 For the next few months, get to know your SCFLTA board. Each month we will introduce board members! This month, SCFLTA would like to introduce you to Dr. Jeremy Patterson and Dr. Stephanie Madison!
What level and language/s do/did you teach? All levels of French and Spanish at Bob Jones University What made you want to be a language teacher? To help people understand other people and cultures What has been the most rewarding part of your job? Actually observing students advance from one level of proficiency to the next What advice would you give to a new teacher? Be yourself in the classroom! What do you think is the biggest challenge facing world language teachers today? Monocultural viewpoints How did you get involved with SCFLTA? Attending the annual conference What role do you play in the organization? Social media director What has SCFLTA meant to you over your career? Networking at the local level – longer and closer relationships than at the national level What do you see SCFLTA doing for the profession in the future? Continuing to develop professional relationships within our state What is one non-teaching related fact about you? I cannot blow bubbles with bubblegum. You can try to teach me, but I don’t think it will work…
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For the next few months, get to know your SCFLTA board. Each month we will introduce board members! This month, we begin with Dr. Jason Bagley-Cooler, SCFLTA Executive Director and Xiaolin (Rebecca) Feng, the SCFLTA 2022 World Language Teacher of the Year.  Xiaolin (Rebecca) Feng
What level and language/s do/did you teach? I'm a high school Chinese Teacher. I teach all levels of Chinese from regular classes Level 1-5HN to Immersion classes Level 3-5; and AP Chinese. What made you want to be a language teacher? When I was little, I was very good at singing, and was selected to a regional choir group. I sometimes performed as a solo in the group. My choir teacher told me there were usually direct and positive connections for people who sing well and speak beautifully a foreign language. I believed her and became a language teacher without much struggle. What has been the most rewarding part of your job? Having been a language teacher for more than 20 years, the most rewarding part is to see students acquire cultural competence and global view through the language learning process, on top of beautiful pronunciation. What advice would you give to a new teacher? My advice for a new teacher is first love your job and be ready for challenges, second, always learn from experienced teachers and your own experiences. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing world language teachers today? The biggest challenges we face today is the technology and globalization that impact the traditional ways of teaching and learning. Students rely on answers from translation apps. overlooking contexts and cultural nuances. Globalization tries to bring the world together but also creates barriers among countries and industries. How did you get involved with SCFLTA? SCFLTA is the hub linking me with other WL professionals; Empowering and encouraging me when facing challenges. What role do you play in the organization? As 2022 Teacher of the Year, I'm honored and thrilled serving as a board member in the organization. What is one non-teaching related fact about you? I've also been in several other professions at the same time being a teacher, such as I once worked in media stations for years. I'm eager for the opportunity of making my contribution to advocate for SCFLTA. For the next few months, get to know your SCFLTA board. Each month we will introduce board members! This month, we begin with Dr. Jason Bagley-Cooler, SCFLTA Executive Director and Xiaolin (Rebecca) Feng, the SCFLTA 2022 World Language Teacher of the Year.  Dr. Jason Bagley-Cooler
What level and language/s do/did you teach? I teach high school French, levels 1-5. What made you want to be a language teacher? Actually, I didn't start out to even teach! Thanks to my high school French teacher, I wanted to do something with French, and I wanted to go to Clemson. I thought I wanted to do international business until I took economics in high school and realized that that was not the field for me. Education was what I decided to try after I gave up on business. What has been the most rewarding part of your job? I think most people would agree that it's super rewarding when you have students who get in touch with you after they've graduated or finished with your class and have had an experience with another culture or have decided to continue studying language. That is always a great feeling! What advice would you give to a new teacher? Take time for self-care. This has become increasingly important over the past few years, and is so important! You can't serve from an empty glass! What do you think is the biggest challenge facing world language teachers today? I think that across the board that a shortage of teachers is a crisis. The teaching profession is not as attractive to many young people these days, and I think it's something that we all have to strive to change. How did you get involved with SCFLTA? My first interaction was actually when I was working on my MA, and part of our course work was to give a presentation session at the annual conference! Then I was asked to be the SCFLTA webmaster and editor of The Crescent newsletter. Here we are 16 years later! What role do you play in the organization? Currently I serve as the Executive Director. What has SCFLTA meant to you over your career? SCFLTA has been wonderful. I actually left the teaching profession for two years because I felt that I was losing my passion and language ability. I didn't know as a young teacher about professional organizations and the connections and friendships that result from participation. SCFLTA helped my return to teaching be much more fulfilling, professionally. What do you see SCFLTA doing for the profession in the future? I'd love to see more participation, of course. We have tried to get some initiatives going for collaboration and community building, but there hasn't always been great participation. What is one non-teaching related fact about you? I got married last year and married life has been great! I also do yoga about 6 days a week. Carver-Lyon Elementary School went all out to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year 2022, the Year of Tiger. Not only did they decorate their school for this even, but all Chinese language immersion students received red envelopes ( 红包) with good luck coins, and all Chinese immersion teachers and partner teachers received good luck necklaces of Chinese traditional values and tiger. The following Chinese immersion grade levels celebrated by: PreK students made the Great Wall with wooden blocks. K students did Chinese calligraphy with team work to write "福"(blessing) and "春联“ Spring Couplet) and then decorated them on the door. 1st Grade students did Chinese dance with traditional song. 2nd Grade students sang a Chinese song. 3rd Grade students did a paper cutting of the tiger and panda. 4th Grade students did paper cutting of the Spring Festival couplets. 5th Grade students paid New Year visit with dragon dance to all the classes at school. Thank you, Carver-Lyon, for sharing your creativity with us. Check out some of the cool ways teachers in our state celebrated the Chinese New Year. Hartsville High School students from Darlington County School District celebrated the Chinese New Year by making traditional decorations and food related to the year of tiger. For decorations, they created 2D & 3D paper-cutting crafts that combined the character of spring and the face of tiger. They also wrote the Spring Festival couplets with the blessing words containing the character of tiger. As one of the most typical food on the Chinese New Year, making dumplings is the students' favorite cultural practice. This year they made the special dumplings with the tiger's colors and stripes. The students shared their decoration works and food with their family and friends to express their best wishes for the year of tiger. Broad River Elementary School in Beaufort County celebrated the Chinese New Year with kindergarten and first grade.
The students learned the stories and traditions on how Chinese people began to prepare the week before the new-year day, and how they celebrated until the Lantern Festival, the 15th day after the new-year day. They also made and presented tiger crafts to welcome the Year of the Tiger and learned to say all the main celebration phrases in Chinese. Lastly, they performed Chinese songs and dances that paid homage to the country's culture and history. THANK YOU, 谢谢/Xièxiè Ms. Zhang Qu for tapping into our children's sense of wonder by sharing the ancient traditions of the Chinese culture. Providing students with authentic language experiences boosts learning, engagement, and builds bridges of personal connection to other people and cultures. Last year, Westwood High school, home of SCFLTA's President-elect, Nadine Okoduwa Stewart, facilitated the following language enrichment activities. Webinar with Dr. José Liens & Mrs. Irma Leal
Virtual Hang Outs with Native Speakers Westwood High's Spanish faculty facilitates virtual hang outs for Honors students not currently enrolled in Spanish (but plan to continue studies in college) in order to practice with native speakers. These hang outs also give native speakers a chance to practice their English. Win-win! Level-up Proficiency Yearly, the faculty encourages Westwood High School's 11th -12th graders who are bilingual or who have studied at least one other language, to level-up and prove their proficiency in their languages. The State Department of Education provides this opportunity. Students can earn a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Seal of Biliteracy from the State of South Carolina.
There is a lot happening with languages in South Carolina and we would like to share and network with YOU. Whether you are early in your career or experienced, we want to provide an opportunity to connect with other language teachers and share in our collective successes and challenges.
During the first of our virtual social hours we hope to have some fun with a short game or two and then hear from you about what is on your mind and what topics would be of interest for the next social hours. If you can't make it, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or via Twitter or Facebook. We're looking forward to meeting you! ~ The SCFLTA Regional Reps Julia Royall, Amanda Hajji, Stephanie Madison, and Heather Giles" Here is the Zoom link for the meeting: Join Zoom Meeting https://rockhillschools.zoom.us/j/81859633435?pwd=eVRuZ0VBeXJXRmt1UFRkT1IrYlFOZz09 Meeting ID: 818 5963 3435 Passcode: 956468  Eliciting language learner engagement on a regular basis is complex in any learning setting— face-to-face or virtual. And, as every world language or immersion teacher knows, engaging learners regularly takes paying attention to who they are, their goals, their interests, what the learners bring, and what they need. Careful listening and attention to students is some of the deep work that I see teachers pouring themselves into on the spot during class, after class when examining student work, and asynchronously while watching student work emerge. World language and immersion teachers become masterful at getting a pulse on student goals and needs so that they can help their learners move forward toward increased intercultural competence and language proficiency. There is no single “trick” that can help teachers elicit this engagement in the language and guide learner attention, but we do have many tools at our disposal to help, and I’ve been considering one category of tools lately that tend toward the technical but still require some adaptive thinking based on the students in the (face-to-face or virtual) room. My inquiry: How can some of the technical decisions we make about video help boost student engagement? What are some go-to technical strategies that the instructor/facilitator/creator can use regularly to assist with capturing learners’ attention and keep it? After doing some reading, listening, thinking, and trial runs of my own, here are some ideas that I came up with: Synchronous OR Asynchronous:  Framing Use the purpose to determine what’s in frame. Think about a movie or television show that you have seen. When does the camera show a close-up of someone? When is there more of the person/people/scene in view? When do characters move toward or away from the camera? What objects or scenery do the actors interact with? Thoughtful, well-planned framing decisions can boost the effectiveness of your communication through video, and therefore others’ engagement with it!  Movement, Gestures, Expression Use your face and body. If your whole body appears in frame, use your body— including some very large and deliberate gestures— to help convey meaning (think of an actor on stage who is trying to make sure that even the people in the balcony have a good experience). If you are closer to the camera, you’ll still want to be intentional about your body, gestures, and facial expressions, but some of the more subtle things that you do may be captured, as well.  Lighting Select lighting that will help your students see your eyes and mouth. Facial expressions can go a long way to helping make our input comprehensible when we communicate. A great way to make sure that your face is lit well enough to be visible is to sit in a location where there is (or where you have placed) a light source at roughly a 45 degree angle from your nose (from above, or possibly above and off to the side a little). A lamp can work, but in some cases it may be easier to get a large light source by just using window light. You may also consider sitting in a room that reflects light well from different angles. If you want to take your lighting up a few notches, you may even want to explore ways to diffuse light. This post from FilmDaft (albeit geared toward people who likely have some photography/videography lighting gear) presents some ideas for how to do this with parchment paper. If you do not have specially-designed off-camera lighting gear, a challenge here may be figuring out how to attach diffusing materials safely and in an effective position with regard to your selected light source. Sheer, pale curtains on a tension rod in front of a window is another idea! Asynchronous (recorded in advance for asynchronous viewing): Brevity Condense the time it takes to convey meaning and information. This is certainly not for all videos, but if your video’s main purpose is to convey information or steps, consider condensing it by filming it in different takes, thereby reducing fillers (such as “ums” and unnecessary pauses). It is easy to do this using Flipgrid Shorts without any fancy equipment. Flipgrid even allows you to upload previously recorded clips as part of your video creation -- just make sure the clips aren’t too large in size. Proactive decisions Keep technical snags from getting in the way of viewing. If your video is so large that you have trouble sharing it using common tools (e.g. Flipgrid, Google Drive, etc.), AND/OR if it won’t play all the way through without loading issues, try compressing it: https://www.freeconvert.com/video-compressor These are just some ideas that came to mind as I considered my question for inquiry, but I’m sure you have some great ideas for technical ways to enhance the synchronous or asynchronous video experience, too!
What are some ways that you guide learner attention through video?  COVID life has surely added new dimensions to planning for learning -- language learning is no exception. Teachers, parents, and coaches in numerous learning landscapes have stretched the bounds of creativity: some guide learners to interact in the target language face-to-face while ensuring increased safety measures such as social distancing, while others engage students in virtual spaces where the cues that advance the give and take of a conversation have had to be relearned. Many do both. In my experience, language educators are unceasingly creative people, but the push to generate new ideas for engagement within a new set of circumstances can be exhausting, even for the most flexible thinker.
What wells can we draw from to continue moving forward for our learners? If you are a teacher, a parent, or a coach, you may have been on a quest to unearth and vett a new world of resources. Maybe you have joined a virtual professional learning community, or maybe you have made a point to seek out virtual conferences such as SCFLTA, NFLC, and Global Cred. As you continue on your quest, remember that who YOU are is important to the learners that you lift up every day. You experience the world, and your students are experiencing it too. I was reminded of this a month or so ago. My toddler, like many toddlers, likes to be active. We don’t really have a great yard space for her to play in, so I have typically been very grateful for public outdoor spaces. Lately, given that most of the public parks we would visit have closed their playground areas as a health precaution, we’ve had to start thinking outside the box. We do have a driveway, and sidewalk chalk is a favorite activity. One Saturday, when the air started to feel a little cooler, I was out there making sidewalk chalk drawings with my toddler -- stars, circles, pumpkins, simple outlines of animals, a sun and a moon. She looked at me and said, “Mommy, I need a playground.” I reminded her that unfortunately, we’d have to wait on playgrounds for awhile but that we had plenty of other things to do. She said, “No, draw me a playground. Draw me a swing.” I drew a swing set with three swings. She sat down on one and asked me to sit in the one next to it. We sat there for awhile. Then, she said, “Mommy, can you draw me a slide?” I drew a chalk slide. She then informed me that she couldn’t use it without steps to get up to the top, so I had to draw that. She walked to the top, waved to me from the top of my chalk creation, asked me if I would catch her at the bottom, and then (more or less) slid down, jumping onto her feet at the bottom and cheering. This continued for some time -- she told me she needed “a big playground,” and we co-constructed it with her telling me what to draw and where, me drawing it, and her testing the integrity of the pink, blue, and yellow chalk structure. After this impromptu sidewalk chalk extravaganza came to a close (and as I washed her chalk-covered clothes), I reflected on how this child had stretched my mind. It never would have occurred to me to draw a playground for her and ask her to pretend it was real, but it occurred to her. This got me thinking about the creative contributions that students -- and all learners really -- can make in helping us design learning experiences for them. I wondered how I could create space for creative contributions from the people I work with in professional learning groups, and I pondered how student agency can look in different environments. Certainly, it would not always look just like my experience that day, but it got me thinking. My experience with my toddler that Saturday helped me make a connection. It was a kind of resource that added to my learning. Wherever you are, I hope you know just how valuable you are to your students and to the people whose lives you touch and that YOUR experiences doing life are valuable resources to tap into. What life experiences have you drawn from? This week in The Crescent, I have a challenge for you. Take a moment from your day to stop, breathe, and just gaze at the stars. What do you see?  constellation If you are a realist, you may say, “Obviously, I see stars, a night’s sky, some trees, and a constellation”. To my wonderful realists, I cannot deny that truth. You are, in fact, interpreting one correct and very logical answer. However, I challenge everyone: Look again. You may see a BUSINESS TIE or, thinking of the cold winter weather, an ICE SCRAPER FOR YOUR CAR. Step back and take a look from a different angle. You may notice that other stars embellish the formation which starts to look something like this:  "" What do you see now? When I look at this picture, I reflect on my summer as a volunteer for a camp in Maine… What do I see? I see a bunch of claws from my first time hauling for LOBSTER.
My brother, on the other hand, would tilt his head and see the antennas of the EVIL GRASSHOPPER in his favorite childhood movie, A Bug’s Life.
Look again, You may see a WARRIOR WITH HIS ARM RAISED.  What is in his other hand? Is it the HEAD OF A LION, a SHIELD or is he wielding an ARROW?
If you are an astronomer: You may know this to be the constellation Orion, with the three recognizable stars across the center known as “Orion’s belt”. If you are a mythologist: You would tell me that Orion was a celebrated hunter in Greek mythology. If you are a linguist: You would mention one of the stars in Orion’s belt is called “Alnilam” in Arabic, meaning that it is not a belt, but a string of pearls. You may also remind me that in Spanish the three stars of Orion’s belt are called “Las Tres Marias” or, in places like the Philippines and Puerto Rico, “Los Tres Reyes Magos”. “We all look at the same stars and see different things”. Based on your background in Astronomy, the language you speak, the stories from your culture or your past experiences, we all saw different images in the stars. How does this apply to the classroom? Just like we, as teachers, bring our culture and experiences to the classroom, each child brings a set of experiences with them. It is important to understand why students think and feel the way they do, what struggles they have in life and what makes them feel alive. Getting to know students’ experiences builds relationships and encourages student engagement. Most importantly, it expands our knowledge of the world, making us better listeners, better individuals, better educators. How to do it?
Why spend so much time gazing at stars? With new experience and new knowledge, our first glance can change over time to form something more elaborate, more beautiful. Sometimes we need to take a look and then... pause... to look harder. Why spend so much time gazing at the stars? Because, my sweet friends, with time our pupils are able to open to the night’s sky, then, and only then, can we see beauty in the dark and our skies are forever brighter.  |
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