School's Out: A post for my teacher-friends.

The school year is coming to a close here in Palau. I'm pretty happy with the way my class ended. I did a lot of experimenting with the sophomore class, and wasn’t sure about how the results would turn out. But now that we’re finishing up and I think it went really well – better than I expected.

Experiment #1 – Anne Frank

I took a risk and taught Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. We had a classroom set of books donated to us (Thank you for arranging that, Connie!) and the book fit perfectly with the Ministry of Education standards for sophomore year.

As we were plowing through the book, I thought the girls didn’t really understand the Diary. I was thinking the whole thing was a waste of time. One day, I was correcting a worksheet that asked for the definition of "swastika" and the student responded, "Ancient symbol of the Jews that the Nazis wear to a party." I was like ... Dear, Lord ... we've been reading this for eight weeks and she doesn't even understand what a swastika is OR for that matter, that the Nazi party is not a fancy, fun event held every year in Germany.

::sigh::

BUT ... the last page of my final was two full paragraph responses to the following questions: 1) Describe Anne's hopes and dreams. 2) Describe what happened to Anne Frank after she was discovered. My bonus question was "Why is 'genocide' the most important part of this story?” Lo and behold those girls GOT IT! I was surprised, I'll admit ... but very pleased. I mean, some of them only got it on the most basic level, but a good portion of the girls were making actual connections to their own lives ... "If we ever hear of these terrible things happening we must do the right thing to help stop it, even if it's dangerous." I could've cried. Beyond Diary of a Young Girl they KILLED the “Parts of Speech” section on the test. I drilled and drilled and drilled those definitions into their heads and we came up with example after example after example. And they did a GREAT job on the final. Really awesome. Labeling sentences was a little bit tougher, but overall they did okay on that, too.

Experiment #2 – One-on-one tutoring

Every school day I spent one hour with a Chinese student. At the end of the year she received the "most improved student" award! (I'm taking that as a personal compliment. Ha. Kidding!) Really though, she worked SO hard. She deserves it. And ... it’s just an extra bonus that I can see my efforts pay for HER. (She gave me a HUGE hug. It was sweet.)

I assigned a final project to my sophomores – a 30-minute speech on the topic of their choice. And I opened it up to the whole school to attend. When I started working with this student at the beginning of the semester, I had to have her spell out words, and we couldn't talk without her electronic dictionary by her side. And last week she gave a 30-minute speech about China in front of the whole school. I was nervous. I thought it was going to be hard to watch her struggle through it ... but she did AWESOME. I video taped it, because I thought she might like to see it in 2013 when she graduates, to see her progress. Anyway, I adore her. She was the class president back home in China, so we have a special bond. ;) She works really, really hard. She always turns her assignments in on time. She struggles through it all. And she's cute as a button.

Experiment #3 – Rainbow groups

They REALLY liked our rainbow groups! Hooray! That was my BIG experiment. I put the students into their specific language levels – pre-production (red), early production (yellow), speech emergence (green), beginning fluency (blue), and intermediate fluency (purple). It’s the same concept as reading groups for elementary school, but I applied it to a high school level ESL classroom. The idea was that it would be easier to scaffold my lessons that way, and it would be easier to grade assignments and create rubrics based on these levels. Plus, certain activities work better if the students are in mixed-level groups (rainbow groups) while others work better if the students are in like-level groups (color groups). To make the “Rainbow Groups” I matched up the purple and red students and then had a mixture of yellow, green and blue spread evenly throughout the groups. We did a few team-building games and they named their own groups, so they got kind of into it.

I think what made the groups a success was that the girls saw how it made all our learning games SO much more fair and run so much more smoothly. When teams have to send a representative to the front of the room, it's really easy to say "Send a blue or purple member" or "Send a yellow or green teammate to the board." The teaching book where I read about using these groups said, "Be careful not to over-use these groups. They’ll get sick of them." But honestly, I had to FORCE them NOT to use these groups. If I gave them a choice they ALWAYS wanted their rainbow groups. I think, since they're in high school, they get it. They get that the teams are fair this way and the game is more fun when the teams are fair.

These groups also made MY life soooooooooo much easier. Grading was easier, scaffolding was easier, activities were easier. I loved it. And I was so excited when, at the end of the year, I asked what they liked about my class and the FIRST thing they said was "Rainbow groups!" Our Peace Corps technical trainer visited my class the day before finals and observed while we were playing a couple review games. He was impressed, too. He was like, "As soon as you said 'rainbow groups,' they moved their chairs and knew exactly what to do. They switched activities really quick." (Big proud smile on my face.)

This is probably my biggest achievement of the semester. It's REALLY hard to teach a class with 3 Chinese students that are pre-production and 3 Palauan students that are intermediate fluency and 12 other students from other Asian countries and island cultures that are at levels somewhere in between. Now, knowing that this technique worked, I’m looking forward next year!