Pecha Kucha: Speaking Spanish Without Fear

“I’m a Spanish teacher,” I say.

“Cool! I took 4 years of Spanish in high school and I can’t remember anything.”

Cringe.

How can this be? I wondered. After hearing this time and time again, from person after person, I began to question my practice, wondering, do my students leave my class feeling the same way? Do they feel like they can communicate in Spanish? Is real learning happening in my classroom or am I helping to create good test-takers? It is important to me that students can produce language after leaving my classroom because otherwise, what is the point? I noticed students had no problem memorizing verb charts and vocabulary, but in turn, they were disengaged and bored. Traditional grammar and vocabulary learning was working to keep their grades up, yet it had very little connection to the real world. The students barely relied on one another for information, hardly collaborated, and almost never were asked to perform a real-world task using Spanish. 

I tried hard to weave in textbook reading and writing and some listening practice, and in this past year worked on incorporating speaking tasks, too. When I asked them to speak Spanish, or remain only in Spanish for a certain activity, they froze up like a deer in headlights, and suddenly could not remember a thing! Some panicked in fear of making a mistake. Some opted for a zero. Some got caught up on verb conjugations and tenses. Assessing each speaking task one on one and face to face was so time consuming and tedious I had no time to engage with any student but the one in front of me. The speaking prompts my department and I asked them to respond to were so staged and scripted with very little connection to their lives it caused them to simply memorize. Sadly, I noticed it had begun easier for us all to simply avoid speaking tasks. I took a step back and wondered, was there learning going on here? These were not the kind of beautifully authentic speaking tasks I envisioned my students participating in. I needed to reflect on my beliefs about learning and speaking Spanish and realized I needed a change.

I believe students learn Spanish when they are connecting language to communicate in the real world, when the speaking is natural, spontaneous, and authentic, with a giving or an exchange of information. In addition, I believe that students learn best when they define and understand why learning languages is important and useful to them. I believe building community and collaboration is key to getting students to feel comfortable and connected in class to speak Spanish to the best of their ability. How can I incorporate my beliefs about learning into getting students to successfully speak Spanish?

During the first weeks of school, my students will collaborate to compile a list of all the reasons they believe learning Spanish is important. I am hoping these reasons range from it is a college requirement to being able to travel and make friends to making more money in a job and being able to understand a perspective and a culture beyond their own. Like Simon Sinek speaks about in his Ted Talk on the Golden Circle, knowing the WHY is crucial, and can change the game, and it is important that they know theirs as well.

While I find myself to be pretty tech savvy, with a class webpage, and daily use of Google Classroom and numerous applications, I always went the technocrat/techo-traditionalist route according to Scott Noon’s 4-Tier Model of Teacher Training in Technology with my lessons, but I honestly never thought of using technology as a tool to help students speak Spanish. Last year, I called students up to my desk, asked a set of predetermined questions, and graded them on the spot with a paper rubric. The first problem I faced with this was that there was no room for mistakes, repetition, trial and error, and students could not see their own growth over time. These tasks were just simply done and graded. The second problem was how the rest of the students would be silently working on a different task, leaving little room for me to engage with any of them, for the students to engage with one another. The third problem was that this face to face teacher student interaction created, for many students, a high-anxiety, heavily stressful task to memorize a script for, in a sense, a very inauthentic, unrelatable task.

What was I doing? Was this effective? Kelly Reed says, students don’t need iPads, they need opportunities to inquire, explore, experiment, play, design, and create. I used to be that teacher who wanted to find ways to use the newest tech tool, and what Kelly said really resonated with me, “It’s not about the technology, it is about what you do with it.” How can I help my students learn to speak Spanish without fear, and in a natural way? Can technology help me combat the issues I faced last year with speaking tasks? I took everything we learned in Digital Media Literacy and I went on the hunt. Finally, I found Flipgrid, in the hopes of using it as a launchpad for me to grow from a techno-traditionalist towards a techno-constructivist to change the face of speaking in Spanish.

Although I have heard of it before, I had never thought of diving in to use Flipgrid for speaking assessment. Flipgrid is a social learning platform that allows educators to ask a question, then the students respond in a video. Students are then able to respond to one another, creating a “web” of discussion. I plan to start off the year as I always do with introductions, but this year, I plan to engage them digitally, in a collaborative, low stress speaking activity through the use of Flipgrid videos. These videos can be recorded anywhere: in class, in the comfort of their own homes, using their computers or smartphones. They can prepare ahead of time, watch others before posting, and record themselves as many times necessary, and best of all not have to perform this task in front of the class (gasp!) or just in front of me. They are used to recording on their phones and Snapchats, so I thought this could be a way to incorporate the norm for some of them. 

In Michael Wesch’s Ted Talk, he believes that learning is a process of repetition, as we watched his son get up and try again each time he fell off the stairs, finally one day he got it right. Moana used repetition to help believe in herself and gain confidence. These students can record and rerecord as many times as they feel necessary. They can get tons of repetition and input by listening to classmates and responding to their videos. In addition, students can learn about each other’s similarities and differences. I am hopeful that this tool can help students build confidence, community, and allow for creativity as well.


In addition, Flipgrid will help me organize speaking by theme and question on the Flipgrid, and takes the weight and pressure off of grading potentially 90 speaking assessments in one day, and also provides a space for me to share feedback (even in video format, so cool!) and have these responses for longer than the few minutes students are sitting with me. It also allows for all students to accomplish more while in class, and keeps me as a facilitator for learning in the room rather than ties me up for the whole period. I believe it is important that I am available as a resource for students and can give my time to them when needed.

I want to also address the goal I have to make speaking less inauthentic and unnatural and make it more relatable for students. I want to ask better questions, like what they did or what they will do over the weekend, personalized questions about their preferences, what a day in their life looks like. I hope to incorporate their passions and dreams through asking questions using Flipgrid as a platform. I also hope to incorporate cultural traditions and to have the students compare and contrast a typical tradition in a Spanish speaking country with that of their own. Not only does this make Spanish more relatable and communicative, it helps students connect and shows students they have a teacher who cares about them and their lifestyles, while highlighting similarities and differences among classmates. My hope is to create a culture of a “judgement free” zone where through the use of technology such as Flipgrid, students feel they are a part of a Spanish speaking community, and can see that they have a teacher who truly cares about them, their interests and lives, and will confidently leave the classroom speaking Spanish fearlessly out there in the real world.

Pecha Kucha Video with voice
Pecha Kucha SLIDES only
Rubric