Fund for Teachers--Professional Development Grant Program

After 9 years of teaching high school English, I finally took my dream job of teaching French at my alma mater. But with no real training in FLE (French as a Foreign Language) teaching since my Master's degree in French Linguistics in 2004, and with five different French levels to plan each day, I was desperate for some help in curriculum design and getting my students to be more communicative. I had studied abroad at the Institut de Touraine in college, and knew their programs were high quality, so after some research online, I decided to attend two week-long FLE teacher workshops in July, one focusing on oral activities and the second on written activities for the classroom. I added a phonetics and grammar workshop three days a week. Staying with a host family was the best way to get the extra dose of culture and French language practice by sharing meals and living with a French family. Since Tours is only an hour away from Beaugency, the town where my students' pen pals live, I stayed with my English teacher friend for a week before the training began so that I could see her school and meet teachers and students there. 

The trip and training have given me a large variety of activities, websites, and resources for creating innovative and engaging lessons for all five levels of my French classes. I came back with a Google drive and flash drive full of resources to pull from or modify, and I’m using them and seeing an increase in my students’ confidence in speaking French in class. They’re being more communicative with me and with each other, which was the main goal of my program. In addition, I’m able to show them pictures of everyday things in France that I took during my trip, and I’m giving them more updated cultural information about everyday life in France than before. I’m also looking forward to a project-based learning project in a travel unit that will allow me to use the authentic materials I gathered during my travels.

More than that, I am networking with FLE teachers from all over the world, keeping in touch with those from my training through social media and email. We have a Facebook group in which we shared our experiences in France and are now sharing teaching resources and ideas. I also keep up with my host family through Facebook, and gain new insights into French culture regularly. The trip has proved invaluable to my development of new practices and knowledge of my subject in so many more ways than I could have foreseen.

I could not have been happier with the experiences I had in France this summer! During my week in Beaugency, I went on a nature walk and picnic with middle school students from Collège Robert Goupil, and when we created art from the leaves and flowers we collected on our walk, I realized that was easily something I could recreate with my French students to practice all sorts of vocabulary. In talking with their English teacher and her colleagues, I learned more about the modern European foreign language classroom techniques. Everything is immersive, and they do nothing in isolation. I’m trying this year to model my classroom more on that premise for all levels. 

During the week of oral proficiency teacher training, we learned techniques for all levels, but the thing I’m most eager to try in my classroom is the Global Situation. The teacher asks the students to imagine an environment (a cruise ship, an apartment building, a market, a school, etc.), and then asks them to populate the environment and to develop a story. To understand the concept better, we got into groups and created our own lands with nothing but symbols for water, sand, mountains, and trees. Since the geography affects resources and the development of industry and culture, one could see where to put a village and to begin to construct a narrative with the people living there. We did this also with a cruise ship. We designed a cruise ship and began to talk about a special dinner the captain was giving and the possible problems that might arise—stolen items from guests’ rooms, missing people, etc.—to create a story. The Global Situation would work well in any unit and at any level. The teacher’s job is to create a basic framework, supply necessary vocabulary, and mediate any disputes in a group, but the goal is to create a safe space for the students in which they are willing to take linguistic risks and use their imagination. For that reason, it should not be heavily graded, as that will intimidate students. It’s also a long-term project, done in stages and generally taking 8 to 10 school days, which you could spread out over many weeks.

I learned about many other activities and approaches to using authentic resources such as commercials, comic books, short sketch comedy scenes, songs, and children’s literature to supplement the practice of various aspects of grammar and thematic vocabulary. I’m sharing these ideas with other teachers in my school and worldwide through social media.

Like so many other foreign language teachers in middle and high schools, I have to plan and prepare and teach the entire curriculum (4-5 different levels every day) for my language. Over the past two years, I have felt many times that I was not doing my best for my students because I have had no real training except for an IB French training before I had even started teaching French, before I knew what questions to ask. I am teaching AP French and have not been trained in AP, and there has been no real foreign language training for anything but Spanish since I began. This is why I wrote the grant proposal to go to France for quality FLE training from a certified program. 

Three main reasons drove my decision to go abroad for this training. First, I needed intensive training in best practices in the FLE classroom, and I knew I would get that from the highly rated program at the Institut de Touraine, where they teach FLE year-round to students from around the world. Second, I wanted to network with teachers in our language of instruction--French, not English as would tend to happen in the U.S. Third, I wanted an immersion experience to improve my confidence in my own spoken French and to pick up as many authentic resources as I could. 

My last full immersion experience was seven years ago, a full five years before I began teaching French, when I was selected for a National Endowment for the Humanities summer teacher seminar in Avignon, France, on French Theater of the 20th century. My own Senator Jeff Sessions led the charge to defund that program and other teacher programs abroad because he thought they were "paid vacations for teachers." How little he understood those programs! I read plays, wrote papers, and attended plays nearly every evening. I learned so much from that intensive class that I have been able to use in the classroom, in both French and my elective class, and I knew that to get the most out of any training, it would need to be abroad. Unfortunately, there is no money for such PD in my district, and without the grant, I would not have been able to have this experience. My students are reaping the benefits, and I hope to see an improvement this year on my National French Exam scores and on the AP and IB exams. 

Foreign languages, especially French, are just as important as STEM subjects in our global society. Learning another language and culture makes students more empathetic and more attractive in the global market.

The goal of the foreign language classroom is to create a safe space where students feel free to use their imagination and to take linguistic risks.