It’s already Thursday! This morning I awoke again at 6 and could not sleep anymore. Daniel and Judy Dubois from France also have this… It must still be the jetlag. And I think because of that, I mixed things up and I went to observe in the learning lab in the first round, but it should have been in the second round… I went to Joe Dziedzic’s class, teaching a Spanish 2 class. It was a calm group; as is Joe. The class was very supportive. It’s very nice to see all those different teaching styles.
After the break I went to the workshop of 7-months-pregnant Martina Bex. She has a blog: The comprehensible classroom. She had a very interesting interactive workshop “PQA hooks”. Martina calls PQA (Personalized Questions and Answers): a teacher facilitated discussion with students about students.
– Purpose = relationships & repetitions
– Benefits: engagement & inspiration
– Challenges: engagement & execution
She used several primary school games and teamwork activities with personal questions, containing certain grammatical features in order to have the students work and communicate together in the target language.
When I was waiting in the hallway during lunchtime, suddenly Susan Gross came along! What a nice surprise! I heard she did a small lecture with the beginners and of course she said: Nothing motivates like success!
After lunch I went to the engaging and highly inspiring workshop by Leslie Davison: 20% projects. I did not know at all what it was, but I found it an intriguing title and someone in the hallway said Leslie’s workshop was great, so I went for the adventure. The title happened to be inspired by the Google project to use 20% of the time for projects. “Google described its startup ideal of “20 percent time,” where any employee could take a day’s worth of time out of the normal work week and come up with a cool project to work on”. Leslie had us go to the site of the Kiva project – empower people around the world with a $25 loan – and we had to find someone we wanted to loan $25 to. We had 6 (or 10?) minutes to make a presentation and put it on Google presentations and then convince the group in one minute (!) why the 25 dollars should go to our project. We had about 5 presentations and then we had to vote for the the one we wanted to give the money to and then Leslie really made the loan of the 25 dollar with the money on her Kiva-account. What a wonderful idea!!
Leslie also had a project: What’s your passion?
Guidelines
I. investigate your passion (or: learn more about…)
II. improve in your target language
III. connect with someone in the target language
IV. save the world in the process
Structure:
• 2 months (up to four)
• provide the language they will need
• teacher is the guide in terms of ideas
• out of class work
Evaluation
– journal or blog entries
– their presentation
– student reflections/teacher reflections
The last workshop I went to was Karen Rowan’s Personalization workshop part 2. Yesterday I went to part 1. This one was more about personalizing and making it into a story. Karen was coaching someone and then another person had to take over the coaching and she would coach the coach.