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Curriculum Development: Event Planning Take 2
Last year, I blogged about the creation of our party planning unit in second year Arabic, including some of the challenges. Since we are on the verge of creating the second round of this unit, I thought I would give an update on how it is going this time (short version: much better!). First, we…
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Trello for Travel
As a general rule, I enjoy traveling, and obviously I chose to make the majority of these trips. However, I’m less thrilled about the logistics of traveling, such as packing, purchasing flights/hotels, arranging entertainment, etc. These have gotten even less thrilling as I have to pack and make arrangements for more people and spend time…
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Learning from Indigenous Language Revitalization Programs
This semester, I’m teaching the capstone class for the Languages majors at my university, and we recently finished a unit on Indigenous Language Revitalization. While this is an important unit for a Languages Capstone Class, it is not my area of specialization, so I was excited to learn more along with my students. While Indigenous…
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Monolingual Ideologies and Plurilingual Realities
Two weeks ago, I attended the Integrationists Conference at Penn State University, whose theme was “Integrationism and Philosophies of Language: Emerging Alternative Epistemologies in the Global North and the Global South”While I had not heard of Integrationism as a linguistic theory until I saw the announcement for this conference, I was interested in learning more…
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Weekly Planning Routine
If I had to choose one piece of productivity advice, it would probably be weekly planning! I talked about weekly planning and daily adjustments almost a year ago, but I’ve had some questions recently from friends about how I actually do my weekly planning process, so I thought I’d share it here.
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Telecollaboration in the Language Classroom: Challenges and Benefits
Although telecollaboration is one of my research contexts, I realized I’ve never written a post about it. So, here is a long overdue discussion of telecollaboration, the projects I’ve been involved in, and the lessons I’ve learned.
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Back to School Preparations
So, back to school . . . This has always been one of my favorite times of year, so probably not that surprising that I ended up as an academic :-). Since the public schools in Albuquerque start August 12, and my university classes start August 19, I basically consider the beginning of August the…
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Spring 2019 by the numbers
For several years now, I have tracked how much time I spend on particular work tasks, as part of an attempt to make sure I’m properly balancing the various components of my job (research, teaching, service/admin). I track this in a google spreadsheet by month (pictured below for May), and update it each week (from…
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End of Semester Review
As I’ve mentioned before, my larger scale unit of planning is the semester, and I’ve discussed how I make my semester plan for Fall and Spring. At the end of each semester, before making the plan, I also conduct an end of semester review, looking at what went well and what didn’t, and what I…
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Reflecting with Students
As is probably clear to readers of this blog, I think reflection is a crucial skill for learning and teaching. I’ve discussed making time and space for reflection as a language teacher, and ethnographic projects as a way to encourage reflection during study abroad. In this post, I’ll discuss reflecting with students, another valuable practice.