Episode 83: ACTFL Takeaways p2

Welcome to part two of my three part reflection on ACTFL 2024 in Philly this year. This episode covers the takeaways from various sessions that I was able to attend while at ACTFL.

Links and people mentioned in this episode:

Dr. Uju Anya

Ben Tinsley

Dorie Perugini

Junko Yamamoto

Published paper: World Languages for Black Linguistic Reparations

Bertha Delgadillo

Maribel Gómez

Paul Asleson

I am SO excited to bring you this new YouTube series where I interview EXCELLENT educators with 11 carefully curated questions to bring you inspiration, ideas, tips and tricks in SHORT, FUNNY, relatable videos! Click here to tune in and hear from educators like Adriana Ramírez, John Sifert, Darcy Pippins, and more! 

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Transcript

New Series!

Hello, hi, thanks for being here and listening to this episode. But first, a message from our sponsor. Okay, hi, it's me, la maestra loca. I am so excited to tell you about my new project. It's called Who is it? jueves, and it's a YouTube series that I've started where every single Thursday, I'll be interviewing an incredible educator, some of them you might know, others you should get to know, and I'm going to be asking them 11 carefully curated questions called the "Loca Lineup". The beautiful thing is, I've already interviewed eight educators, and every single interview has been drastically different and equally impactful and powerful. You will walk away with actionable ideas and strategies that you can implement the very next day in your classroom, and you'll walk away feeling inspired, and you'll get a few laughs out of it. The Loca Lineup was designed to give you ideas that you can use right away in your classroom, and inspire you to try new foods, maybe learn something about language acquisition, and I'm so excited for you to watch. So far, I've interviewed people like Adriana Ramirez, John Seifert, Darcy Pippins, Rocio Jacobi and more. I'll be doing this every single Thursday, and I'm so excited for you to tune in and watch. I'll link it in the show notes, and I hope you have a wonderful day. Enjoy this episode. 

Welcome!

Welcome back to teaching la vida loca, the podcast you come to for short and sweet and sometimes spicy episodes full of enthusiasm, magic and tips and tricks for your classroom. I'm Annabelle, your maestra loca, and I'm here to bring you inspiration, unapologetic authenticity, and ideas to spark more joy in your teaching journey. I'm turning up the excitement and elated to have you right here with me. I'm not just your host, I'm your cheerleader, and I'm thrilled you're tuning in. So, let's do this. Let's tackle teaching la vida loca together. Hi there. Welcome to episode, episode, Episode, what is oh my gosh, y'all, the baby is not sleeping again, and that's where I am. Exhaustion level wise. Welcome to Episode 83 of teaching la vida loca. I was just talking to Liam Printer about how I don't edit my podcast because who has time to do that. I had zero time when I started the podcast because I was in the classroom and doing this, and both felt like full time jobs this year, on maternity leave. This still feels like there's no I cannot edit. I can't begin to this is the second part of my three-part reflection on ACTFL and today's episode I'm going to try and keep short and sweet, just like my first. The first episode reviewed some of my favorite quotes from the keynote speech from Cheryl Lee Ralph, and today, I want to share my takeaways from the sessions that I had the opportunity to attend. One of the sessions, though, I'm going to try and get this person as a guest speaker on the podcast to share about their presentation, because I think that it is incredible what they're doing, and I think that I can convince them. So, stay tuned on that. But I wanted to share some other takeaways that I had from various workshops and various presentations that I was able to attend. 

ACTFL Sessions

And the first that I'll start with was a panel discussion. And the title was, language is liberation, a panel discussion with ACTFL president. So, LJ Randolph was the host of it, and he posed several questions to a panel of individuals. Dr Uju Anya was one of them. Ben Tinsley, who we know and love, was another. Jennifer White was supposed to be there and last minute, Dorie Perugini was asked, and I'm so glad that she stepped into that and was willing to be on this panel. And then Junko Yamamoto was the other person. And so, they shared their insights and their thoughts on various questions that were posed to them in this panel, which was called languages liberation. So, one of the things that Ben said that I think directly relates to the first podcast and the general meaning of the of the keynote was he said, we need to center social emotional learning, when we are seeking student well-being, we can center joy. So good, in putting our students social emotional learning first, when we prioritize that, we can center joy and then language acquisition comes. I loved that very much. I also love that Ben said even the things that we think are neutral are not. Language Teaching is political. I thought that was powerful. 

Panel Discussion

Dr Uju Anya has an article that I will link in the show notes on black linguistic reparations, and I've only skimmed it. I haven't read the whole thing, but it's free, available free online. And she talked a lot about not pre complying. Don't pre obey the fascists, she said. And I can't remember the context of that, but I remember that it was something related to, like, how do we do the work that we need to do in buildings where perhaps the work is not being done or there is fear of what people will think about teaching themes of social justice and using language that is inclusive for all the students in our classroom. And I just thought that was a beautiful way to say it, like, don’t pre comply. Don't obey the fascists. And in Dr Uju Anya also said, how can we say we are teaching about World Cultures when we are leaving out whole groups. that, oh my gosh. Dorie also brought it back to the fact that the world readiness standards, actual world readiness standards mention interculturality, and so anchoring what we are doing in the fact that we are teaching for intercultural interculturality. I thought that was powerful. And one other thing that stood out from this that was interesting. I mean, there were a million points in that panel, but there was something that I hadn't heard of before, and that was the term color brave. I had heard the term before of color blind, and which is obviously ignoring problems of systemic racism and failing to acknowledge our inherent biases and refusing to work on that. But I hadn't heard this term of color brave, and after hearing her say this, I went and I started researching it, and learned that it was first coined by Melody Hobson in a TED talk in 2014 and it's this idea that encourages people to be aware of the challenges that people of color face and work together to like, fight against and will remove systemic barriers, right? And I just, I really loved that term. I could go on and on, but there's so much more. Okay. 

Another Great Session!

Another session that I really enjoyed was one that I went to by Bertha Delgadillo and Maribel Gomez, and it was called Rising Above, and it was talking about elevating your world language program with very little resources, or with limited resources, I think was the actual title. But they went through various things that they do. I mean, their World Language Program is incredible in Georgia, and they shared the various things that they do to elevate their program, including like celebrating their department, focusing on the learners needs, giving them opportunities outside of school to interact with, engage with and share the language and how to like, engage and connect with stakeholders, and I just thought it was really interesting hearing about what they've done, because I've seen,  I've been to their school. I've been able to work with their teachers before in that district, and I would have never guessed that they had limited resources, but it's because of the time that they've put in and the tiny things they've done to make big waves that have been so impactful, and it just was a reminder for me personally, in the power of community and the power of like, tooting our own horn if you're doing something incredible in your classroom, invite the principal to see. Invite you know, people to come in from maybe the I can't even think that communications department to take pictures and spread the word about it. Let your local newspaper know. Those sorts of things are so impactful for spreading the word about how powerful world language programs are. And I'm sure both women would love to share more about it. Probably not Bertha right now. I’m not going to send anybody to Bertha right now, because she's working on her doctorate. She doesn't need anything else. But looking at what they're doing in Savannah, Georgia with their World Language Department, it's really, incredible. So, I really loved that session. 

Paul’s Session

Another session that just was like mind blowing and so much fun was Paul Asleson, and that's who I want to talk about right now. That's who's on the cover of this podcast. Paul is a member of Familia loca, Montana World Language Teacher of the Year His session won Best of Montana. And then. best of the Pacific Northwest region, and then he presented it at ACTFL, and it was just so good. I can't even tell you. I will tell you he presented five different ways to increase engagement and language acquisition in your lessons, and I was familiar with most of them, but the way the most powerful thing about these conferences is seeing the way that people do it differently, right? Like we can see these strategies in a session or experience them. Paul did a very good job of like, every single strategy he introduced we participated in. He introduced rejoinders at the very beginning or like second and throughout his workshop, anytime something was, like, awesome or amazing, people were randomly yelling out, mega, which is German for like, awesome. That's so cool, that's so epic. And we were learning, or we were yelling, kvatch was like, I can't even remember. It was like, No way. Or it was like, yeah. It was like, No way. I can't even remember. Anyways, it was so good. The way that he integrated it and taught it, it was beautiful. So, the thing that was brand new to me that he presented that was just gold, was he called it ratings, and I'm going to call it scales. So again, like you learn something, you take it, you make it your own, you always give credit to the owner or the person that you learned it from. So, he called it ratings. And basically, the idea is you make a statement, and based on that statement, your students are going to guess what rating you would give it, what scale, on a scale of like one to 10, what you would rate that statement? Now the scale goes like this, one is like, not, heck, no, not true, not true at all. And 10 is true. Couldn't be truer. I totally agree with that. So, the statements can be literally anything, and that is the power. 

Low-Prep!

And this is so low prep, or even no prep. Low prep would be what he did, which was put a picture of himself up there, write out the statement, and put a scale of one to 10 on the bottom. His little scale had like a person with an emoji with the arms crossing like heck, no. And then the 100 symbol on the high end of the scale, and above it was the statement, so kids or your students, like, whether it's on teams, whether it's in pairs, whether it's the whole class, debate what they think this person would rate this comment. So, one of his comments was, like, even though Facebook has everything, it's a waste of time. So, we as a group had to think, Okay, how likely is it that he answers, or he agrees with that or disagrees with that? And we chose a number on the scale. And since we were such a huge group in that room, we all just kind of did it individually, and we held up our numbers, or we shouted out our numbers, and the number that is true. So, let's say that I said it was a nine, that he rated that a nine, his actual answer was an eight. So, he almost completely agrees with that statement, that Facebook is just a waste of time. So, because, I guess very close, I only get one penalty point because I was only one point off his actual belief of that statement. Another statement was, Tiktok is a lot of fun. Do I think that he believes that, or do I think he totally disagrees? I rated them him a four. On this one, I said I don't think he thinks Tiktok is fun. Well, I was wrong. He thinks it's fun. And he gave it a nine. And I was like, oh, dang, I was way off on that. So, because he gave it a nine and I gave it a four, I got five penalty points that time. And that's no fun. Penalty points are no fun. But I add those penalty points up and then, like, let's say I was doing it on a team we would keep track of our points if we were doing it in a bigger team. The beauty of this is I see it as a no prep thing. I can literally write a scale on my board in a second, and I can write a statement on my board in a second. I can also pull a student up to be the one giving the rating. I can sit them in the hot seat and say the statement, and then have the student write their number on a whiteboard that only I can see, and then I can ask all the students, what do you think? Here's the statement, snow is so much better than rain. How do you think this person is going to answer it? It allows Paul, made the point of the amount of rich language that you can incorporate is so incredible. The amount of like, extra language that can come into this even though was one that I was like, oh, you could sneak the word, even though in so easily. So, it's an easy way to sneak in more rich input. It's obviously a classroom community builder, because they're debating and they're talking about like this person, and they're using what they know about their classmate or what they know about me as the teacher to make predictions of how I'm going to answer this. And it's highly compelling. It's super engaging. So, I would try this if I were in the classroom. This would be what I would do tomorrow because it's no prep, and you can do it with every level. You can also center vocabulary that you've been working on. If you're in a school that's forcing you to use, you know, thematic units still, and you're still having to teach with a textbook, and you're you've just gone over the clothing unit, then make your statements about different clothing items. If that's the high the vocab that there's trying to acquire that way you can talk about it in the target language and have it been in a compelling context, so that they're not just memorizing lists, right? You could do it with winter vocabulary in the workshop that I led last week, or I guess it was this week. It just feels like forever ago, I did a pay as you go workshop like pay what you want workshop with winter strategies. I'll link it in case you want it, because I can send out the recording and the resources that I shared. But I think that winter vocab is super fun, like, I think ice skating is better than sledding, or hot chocolate is the best winter beverage, right? So, you can literally do these statements on anything, and you can come up with them in the moment if you need to. I think this is a great no prep activity. 

Love You!

So those are my biggest takeaways from various workshops, the workshop that I really hope I can get a guest speaker on I'm gonna work on it for the next couple weeks. I'm gonna work on trying to figure out how to ask this person and get them on my show, even though I know they're very busy, because I think that you'll have huge takeaways. So, I'll save that one for later. Part three is up next, and I hope you'll give it a listen next week, and I hope you take care of yourself. You don't have very much longer left, hopefully no more than seven days before your break. It's right around the corner. I'm sending you lots of love. Until then, I know you'll be teaching la vida loca, loca loca, and I'll be here to support you. I'm so grateful for you teacher and I'm sending you lots of big love. Take care. Bye, bye.