30 October 2015

Help a School: a novice/intermediate IPA

My goal with the second IPA of a unit is to help students reflect on their final product and how they want it to turn out. Drawing inspiration from Sra. Toth and Sra. Placido's Kiva videos, I've already planted the seed for students to try to convince others to carry on our work with La Laja. Here (by searching for "ayuda escuela" in YouTube) I have found another school in a situation not too different from our friends'.

So I'm having them take this new school's situation and break it down storyboard style as practice before we make our own inspiration videos. And I'm also test driving some ideas I got from #FLANC15 last week.

Interpretive Listening

Of course I'm not giving my baby parrots a video over seven minutes, so I vibbied it down under 3 minutes, picking out the easiest and most relevant sections. I was thinking I'd use EDPuzzle, but there were several swaths of video that I'd rather just skip PLUS this way the full video is still available for heritage speakers to do their thing!

Here's the Vib:

As I did with the Peruvian playground videos, I included some guiding questions to help students tune in to important parts and make connections with what they were hearing. This time, however, they can potentially perceive a main idea, but I've noticed it's important to explicitly instruct the young ones to "Include supporting details from the video" so they can move up the intermediate scale if they happen to be ready.

Interpersonal Conversation

So I apparently have an extra anxious and/or perfectionist set of (perfectly precious) kiddos this semester. They are intent on scripting their "spontaneous" conversations for IPAs. Having just spent an hour or so this past weekend learning at the feet of Sra. Stephanie (and crew) once more after our grad school days, I decided to give her way a try and save us all some technology sharing and uploading headaches--as well as the temptation to script discussion.

So we're trying the individual teacher interviews, and let me tell you, it is tough.

Now maybe it was this tough before, but it was just for them. Now I have to suffer too! Here are just a few of my tribulations so far:

  • need every minute of the class period to get through interviews, but they can't talk about the video until they have, you know, WATCHED the video and KIND of made sense of it (this is where a decent-sized heritage speaker population can come in handy).
  • plan to limit to three minutes when you know you can squeeze another performance level out of them if you can just keep pushing
  • they have no questions for me, so breaking out of Novice Mid is a beast, meaning...
  • ...I had to reformulate the context premise two or three times and...
  • ...my handy Google Form was obsolete about halfway through second period.

I started off with a prompt card with these questions in English on it:
What do the children in this school in Honduras need for a good education to be possible? How can people help this school?
And a prompt Google Form for me.
  • ¿Qué necesitan los niños en esta escuela?
  • ¿Cuántos libros/cuadernos/balones tienen?
  • ¿Les gusta la escuela o vacaciones más?
  • ¿Cómo pueden otras personas ayudar a estos niños?
  • ¿Cómo es esta escuela similar a/diferente de La Laja?
The prompt card evolved first to
You are talking to a person who is considering helping the students in the school. What can I do? Find out if I CAN help and HOW.
and then
Should we help this school? Is it possible? Is it a good idea? Do you WANT to?
By the end of Day 1, my questions looked more like:

  • ¿Te gusta el video/la escuela en el video? ¿Por qué?
  • ¿Qué necesitan los niños en esta escuela?
  • ¿Cómo puede nuestra clase ayudar a estos niños? ¿Es buena idea ayudar esta escuela?
  • ¿Tienes preguntas para mí/los estudiantes/los profesores/los visitantes a la escuela?

But at least I'm getting a reasonably accurate picture, and they're getting pretty immediate feedback, right?  Plus they have me to hold their iPads for them to record for once, and they don't have to worry about their partner turning in their video first.

And shoot, why not go ahead and use the quiet time to get the video planning--maybe even excecution--started?

Presentational Writing

I think we might give Seesaw another try, especially since I liked how creating the infographs on paper turned out on the last IPA. I think the visuals helped some convey their points and organize their thoughts, so I thought a storyboard might be a more appropriate way to set up the assignment than a straightforward script. Also, I made a quickie example so they can see how it works:

I printed a page with 8 blocks for doodles on each side of the page, including boxes within each block where they would put SPANISH subtitles (if they want them) and lines below where they can write the spoken dialogue. Most seemed to agree that this would be an easier way to organize a video plan than just a script. So here's their assignment:
Create a storyboard for a video to convince other people to help this school in Honduras. What does the school need? How can others help the school? Why do they need to help? 
They can take as many pages as they need, and even color--or, heck, CREATE A VIDEO, since it looks like the interview wait may take a while.

@SraStephanie and @ErinRae0399 promise that the on-deck process will get smoother with practice. I'll let you know if I can get the interviews done in under a week.


  1. My students are also convinced they need to write out a script for their interpersonal conversations. Going back to teacher-student interviews would solve the problem, but I just don't have a week to dedicate! I'm anxious to hear how it unfolds for you. Also - I didn't know anything like Vibby existed. Can't wait to try it out. Thanks!

    1. Well, it turns out with limiting to 5 minutes (3 if they were on the ball!), I got through all of the interviews in 2.5 days! I had them start planning for the last phase of the project day 2 and then just pulled the last few out of group work for Day 3! It was more work during class, but I don't have to go back and grade, as it was all done in the 2.5 days!