Highlights from ACTFL 2014 / Higher Order Thinking

I've just gotten back from ACTFL in San Antonio and I have a notebook full of ideas I wanted to share here for future use. My first session was given by Carol Gaab and was entitled "Inspiring Higher Order Thinking." I work in DC public schools and an entire section of our evaluation rubric is devoted to higher level thinking in class and so I was eager to attend. As always I found the presenter full of energy and with some excellent ideas. For this session, Gaab used her biography about Felipe Alou.
(1) She first discussed how she selected particular vocabulary words from the text by looking both for the major themes of the novel and the highest frequency vocabulary words. For this text, Gaab chose the word "dream."
(2) To reinforce the vocabulary, she gave students five examples of different types of dreams and asked session participants to distinguish between "waking dream" and "sleeping dream." For example, "Felipe dreams of joining the major leagues" would be classified as a "waking dream" or a "goal" and "Felipe dreamt there was a monster under his bed" is a "sleeping dream."
(3) In order to give students more opportunities to practice the vocabulary she gave students various sentences about the main character and students had to decide if each statement were "probably" or "possibly" true. I like this strategy which is very similar to Martina Bex's "This or That" activity and can be modified in a variety of different ways.
(4) Gaab then suggested personalizing the vocabulary. Asking the students questions like "Do you have a dream?" "Do you always dream the same thing?"
(5) Next, Gaab asked participants to indicate which of the following words could be used to describe a dream: Event, Opinion, Goal, Wish, Reality, Future. She suggested distinguishing between long-term goals and short-term goals and, to demonstrate, showed us an impressive video of one of her own ESL students discussing his long and short term goals on video.
(6) After this last activity, Gaab transitioned from talking about dreams to talking about stereotypes (all of this in preparation for the students listening to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a Dream" speech). She introduced the word "judge" and asked students if they thought they were a judge. Anticipating that most would answer in the negative, she showed the audience several pictures depicting various stereotypes (an overweight woman, two goth kids, etc.) and asked us to write down three words describing each picture. She then asked us to share comments in order to see whether we commented on economic status, looks, age, etc., proving to us that we do in fact judge one another.
(7) Gaab followed up with a selection from the "I have a Dream" speech. She suggested giving the students a transcript while they listened and, ultimately, taking the script away after the second or third listen. I would also try to personalize the speech as much as possible and circle key vocabulary after each listen.
(8) As a post-listening/post-reading activity Gaab gave us several sentences and asked us to distinguish the sentences as either something MLK would say or would not say.

All and all I thought it was an excellent session and took away a ton of ideas. We are gearing up to read "Los Baker van a Perú" after the holiday and I'm looking forward to developing some higher order thinking with this text.

Teaching Esperanza / Guatemalan Civil War / Personal Reaction

I am currently teaching Carol Gaab's novel Esperanza to my 8th graders. The novel has been a real hit with students and I am particularly fond of it because of the potential for really rich cultural and historical study. It doesn't hurt that there are a ton of resources out there from some very creative teachers for use with the novel. For example, Martina Bex has a ton of beautifully designed graphic organizers aligned to each chapter. The teacher's guide is packed with excellent teaching ideas (among my favorites is the simultaneous acting which I intend to blog about later) and a thorough supplement of presentations on Guatemalan history, culture, family, and traditions. Finally, the Language Educator recently published an article by Carrie Toth on using the novel to develop global awareness. We have just completed chapter four of the novel and my students are really excited as this is when the action sets in. I've used the teacher's guide and the novel in order to facilitate some pretty interesting conversations regarding justice and injustice, worker's unions, and the right to strike but, I wanted my students to know more about of the history of the Guatemalan Civil War, in order to give the events in the novel more of a meaningful, historical context. This was a tricky thing to do for various reasons. The first biggest challenge was that the Guatemalan Civil War was an extremely long, violent, and inhumane conflict throughout which the United States did not play a particularly sympathetic part. The second problem was that I teach middle school and I didn't want to derail the unit on Esperanza into a far too sophisticated exploration of the causes of the Guatemalan Civil War. Finally, I had to keep it comprehensible. Aware of these potential pitfalls, I began searching for resources that would let me develop a comprehensible explanation of the causes of the Guatemalan Civil War without overwhelming my middle schoolers. Below are some of the best resources I found in my search:

•   PBS Newshour's timeline of the Guatemalan Civil War 
•   PBS Guatemala: The Secret Files. A comprehensive site with video, personal narratives, links to newspaper articles, interactive maps and more. 
•  Guatemala: Eterna Primavera, Eterna Tiranía. Photographs from the Guatemalan Civil War by Photojournalist Jean-Marie Simon. 

From these resources I pieced together this PPT presentation that made use of the vocabulary structures we were studying (these structures were taken directly from the novel).

La Guerra Civil de Guatamala

The problem then became, how do I present this to 8th graders? My objectives were threefold: To have students understand some of the causes of the Guatemalan Civil War in order to give the novel some historical context. To reinforce the vocabulary structures we were learning in class by providing comprehensible input. Finally, to have students understand and recognize "injusticias." Below is an outline of the lesson I taught.

1. I had students write down the words "justo" and "injusto" with their English definitions in their notes. Then, I projected a series of sentences like "Hay una fiesta y solo los que lleven camisas rojas pueden ir" on the board and called on students to identify each as either fair or unfair. (This activity was taken directly from the Teacher's Guide to the novel.)

 2. I then showed the class a three minute clip from the film, When the Mountains Tremble, in which Rigoberta Menchú describes her experiences working on the sugar plantations as a young girl. The clip also shows actual footage from the worker's movement in Guatemala and the military's decision to crack down on this movement. The clip runs roughly from 1:10 to 1:07 of the film. During our viewing I paused and asked students whether events were "justo" or "injusto" and had them explain.

 3. I then began to present them with the PPT. The presentation took two days. After the first day, I had them complete the reading below which is essentially the text from the presentation. I wanted them to read first before we discussed the presentation.

La Guerra Civil de Guatemala by AnnaHenderson

4. After finishing the presentation, I had students write a personal reaction to the history. I explained that a formal personal reaction should start with an explanation of what they had read/seen/heard. The next step was to describe the emotion that they felt when reading, viewing or hearing a description of the events. (I gave them guided questions and sentence starters to help them with this activity. For example, ¿Cómo te sentías cuando leíste el artículo, «La Guerra Civil de Guatemala»? Me sentía ... porque...) I then wanted the students to give me details and examples (detalles y ejemplos) and, finally, they were asked to make a personal connection to the text (¿Has experimentado / leído / oído de una injusticia?).