The Highly Structured Class pays off! (Procedures and Routines)

Last year, I had a couple of tough classes.  Really, really tough classes.  They had great attitudes and were excited about learning, but never, ever stopped talking.  In English.  Running commentary about EVERYTHING that happened.  Constantly.

It was enough to make me groan every time I saw them on my schedule. (Which was every day.)  I tried Plan B.  I tried every trick in my book.  They still made me crazy.

But...(you knew there would be a but, right?) they learned.

Despite all the time I spent away from providing comprehensible input (trying to create community, practicing routines and procedures, redirecting behavior, having class conversations about goals, and loosing my temper) they learned.  They learned a lot.  They retained a lot.

When they came back this year, they blew me away. 

They remembered all the Spanish.  Well, maybe not all.  Probably not the stuff we did in May.  But most of them have a strong hold on everything else.

I have to ask myself why.  Why did that work for them?  The only thing I can fall back on is my greatest strength as a teacher: procedures and routines. (Hey- you have a greatest strength too.  What is yours? It's good to ask yourself.)

 These together form the structure of my class and make it a highly predictable class with a lot of tolerance for chaos (e.g. kids barking, hooting, and stuffed animals flying through the air.)

WHAT ARE MY PROCEDURES AND ROUTINES (P&Rs)?

It doesn't matter.  It truly doesn't matter what mine are.  I am happy to share them (below), but it doesn't matter.  What matters is knowing what they are, and how you teach and practice them.

I came up with my P&Rs by asking myself the following questions:
1) How do I want students to enter and leave class? (procedures)
2) What are the routine tasks that we do most days (sharpening pencils, passing out papers) that can be made faster or more efficient? (procedures)
3) What are things that kids do that make me absolutely crazy that I can train them not to do before they do them? (procedures)
4) How can I make my classroom feel more like a place where we are family, with in-jokes, predictability, and closeness? (routines)

Bryce Hedstrom defines a procedure as:

"Procedures are ways of doing routine activities that help the classroom to run more smoothly so that we can focus on learning. Procedures are not exactly rules, but repeated disregard of procedures will affect learning in the classroom.  There are several specific ways we do things in this class and you will learn them during the first weeks of school."

An aesthetically pleasing notebook arrangement makes me think of procedures.

Some of the resources that helped me develop this list (and my overall approach) include:
Bryce Hedstrom's classroom management philosophy and practice (including passwords and jobs), Alina Filipescu's philosophy of "Discard the Discipline Plan" and Angela Watson's amazingly useful book "The Cornerstone for Teachers", which I suggest that every teacher read.  

A SAMPLE OF MY PROCEDURES
Entering and leaving:

• Kids line up outside, receive their seating card for the day, give me the password, and enter.
• They get their materials for the day (usually scrap paper, glue, and scissors) and get started on the starter.
• When I ring my chime three times, they drop their pencil to indicate that they are focused on me,  and I greet them.
• At the end of class, someone tells me it is time to clean up. (Student job)   
• The kids quickly clean up the entire room and put away their materials.   
• One person picks up the seating cards and puts them away.  (Student Job) 
• A student inspector  (student job) tells me that they are ready: "Listos" and I reply in TL: Thank you for learning.  They reply "Thank you for teaching us" (in TL, of course) and I say good bye.

Papers: I give papers to the two kids sitting in the middle and they pass them outwards.  Kids sitting on the end of the horseshoe put the papers back on the paper table. (rotating job)

Absent kids: I wrote about that job and procedure here. (student job)

Moving chairs from one configuration to another: I model what I want, we practice, they do it.  We practice often, I narrate positives, and if need be, we practice over and over.

Whiteboards: If students are writing on whiteboards, I ask that they do not "show" their work to me until I make a specific sound with my rattle.  This way, I have time to look at individual work, make suggestions or give praise, and see who needs to work on what.  Everyone has think time.  Plus, they know that being the first one done doesn't get rewarded.

Late work: Students have somewhat relaxed deadlines and rolling deadlines.  If they miss something, they put a Missing/Late work slip on it so I know what I am doing with it.  If one kiddo has a lot of those slips, it is a good conversation to have during (or before) Parent Teacher conferences.

Here is a link to a document that I modified from I am sad to say that I can not give credit to the original as it is no longer available.  I am pretty sure I got it from Bryce, but not 100%.  If you know where the original document came from (ABCs), please let me know in the comments or by email!   Here is a link to the document I use in class. 

UPDATED 2023: 

Please note- in looking at the ABCs from a few years ago, my thinking has changed a lot on how I would use them. Now, I still think this is a really great exercise for me but I would not give it to students, and there are some things I would change.  

A SAMPLE of my ROUTINES 
To me, routines are different than procedures because they add fun and a little chaos into the class.  Most of these routines I learned from Alina.  Here are some of the ones I have adapted:

I was very impressed with this class! 

• ¿Quién?- when I say this question word, a student holds up a stuffed owl and says "woo whoo"
• Sneeze- when someone sneezes, a student says "uno-dos-tres" and the whole class says "salud"
• If a student impresses me, I say "Clase, estoy impresionada" and they respond (as if they can not believe that I could be impressed "¿Usted está impresionada?" and then I explain, in L1 or L2, why I am impressed (someone was a risk taker, someone was extra kind, etc.) and then I throw that person a stuffed animal to cuddle with.
• Pero...all kids hold up their index finger, one kid goes "dum dum dum..." in a slightly ominous way
• Perro- someone barks.
  
• Queso- any time someone who is not in class walks in my door, someone jumps up and sings/dances "¿Qué es esto?" and the whole class responds "Esto es queso" and then we pretend like nothing ever happened.  

Our director of admissions giggles EVERY TIME she walks in our room with visiting parents.  It's so awesome.

When it is worth it

This year has been challenging for so many reasons.  I came home in tears often, usually just because of sheer exhaustion.  This is hard, hard work.

But then something like this happens, and it is all worth it.

In a final free write for one of my 8th grade classes, a student who was new to Spanish last year, who thought she would never learn another language wrote this: (Note- I edited out another student's last name!)

In short, it is a story about our first TPRS class story last year.  She goes on to describe how we have lots of crazy stories, and how sad  she is that she will not have Spanish next year in her new school.  Then, she talks about how she is going to Mexico and how her dream is now possible, she speaks Spanish and she loves Spanish.  She also mentions that "Señora C es una professor muy incréible."  (With some spelling errors!)

As I am grading this in my prep period today, I started crying.  Seriously!  This is why I do it- to give confidence and strength to all kids, to help them love the language and feel great about speaking it.

TPRS teachers have a high tolerance for errors, so if you come across this writing, judge it for the fantastic essay on why she loves this class, not for her errors (because hey, we all make errors) or what she doesn't know.

Easy Story activity: Secret input!

I thought I would share the #1 go-to activity that I use if I have a little bit of time to prep.  I love this activity because...
1) It is a "secret input" activity.  Students think they are doing a writing (or speaking) activity- but secretly they are reading!  Plus, if they are writing they are copying directly from the text, therefore are writing accurately!
2) It is based on the student's own work- either acting or drawing.  They are so completely engaged when they are on stage.
3) It's easy and totally flexible and adaptable.  Reading a novel? Use this as a review.  Asked a story and want more reps?  Yep, this works great for that.  Did Reader's theatre and want to spice it up the next day?  Also works for that.

Step 1: Have students create the images.
You can do any of these activities to get the pictures/scenes you need: (These are just the ideas I can think up in 10 seconds- there are many more)
Acting: Freeze Frame, Reader's Theatre (with frozen moments), etc.
Drawing:  Cooperative Mural, individual mural, drawing scenes/comics while listening to retell, Running Dictation with Drawings, etc.

Step 2: Make sure you capture the drawings/scenes.
One way I do this when I use actors is that I give one student my phone and they get to chose which scenes (with help from me) to get pictures of- based on the "Queso" (cheezieness) factor.  Or, quickly before the next class comes in, I snap a photo (or several) of the mural on the board/individual white board and save it for later.

Tech tip: If you have google drive installed on your device, you can take a photo and upload it directly to drive from the phone without having to fuss with moving photos from iPhoto or anything like that.  Easy.

Step 3: Create the activity. 
 I use google slides because it is even faster than powerpoint, but the process is basically the same.

Create a slide show.  Insert directions on the first slide.  My directions are in English because I am very specific about them (and my level 1 kids are not ready to do it in Spanish).  They read
"Write the best sentence from the story to describe the following pictures.  You must use your copy of the story."

Then insert a slide for each image.

Tech Tip: If you do a cooperative mural or comic and have a Mac, you can quickly break that one picture down into several smaller pictures.  Or if the pictures overlap you can quickly separate them out into separate ones.  (I don't have any examples because I just save the individual pictures in the mural.  Sorry!) Open the picture in whatever application you prefer, and use the shortcut [Option Shift 4] to grab a screenshot of where ever your cursor is.   Make sure you know where those screenshots are saved (usually desktop, but you can change it).  This makes it super fast to insert into google slides because you can drag directly from your desktop to a slide without having to go through the whole import photo step.

Pick hilarious images, vague images, and images that will get you the reps that you wish for.

I also usually pick some image from Google Images that has something to do with the story...but that's totally not necessary.  Just fun and usually takes an extra 10 seconds.

Step 4: Provide students with a paper copy of the story/scene, whiteboards, and markers.  (Or, paper, or do it verbally with partners. Really, the options are limitless.)

Step 5:  Students write the best sentence from the story.
They may not all agree- that's ok.  In fact, that's an opportunity for more repetitions and PQA.

I have done this activity with as few as 3 images, and as many as 10.

Here is one full slideshow that I made.


Here is another one:  I am also going to try an extension activity where they speak and then...answer questions about the text.  (I am using who/what/where questions and some why to get that higher order thinking discussion.  I am also going to do the activity orally because I think they need to be social.)  If you want to see the questions appear, look at it in "present" view and click through.

Back to school nights

BTS nights are pretty challenging, I think. This year, when I was at the school for 14 hours, certainly was! The way we do it at our school is very challenging too: each teacher has five minutes to present, in one group space, to parents of each grade. Then you run to another grade level, and do it again. You do it twice for families that have kids in various grades.

However, I think it's so important for my students' parents to see what I do and why. I did not do BTS night last year since I was so very injured and on medical leave, and the first year...well, I didn't really know yet what I was going to do. (I cringe to think about it now!) This was my first time trying this and I am sure I will keep it.

My goals were this:
- short demo in the target language
- brief biography
- answer to "how you can help your child at home"


I prepped a poster with these structures:
éste es (ésta es) -this is

un hombre- a man
una mujer- a woman
o- or
sí- yes no no

I also prepped a couple of stuffed animal cognates (dragón, unicornio). I told parents that instead of talking about what class is like I would just do it, and all they needed to do was answer yes (pause and point) and no.



I demoed for about one minute, going slow, using parents and the stuffed animals to compare and contrast. Then I asked them if they understood everything, and explained that in my class, their students understand everything too.

 Then, I did my big grammar talk:
1) I asked parents who had taken two or more years of language to stand.
2) I asked them to remain standing if they studied grammar (conjugation tables, etc).
3) I asked them to remain standing if they were functional in that language now.
 (One or two were left.)

Reenactment of "Grammar Talk"- no one is standing.

I went on to say "that's why we don't teach that way!" Then short bio, and a quick reassurance that they are already great language teachers since their kids speak English, and that I will be providing their students with tons of input in class so the best way to support them is...to send them to class.
This year went incredibly well and parents were pleased and surprised. I got applause at the end!

When they scream for a story...

Quick post between meetings because something REALLY COOL just happened:

Several of my Spanish 2 kids had to leave for a cross country meet.  Instead of introducing new subject matter to only half the class, I decided to do a review. Of something.  Um, what?  I had nothing planned.

They begged for a story.   I didn't have a script and I didn't really think I'm confident enough to just do a story.  Plus, we are working on preterite verbs and talking about the past, because I'm still learning how to not shelter grammar.

I'm new at this!

But what I could do was take a story from another class that I know really, really well and quickly put it in the past tense.

I put the past-tense structures on the board and went for it.  We ended up with a usual silly story (a friendly elephant, a shark, and the reasons you don't see leprechauns in Ireland any more) and another easy, fun 30 minutes of Spanish used naturally.  I don't even think they realized how much language we just used...And as a bonus, I got to work in some structures (indirect object pronouns, tener + que) that I've been meaning to review with them.

Good day.