Target Language Comprehensibility with Rebecca Blouwolff

Inspired Proficiency

Welcome back to Inspired Proficiency and thank you for joining us on our journey into season 3. As always, please tweet any takeaways and inspirations to #inspiredproficiency.

On the first episode Ashley talks about high leverage teaching practices with Rebecca Blouwolff, the NECTFL 2019 teacher of the year. Rebecca teaches 7th and 8th grade French at Wellesley Middle School, a suburb of Boston, MA.

Rebecca walks Ashley through one of two high leverage teaching practices she recently presented at the NECTFL conference in New York City. These practices talk more about how to teach and not what to teach. Her ideas come from reading the book Enacting the Work of Language Instruction: High Leverage Teaching Practices by Glisan & Donato. Rebecca describes the importance of watching, doing, and experiencing training to get better at what you’re doing and how it important is for teachers to participate when trying new teaching practices.

Big takeaway from the first high leverage teaching practice: Using the Target Language (TL) in class with the kids is the most important thing you can do. We are privileged to be able to provide that environment for our students and get to know them through the language.

For the variety segment, Profe Ashley also plays a fun trivia game with Pamela Russell (@pammycakes_87) and Melanie Thomas (@senoraMThomas). She asks questions about the first two seasons of Inspired Proficiency. Thanks to Pamela and Melanie for playing and thanks to everyone who helped support this podcast into its third season!

Resources and links mentioned on the show:

Guests:

• Rebecca Blouwolff
• • Twitter @MmeBlouwolff
  • Blog https://mmeblouwolff.weebly.com

Books:

• Enacting the Work of Language Instruction: High Leverage Teaching Practices by Glisan & Donato
• Total Participation Techniques by Himmele & Himmele

Other resources:

• Rebecca’s blog post on her 6 hour session on High Leverage Teaching Practices with Dr. Catherine Ritz (on Twitter @ritzforeignlang)
• • Their slides
• Greg Duncan’s TELL project article “Engaging Language Learners” with references to Total Participation Techniques book
• Shelby County Public Schools
• Total Participation Techniques Resources from Shelby County Public Schools
• Language Specific Hold Ups in many languages from Shelby County Public Schools

Episode sponsors:

• Wayside Publishing
• ACTFL Center for Assessment, Research, and Development
• Comprehensifying and Extending Authentic Resources
• Señor Wooly
• El Mundo de Pepita
• World Language Classroom
• Voces Digital
• Puentes books from A.C. Quintero & Jennifer Degenhardt

For detailed notes on the interview visit: www.deskfree.wordpress.com after 3pm on the day it's released.