Low Risk Classrooms

5. Learning Environment: The teacher fosters and manages a safe and inclusive learning environment that takes into account: physical, emotional and intellectual well-being.

A foreign language classroom can seem like a high risk environment, students feel put on the spot and pressured, have anxiety about how they answer and whether they are correct or not. When your understanding and capability of communicating is questioned and then assessed in a high risk environment, well you would rather not participate and squeak by with a passing grade instead of taking risk and being wrong. Communication is so key to human beings, when this is compromised with high risk, anxiety and grades, no wonder students prefer not to talk or participate period in a foreign language classroom. In my own experiences I have preferred to not participate for fear of getting the wrong answer and humiliating myself in front of my peers.

Therefore I have made a point in my classroom to lower this sense of risk and anxiety through different activities which take a team effort to complete. One such activity is when I do warm-ups at the beginning of the period. Students will take a daily quiz on their own and then shift into the warm-up, working on it alone and silently until everyone is down testing, then I give them a few more minutes to work on the warm-up with their neighbors, checking their answers and working through difficult areas. I try to have all my warm-ups take up about 7-8 minutes, no longer than that, we then come together as a class and work through the problems they may have had. I use name cards and randomly draw students who will the write their answers on the white board and then draw another student who will “scribe” with the help of the class to make corrections. Throughout this process I encourage students to make corrections through inquiry based strategies, making them the ones who are correcting and affirming the correct answers. This lowers the risk for students because even if they do get the wrong answer everyone else helps work t the correct one. This I believe has lowered the anxiety in answering and participating for my students but also has helped them in learning the language better through whole class participation.

Another area where risk and anxiety run rampant is in translation. I for one hated being called on and made to translate a sentence completely on my own. To lower the risk and anxiety for this I again use my name cards, randomly drawing people to translate and having the whole class as well myself help the student work towards a viable translation of a sentence/passage. I ask pointed questions and encourage them to seek assistance from their peers through “phoning a friend” or breaking down the translation into manageable pieces and then putting it back together. This activity has helped the whole class see where there can be confusion and how to work through these confusing areas.

In addition to doing this for translation I also like to put students into groups (no more than 4-5 people) to translate a passage together, this also reduces risk and anxiety for students because instead of facing the whole class they are translating with a team of sorts. Everyone has be on the same page in order to move on so everyone is working together to translate even if it is someone else’s “turn”.

These different strategies I believe have culminated into creating a low risk, low anxiety classroom where student’s feel safe about making mistakes and therefore really learning.

image:http://www.uncp.edu/academics/colleges-schools-departments/departments/english-theatre-and-foreign-languages/foreign

H1: Honor Student diversity and development

Ouvre ta porte, Ouvre ton couer

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sf7sEOVqiOhCVqsRdgJMpxRDW1AB5jpvS9CU342uSdw/present#slide=id.p

english translation: http://learnspeak.blogspot.com/2006/09/lhomme-qui-te-ressemble-english.html

This poem by Rene Philombe is a great example of what diversity means to me and is a great way to show students that even in the literature that questions about diversity come up. The poem is about a man who questions another man, calling him brother, why he cares about his skin color, how long his nose is, how thick his lips are or what are the names of his gods. I truly love this poem and have found that when I was taught french through this poem I came to understand how important pointing out differences are and why they were important. This poem brings up these shallow questions that we ask openly or internally when facing some with culturally different backgrounds, the poem has made me catch myself when facing people of different backgrounds, how some of these questions can be perceived as racists and distasteful. Yet after studying the poem and understanding the term diversity more I have come to view these questions as just questions. I do not question someone with these in order to label that person but instead to understand their culture better. I ask about language, about customs, about anything that I find different but also interesting. I have learned that putting these questions aside and hiding from them does not help the problem we face with confronting diversity, instead people shy away from confrontation in expressing others differences. I want to know these differences and to celebrate them, I want to understand my students better and allow them safety in knowing that yes they are different but these little differences do not make up the whole person. Experiences, hopes, dreams, fears, culture, all of these attribute to each person. I want to acknowledge my students differences but also show them that they are still my brother and that there is more to their person than just differences in appearance and beliefs.

image: http://www.laramedia.com/how-to-embrace-diversity-in-the-workplace/