I recently wrote the following in a personal statement of my teaching philosophy: I value a safe and culturally rich classroom environment where risk-taking in the target language is encouraged thus preparing students to communicate in real-life situations using communicative, collaborative and creative skills they have gained as they apply the content they have learned. […]

Student presentations are commonplace in world language classrooms and have been for a long time. Teachers use them for all the right reasons: instruction moves from teacher-fronted to student-centered, students gain responsibility for course content, and learners practice ACTFL’s presentational mode of communication. Presentations offer a possibility to assign research outside the classroom to students, […]

When we think of 21st Century skills we tend to think that the pedagogy which guides us to incorporate these skills must be accompanied by high tech tools. Of course by definition some skills (such as technology literacy) will need to be fostered by high tech tools, but there are others that can go low […]

Let’s start with ACTFL’s position statement on the use of technology as an initial step when deciding to go high or low tech in a lesson or activity: The use of technology should never be the goal in and of itself, but rather one tool for helping language learners to use the target language in […]

“Only by acquiring skills that bring us into contact with the physical world can we flourish as social individuals.” Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, 2015. Scissors, tape, glue, and brightly colored construction paper. The first thing I remember constructing with my hands was a wide-brimmed floppy paper hat for my mom, an […]

I recently reacquired the suitcase that I lugged around on my very first trip to Paris. The moment I grabbed it by its handle and felt it dig into the flesh of my fingers, I was flooded with sensory memories – cue the soundtrack to Amélie! Only instead of seeing movie-like images, I could smell […]

Using ACTFL’s 21st Century Skills Map as our guide, how can we strengthen the ways we teach recurring cultural themes such as food? Food seems to be a favorite topic of our students and many of us teach a unit on food or often incorporate it into our lessons. We’ve chosen to look at food […]

This month marks the one-year anniversary of High Tech/Low Tech: Ideas for Every Classroom. As we look back through the archives, we notice that there are quite a few ideas involving sticky notes. This is not surprising. After all, sticky notes represent a perfect marriage between high and low tech. The combination of space-age “low-tack pressure-sensitive […]

Across cultures, stories about gods and heroes fall into the category of myths and legends. According to diffen.com, “…the two aren’t the same and can be differentiated based on factors such as reasons behind them, the stories behind them and the truth they hold.” The table below (from diffen.com) helps us distinguish between myths and […]

Recently after a museum field trip, an ever resourceful colleague in Spanish was pleasantly surprised when her students reported having greatly enjoyed an activity she had assigned: “sitting still for 30 minutes staring at one painting, to see what new things they’d notice.” Given how accustomed we have become to scrolling quickly through images on […]