Today the second day of iFLT15 started and today the learning labs started. Yesterday the master teachers – who are teaching the students we were going to observe – already started with their lessons in order to get to know the students and to teach them the first vocabulary.
Here you can find the session hand-outs of Wednesday.
The experienced teachers first went to the learning labs and the beginners went to the other sessions and after the break it wa the other way around. I went to the French beginners lesson of Sabrina Janczak. It was amazing to see what the students already understood after one day! Sabrina makes a lot of contact with the students. After the 2 sessions of the learning labs were the debriefings. Sabrina and Diana Noonan did the debriefing together. During the debriefing
Sabrina told a few things that are important to her: she wants the students to be able to tell how they’re feeling: on the board were written a few possibilities. And so with this group she started off asking how they felt today. Personalization & showing that you really care for the students is most important to Sabrina. Key: explain the process, tell the students why you do what you do and remind them of what you’re doing.
Concerning the taught structures: yesterday Sabrina used the structures: is/has/gives to him-her and today she used the structures: works/yells/lazy/ get out of here.
After the break I went to the workshop about Movie Talk by Kristy Placido. She does Movie Talk every once in a while and the students like it very much, as they also indicate at their evaluations at the end of the year. Kristy started with a demo of… EL MONSTRUO DEL ARMARIO (Pablo Conde – 2009). Concept: play a movie and talk about it. Every Friday her students watch a telenovela, with Movie Talk.
After lunch I went to Martina Bex’s workshop: Bringing culture back, 
developing units that teach language through culture. It was a well structured, highly interesting workshop, also hands-on: the participants could immediately use what Martina taught. She talked about the need for comprehensible cultural units. Obejctive: use target structures to explain a cultural topic. Method: CI. See her clear hand-out with a practical scheme of how to develop the cultural units at page 15-17 of the the session hand-outs of Wednesday.
The last session I went to was again by Kristy Placido: Rock the CI (page 22 hand-out Wednesday). She started with a few quotes about music, like the one one the left by Ludwig von Beethoven. Kristy told she learned last year from keynote speaker of iFLT14 Dave Burgess (“Teach like a pirate”) how important it is to have some ‘hooks’. And music can be a strong hook. Because of that, a lot of her students start downloading the Spanish music they hear in class on their own devices and the songs become something of their own repertoire.
Alike in CCI Wonderland 