I am not creative. I promise to have creative confidence! Creating and innovating does not have to look a certain way, or be perfect whatsoever. It involves trying something new, asking questions and taking risks with the hope of learning something wonderful, which is exactly what I’ve been discovering through Cohort21!

Going into the second F2F for Cohort21, I was assuming that I would have a really hard time narrowing down my Action Plan to tackle only 1 problem, since I have many I would like to be addressed. It turns out that by using Design Thinking, I can group my challenges together with one very common theme: student engagement and motivation. My challenges with behaviour, with speaking only in the target language, with keeping boys happy in my class could possibly all be improved with increased engagement. I think that using various technologies in Grade 6 is a good start to solving this problem. Giving boys the opportunity to do things that interest them allow them to use French in ways that are meaningful to them. Do I care that they are not speaking only in French while they work? Yes, I admit it does bother me, but should it?

I also spoke with some Cohort colleagues that got me thinking about my issue around the program that I have been told I have to use, but don’t particularly love. I really tried my best to keep an open mind, accept the program and deliver it to the students as best as I could — but if you think about it, I don’t want to be the type of teacher that simply delivers a program. I want kids to be involved in the process of language learning, to choose what we talk about and how they demonstrate their learning. I don’t want each day to involve opening a textbook, reading from the book and then doing writing activities in a workbook. Despite my coworker’s belief that this program aligns with the CEFR and the Revised Ontario Curriculum, I find evidence of the contrary. My first redflag of the textbook was: it’s written in English. How am I going to expect my students to keep French as the language of communication if the program is written in English? Second issue: it comes from an American publisher. We are teaching French in a bilingual country, how can we be ok with using a program that comes from the US? It references Canada in the most hilarious ways. And my third issue is the emphasis on grammar and correct spelling. I truly believe we will not encourage fluency or language confidence by constantly expecting boys to write perfectly and use perfect grammar when speaking and writing. So, to resolve this issue I plan to attempt some shared reading during French Dept meetings and bringing examples of how we include different aspects of the Revised Ontario Curriculum and the CEFR in our daily lessons. I’m hoping that this will begin to shed some light on how the program used is contrary to our learning goals.

One thing I wanted do in my classes after the last F2F was really talk to the boys about their language learning. I wanted ask them: if you could talk to a francophone girl or boy about anything in the world, what would you want to talk about? What would you ask them? What would you want to share? So I did just that, and the response was what one would expect for 11-12 year old boys: “We want to flirt with girls! Talk about sports and music and YouTube videos!” Now I am looking at how we can integrate those topics into speaking activities, vocabulary development and authentic communication with real francophones.

I used to think that my Cohort21 Action Plan needed to work towards ONE solution for ONE problem. Now I think that my Action Plan will include many possibilities for solutions to several problems.

**Note** This post was originally written at the end of the 2nd Face to Face, but I didn’t realize that I never clicked “Publish!” so I adjusted some of the wording to include a couple of things I have been working on since November.