Hit the Ground Running:

Tips for the Traveling Teacher

Maureen Regan-Baker, Consultant

Amy Hanoian, RHAM High School, Hebron, CT

The Northeast Conference Newsletter 43, winter 1998, pp. 38-40

 

Foreign language teachers are still traveling and not always to foreign countries. Many of us move from school to school, district to district, grade level to grade level, language to language, all within the space of a single day. We are without classrooms and/or work space and have less than ample room to hang our hats or store our materials. Scheduled back to back with little time to get our gear in gear, we require an extraordinary measure of patience, preparation, organization, and creativity to get our "jobs” done. Traveling teachers, who may also wear multiple hats, have problems specific to their job descriptions. These problems involve not only time, space, and transport but teaching style as well. The following survival suggestions are offered for the spatially and temporally challenged by two experienced “travellers.”

 

Organize

Never has being thoroughly well organized been more important. Whatever your personal method, know what you need and where to find it. Become an organization junky. Comb the big office supply and discount stores for bins, boxes, binders, file folders, file holders. Code classes, grade levels, and languages by color. Keep tests, worksheets, handout originals in a specifically-colored, three-ring binder. A plastic cover for each page is a nice touch; it will keep sheets from tearing and getting lost as well as separate them and make individual items easier to find.

Be able to find what you seek by the shape of the containers as well, i.e., flash cards in shoe or stationery boxes, art reproductions or other large visuals in an artist portfolio with a handle. The latter is very slender and will slide easily behind cabinets or between a desk and the wall.

If there is a small space in each classroom you visit, tack up a closed folder for assignments distributed or returned on days when individual students are absent. It becomes their responsibility to secure assignments missed or papers corrected.

If there is no room in the classroom where you teach, go over the school with a fine-tooth comb. Is there space in a storeroom, a corner in the library, a niche in the office of the school psychologist, nurse, or administrative personnel where you can correct papers and store materials? Be assertive! When there is absolutely no work space at school, create one at home.

 

Travel Light

Bring only the essentials. Simplify your life. Have duplicate, even triplicate sets of basic necessities that can be stored on site, in a small amount of space, out of sight. Create some sort of mobile unit. A three-tiered cart stacked with three milk crates on castors works well and is relatively inexpensive. The crates will hold file folders, a tackle box for extra pencils, passes to the nurse, rubber bands, paper clips, and the like. The unit will also serve as a lectern or podium on which to rest a text since often there is no spot from which to work. With the mobile unit, you have brought your own. Attach a luggage strap, elastic cord, belt, and you’re off to the next location.

 

PrePrepare

Time is of the absolute essence. Don’t spend it “setting up.” Like the televised chef, premeasure the ingredients. Don’t write assignments, notes, or the basis of the day’s instruction on the board. Bring all these with you, written in advance on large pieces of newsprint or primary pad paper, which is lined. Be sure your requisition for materials contains at least one of these items. Though large in surface area, they are thin, store easily, and can be used in a variety of ways. As you preview the lesson mentally, write out the asides, the connections, any pertinent extra information, follow-up assignments, reminders, announcements on these large, light sheets.

The instruction itself can be presented using the newsprint: a series of clocks for telling time, math problems to be solved, facial expressions, collages of famous people, games, etc., can all be put in advance on the quickly mounted sheets. Fold them in quarters and lay them on top of your mobile unit or tape them by one corner to the outside of a crate. Label them on the reverse side by class and/or language. Unfold and tape them to the board as you enter and you’re ready to teach!

These preprepared sheets have an added advantage. They are placed over any work written on the board by the classroom teacher, who will appreciate your not erasing the lesson for the next period. At the end of your class, remove the sheets, refold them, and carry them to your next room. Additionally, a record now remains of everything covered during a given class period. Tests can also be given using newsprint sheets. Students work from a master test sheet taped to the board. To vary the test from class to class, use different sheets.

 

Require Student Realia

Whatever the vocabulary, have the students supply the actual objects to be used in the lesson. This eliminates your having to carry plastic fruit, stuffed animals, and the like from class to class. Research tells us that the senses play a major role in the learning process. Pictures, while important, focus on only one of the senses. Touching, smelling, seeing the dimension of the article to be remembered will insure its retention.¹

With school permission, language students can be asked to wear hats or neckties, different color socks or something blue, something small, etc. This is good PR for the language program. It sets language study apart and identifies it as fun and interesting. Every class does not need to supply exactly the same things. Have a sign-up list to avoid too many duplicates, but remember some will be necessary for plurals.

 

Make Room for the Room

Make room in your curriculum for the content supplied by your teaching environment. Good language teaching is heavily content based and context oriented. Base instruction on lessons actually taking place at the grade level, on the subject matter taught in the classroom space you temporarily occupy. Then the visual materials that support your instruction are not only on site but remain to be seen and remembered long after the foreign language teacher has left the room. The skeleton in the science room teaches parts of the body; a unit on explorers focuses on the land, the sea, countries, geography, the verb to discover, and the past tense; art projects emphasize color, paint, while the objects created provide multiple points of departure for creative lessons.

 

Enlist Student Aid

The traveling teacher’s students need to be more responsible than those in the stationary classroom. Individuals can be designated to pass out or return assignments, take attendance, tape and remove newsprint sheets, locate special supplies (markers, art paper, scissors) kept in a specific spot in the classroom, obtain and return VCRs or other borrowed equipment. These tasks should be preassigned. Use part of a class to set up a daily system. Students, rather than the teacher, can and should make class sets of flash cards and labels in the target language for objects throughout the school.

 

Wear What You Need

Foreign language teachers are traditionally among the more colorful faculty members. Teachers who travel from room to room can be constructively even more so. Talk about, teach your own clothing. Keep it interesting and colorful. Wear your own realia. Wear multiple articles of the same item: several neckties, belts, scarves, hats, watches. This invites a range of vocabulary: shades of color, fabric types and patterns, styles of clothing. Also, wear some of the classroom supplies you need. For example, pretear bits of masking tape and attach the pieces to your sleeve or the front of a vest for easy access. Wear your roll of masking tape as a bracelet, clip clips to the edge of a pocket, keep some target language currency in that pocket along with subway tickets, stamps, or other small realia to be brought out and returned at a moment’s notice. Wear an apron or smock with pockets, a photographer’s vest, a cloth carpenter’s belt.

 

Multiply the Use of Ordinary Objects

Index cards can be used for flash cards but if you punch a hole in them, they can hang on hooks to play a game, create dialogues, teach grammar. Add a small strip of flannel or sandpaper to the back of the card and they can be applied to a flannel board as well. Ask the classroom teacher for one bulletin board or a portion of it and cover it with flannel so that things may be attached to it in two ways. Putting flannel-backed objects on a board is much quicker than using thumb tacks.

Use paper plates for faces and clocks, or in place of old fashioned slates on which students write answers when you call out questions. The plates are light, inexpensive, and easily stored in the classroom.

Ask the school nurse for tongue depressors (a good way to sample food) or the art teacher for popsicle sticks, or the librarian for book pockets. Write math problems or questions, answers, or matching items on the sticks and ask students to pick a stick and complete the activity as instructed. Stash passes or notes to yourself in book pockets that have been pasted to the outside cover of your text or plan book.

A music stand, which adjusts to your height, in each classroom you visit is easily stored in a corner and gives you a place to set a text, class registers, or papers.

 

Package Survival

As you prepare for the year, begin to collect any material that will allow you to attach instructional materials to any surface: self-sticking clay, double-sided tape, Velcro. Look for things from which to hang materials for easy access such as self-sticking hooks and metal shower curtain hooks. Find help in common objects: straight pins, clothespins, sewing elastic (staple the latter at intervals to a piece of cardboard to create holding spaces for postcards, index cards, and the like) and pieces of corrugated cardboard in all sizes. Use the corrugated boards for collages of interactive materials. Prepare one for each classroom. They take up little space and will stand on a chalk tray for easy demonstrations.

 

Restructure Instruction

Instead of working with multiple units, construct lessons built upon points of departure that will lead in multiple directions. Use and reuse the same piece of material day after day but in subsequent class periods approach that same material from a different direction. For example, begin with a song, which is language placed in a musical rhythmic context, and do the following:

 

Day One:

Sound/Sight/Context/Meaning. The teacher sings or plays a recording for which the lyrics, prewritten on newsprint, have been attached to the board. Students, following the teacher’s lead, read and sing the lyrics. The gist of the meaning is given by the teacher. Or, the students can be asked what they think the song might be about, having heard the sounds of the words and seen the lyrics. Talk with them about how they manage to understand something in another language that they have never seen or heard before. This can lead to a focus on the appearance of words, their pronunciation, and the context in which they are embedded. Next ask students to look for cognates, categorize the cognates, and add more of them to each category from the students’ own store of information or from the teacher’s. The lesson may be further expanded by using one of the categories as a point of departure so that students, with guidance, can free-associate other material with the initial point of contact.

 

Day Two:

Grammar/Syntax. Return to the cognates and identify them by parts of speech, formally or informally (Is this a verb, a noun, something that indicates action or the name of a thing?). Find other parts of speech and transpose them, i.e., change the imperative (a command) to an infinitive (the part of the verb that means “to do”). Change verbs from the affirmative to the negative, from one person or tense to another. Such interaction can be used to teach material initially or to reaccess it. Find the words that describe, give their opposites, use them in simple utterances to describe people, places, or things you know.

 

Day Three:

Applied Numerical Concepts. Introduce or review ordinal numbers. Is the word/phrase that means “______” (teacher supplies the definition) in the fifth line or the sixth?  Where are the negative statements? Students answer using the ordinal number of the line in which the item is located. A student may read or sing any line in the lyrics but must identify that line numerically or instruct you to do the same.

Such activities are naturally self-propagating. There is no prescribed order. The same processes can be used with any type of material. Look for a variety of information and skill building in the same reading, vocabulary list, dialogue, words to a song, collection of pictures. This methodology is in line with current brain research and all that we have discovered about memory and cognition.² The original point of departure remains visible to students as it is constantly reworked and connected to what they already know as well as to what they are about to learn. Furthermore, the teacher is using the same piece of newsprint constructively for a week.

 

Become a Team Player

Finally, make friends with the teachers whose rooms you are using. Demonstrate that you are a partner in their students’ learning, that, although a foreign language teacher, you are as interested in educating the whole child as they are. Support their instruction by incorporating its basic concepts and, where possible, its actual content into your language lessons. Share materials you have that expand upon or illustrate areas of study undertaken at their grade level. Make the classroom teachers aware of and sympathetic to the problems you are facing. Be assertive. Don’t hesitate to ask for what you need. Yet, be considerate. You are a visitor in their space. Attend school functions. Be vocal at faculty meetings. Participate! There are still those few who, having had a less than positive experience with foreign language as students, are a little leery of foreign language teachers.

 

Conclusion

Last year, one of the classroom teachers in our building was asked to do a unit within her grade level that required her to run from class to class and work under a tight time frame, in limited space. She was exhausted and confessed, “I don’t know how you do what you do day after day!” Sometimes neither do we. Ask an administrator to follow you for just one morning. If the administrator does so, your problems are probably over. Nothing succeeds like the walk in the proverbial Indians’ mocassins. In the meantime, getting organized, using materials wisely, and teaching creatively can make “traveling,” if only with the confines of our own county, a more meaningful and a lot less arduous experience.

 

References

¹ Coming to our senses: Scientists are unlocking the mysteries of smell, sight, hearing, touch and taste. (1997, 13 January). U.S. News & World Report, pp. 51-59.

² Caine, R. N., & Caine G. (1991). Teaching and the human brain. Arlington, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

 

Suggested Reading

Brain’s memory system comes into focus. (1995, 30 May). The New York Times, pp. C1, 3.

Thinking about thinking. (1991, 9 October).  Education Week, Special Report, pp. 1-16.

Regan-Baker, M. (1994). Stradivariuses or plastic fiddles? Northeast Conference Newsletter, 35, 20-22.

Regan-Baker, M. (1991). The brain chain: Applying theories of multiple intelligences and brain research to the learning of language.  NYSAFLT Language Association Bulletin, XLIV, pp. 1-5.