Building a Target Language Discourse Community with Rebecca Blouwolff

Welcome to Inspired Proficiency and thank you for joining us for episode 2 of season 3. As always, please tweet any takeaways and inspirations to #inspiredproficiency.

On the second episode Ashley continues her conversation with Rebecca Blouwolff, the NECTFL 2019 teacher of the year, about high leverage teaching practices. Rebecca teaches 7th and 8th grade French at Wellesley Middle School, a suburb of Boston, MA. Ashley also chats with Jennifer Bilby about her fame among Spanish teachers who use Señor Wooly.

Ashley is offering her 3rd annual 3 day workshop this summer 2019 in Tyngsboro, MA.

8/14 Proficiency and Target Language Strategies

8/15 Assessment and Feedback Practices Through Proficiency Portfolios

8/16 Community Building Themes and Team Challenges in the Target Language

Episode:

Rebecca has already shared with us about Facilitating Target Language Comprehensibility and today she continues today with Building a Target Language Discourse Community. All her ideas come from reading the book Enacting the Work of Language Instruction: High Leverage Teaching Practices by Glisan & Donato.

Building a Target Language Discourse Community describes talking to your students and getting them to speak to you in the target language. Several strategies involving visual assists to hold kids accountable are discussed to promote target language use. It is a culture that needs to be built and cultivated within the classroom and that takes time. See more details at www.deskfree.wordpress.com

Variety Segment:

Ashley also interviews Jennifer Bilby and her new found fame after being in the new song released for Wooly Week. She teaches Spanish at Pequea Valley High School in Lancaster, PA. Jennifer Bilby won Wooly Week 2017 two years ago and has been patiently awaiting her original song written by the genius himself, Señor Wooly. He shared the song with all of those participating in Wooly Week for an engaging week (or two) filled with excitement for students and professional development for teachers. Her favorite part of her original song is the dancing in the limousine.

She also answers some listener questions from Facebook to talk about how her life has changed since the song debuted. Señor Wooly is a great to bring joy and fun to the learning of Spanish with great music and stories. Jennifer also mentions how great Wooly Week was for teachers and even though not everyone could complete all of the activities, they work with ALL stories and you just modify the activities to work with what you are doing. The activities shared during Wooly Week help teachers to pull out all the elements of language from the song and story.

Resources and links mentioned on the show:

Guests:

Rebecca Blouwolff on Twitter @MmeBlouwolff and her blog https://mmeblouwolff.weebly.com

Jennifer Bilby

Books:

Enacting the Work of Language Instruction: High Leverage Teaching Practices by Glisan & Donato

While We’re on the Topic by Bill Van Patten (BVP)

Other resources:

Rebecca’s blog post on her 6 hour session on High Leverage Teaching Practices with Dr. Catherine Ritz (on Twitter @ritzforeignlang) and their slides

#langchat on Twitter (What is LangChat?)

TALK rubric

Episode sponsors:

• Wayside Publishing
• ACTFL Center for Assessment, Research, and Development (CARD)
• Voces Digital: Nuestra Historia
• Señor Wooly
• El Mundo de Pepita
• Tina Hargaden
• Puent...