After many months of conducting our needs assessment and applying the knowledge we  had gained from it in our curriculum design process, it was both challenging and gratifying to display and explain all of the work we had done in a condensed manner at the trade fair.

Something we had been grappling with over the course of the semester was the ‘need’ for English in Haiti, when so many of our learner population’s basic needs such as food and clean water were not being met. For this reason, we didn’t want to design a ‘happy-go-lucky’ English curriculum that ignored or overlooked the immediate problems that the community is faced with; we wanted to address these problems head on. With this in mind, we landed on the idea of a content-based, water-focused curriculum that would provide students with practical and applicable knowledge related to water sanitation, water-borne diseases, local and global partnerships (working with NGOs), etc. in the hopes that they would be empowered to share what they have learned with the greater community in Hinche, Haiti and beyond.

One thing that we are particularly proud of in our curriculum (aside from our beautiful poster) are the projects we came up with to complement the content. We came up with the idea of having a Global Hand-washing Day at St. André’s, where the older students (for whom our curriculum is designed) would mentor the younger ones and demonstrate effective hand-washing techniques, which could also be done in conjunction with a soap-making activity. Additionally, during our unit on local and global partnership, we thought of the “Grade Your NGO” assignment, where students research an NGO that has a relationship with Haiti and assess if they have been successful/if they have left a lasting effect on the community or not. Finally, the “Tell Your Water Story” project would involve shadowing, interviewing, and reporting about a member of the community and how they interact with and use water on a regular basis. Ideally, this would be a video project, and the final products would be submitted to water.org, which appropriately has the slogan “Donate Your Voice”. Of course, many of these projects are optimistic considering the limited resources available in the community; however, after a certain point, we came to terms with the hypothetical and idealistic nature of our particular project and embraced it.

It was impressive to see all of our classmates’ hard work at the trade fair, and to have a bigger picture and a more tangible sense of the projects after only hearing about them briefly over the course of the semester. All of the projects and their objectives are so diverse due to the diverse learner populations we are all working with, and it was eye-opening and refreshing to see all of this creativity and the different directions everyone took it in.

Great job, everyone! Happy summer!

-Dee, Ivanne, & Gerri

I have played Jeopardy with my students before as a review activity, and in my teaching experience thus far, it has worked with all ages and gotten everyone involved in friendly competition. Playing it in a graduate level class further proved its flexibility and success as a tool for review.

The first time that I encountered Jeopardy in a pedagogical context was at the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy (for high schoolers), where I worked for three summers. Towards the end of the 4-week program, at one of the evening assemblies, one of the teachers orchestrated a group game of Jeopardy having to do with French culture. The categories included history, music, food, etc. In addition to reviewing some of the things the students had covered in their classes, some of the tougher questions also provided an opportunity to learn. In my own learning, I’ve found that the questions that stump you are the answers you never forget.

When I taught in France, I used Jeopardy as a review activity every couple of weeks. Since I didn’t see the students every day, this was a fun way to refresh their memory of what we had been working on. Since I was teaching elementary schoolers ages 5-10, reviewing and repetition was crucial. After four units such as weather, seasons, months, and numbers, I would create a jeopardy game with the content. I would split the classes into four groups, and each would come up with their own team name in English, which was very limited so they came up with some pretty silly stuff such as “the pajamas” or “the Barack Obamas”. All of the classes got really enthusiastic about the game and looked forward to the days that we played it.

I played Jeopardy with my high schoolers last year as well, and it had the same result: fun, friendly competition, and successful review. They were taking French for the first time, so I adapted the content of my previous Jeopardy games from English into French, since the language level and much of the vocabulary units were the same. However, I incorporated grammar and tenses into the questions more, since they were older and had more language awareness than my previous French youngins.

Playing Jeopardy in Principles & Practices similarly provided a successful review and wrap-up of the concepts and units we covered throughout the course. This particular game had more categories than I have ever employed in my own adaptations of the game, which just goes to show how much we have learned this semester. I really liked that our knowledge of our classmates and our professor was also incorporated into it, since we spent a great deal of the first month reading each others’  language learning histories. Overall, using Jeopardy in P&P further solidified my faith in Jeopardy as an enjoyable and effective tool for review.

Although it seems like this lesson happened ages ago now, it is still one of the activities that has stuck with me the most and one that I would like to emulate and adapt in my future teaching.

Before jumping into the story itself, as a class, we created a chart on the board showing possible ways to express agreement/disagreement in English in both a “gentle” and “strong” tone. Although we didn’t focus too much on using these particular expressions in our follow-up discussion/debate, this would be a beneficial part of the activity in a language classroom.

After creating or simply presenting this chart, students then listen to the tale of Abigail, Gregory, Ivan, Sinbad, and Slug, all of whom commit some sort of questionable act in the story: infidelity, violence, lack of compassion/forgiveness, or not helping a friend in need. After listening to the story, students individually rate the characters in terms of their perceived deplorability; this process was later referred to as ‘value clarification’, since this makes it clear what values each individual finds to be most important in a friend or a romantic partner.

Following the individual rating process, we discussed our own ratings with the group and then came to a group consensus. The way that we went about this worked well: we tallied our ratings for each of the characters and ranked them accordingly (the one with the most points was deemed the most reprehensible and thus was at the bottom of the list). Most of us had ranked Sinbad as number 5, so that made it easy. However, there was more or less a tie with Abigail, Ivan, and Slug for least reprehensible, so this is where the discussion kicked in. It was interesting to hear everyone’s take on the story and the values that come into play; everyone had a strong opinion and didn’t hesitate to express it.

We then listened to the other groups’ rankings and explanations of those rankings, and compared them to our own. It was interesting to see how most groups ranked Ivan as the least reprehensible, but Peter then revealed that he would rank Ivan as #5 because he views doing nothing/not helping a friend in need as the worst thing one can do. Overall, this activity sparked friendly discussion and debate, and clarified our values to others as well as ourselves.

Metacognitive learning strategies are very important to achieve success in graduate school.  This type of strategy is mainly involved with how we plan, monitor and assess what knowledge/skillsets/experience we have gained. As reading plays a major part of graduate studies, metacognitive learning may work most efficiently in reading skills, but other learning skills as well. Therefore, possible applications that will be discussed here are most related to reading skills. Specifically, it will be very beneficial if we plan ahead what we are going read before we start reading tons of articles for different courses, and what we expect during lectures and class discussion so that we can take effective notes and organize them later for reading review.
While we are reading, there are metacognitive strategies that are essential for successful graduate level reading. For example, in the aspect of reading, students need to learn how to skim, scan, and read in order to successfully complete their reading assignments.  Due to the abundant amount of reading, it’s important to focus in on the most important elements of each article or study. To illustrate this, a member of our group mentioned it took her 3 hours to read one chapter.  Once she strengthens her metacognitive skills the amount of time will be reduced but not the amount of information gleaned from the reading.

Brieanna, Minh, Sergio, Dee