In entering my junior spring, I wondered how I could maintain my love for Spanish while deepening my work with children. I discovered a course titled Teaching Spanish K-12, where we learned about second language pedagogy and put such knowledge into practice by volunteering at local elementary classrooms. A year prior, my work with Wesleyan Preschool Math Games provided me insight into school teaching, particularly in how classroom facilitation could occur on a small group basis. This time around, I was working with not only one, but two classes and they were larger, with older students (i.e. 20 students vs. 10; first and fourth grade vs. pre-k). As a result, I shifted my facilitation style to accommodate each student’s developmental needs and account for all student perspectives.

Situational Obstacles of Teaching Spanish

Throughout the semester, I was tasked with the challenges of co-teaching, working with a substitute teacher who had minimal knowledge of Spanish, and creating lesson plans. Though I had learned to work with others through class group projects and camp co-counseling, I had never experienced co-facilitation in the controlled setting of a classroom. Not to mention, the Spanish teacher at the school we were visiting (Lawrence Elementary School) was on maternity leave. This left my classmate and I to lead the class without an understanding of how Lawrence was run, what the students had learned in Spanish, and what the current substitute had introduced to them. We were also asked to plan lessons; a process neither my classmate nor I were familiar with.

First Classroom Visit: Challenges and Successes

When heading into our first week at Lawrence, I felt rather unprepared and unqualified to take on the position of a co-teacher. On the first day of meeting the students, we introduced ourselves, got to know them, and presented basic greeting and goodbye phrases in Spanish. However, I soon realized how one envisions a class will take place is often not the reality. We had taught everything we planned and were still left with 20 minutes of nothing to do. I remember feeling worried that the students would disengage and in the spur of the moment, I began introducing random Spanish topics via YouTube. In an attempt to capture everyone’s attention, I inadvertently caused confusion.

4 Takeaway Lessons

However, the more time we spent in the classroom, the more familiar we became with lesson planning and co-facilitating. Through trial and error, we learned three valuable lessons:

1. Always have a back up plan in case the lesson does not work out. 
2. Lessons should incorporate multimodal aspects of learning for student engagement, including but not limited to videos, hands-on experiments, and interactive presentations. 
3. Play to your co-teacher’s strengths and communicate any issues or successes as needed. 

Overall, these lessons became crucial to me not only at Lawrence, but when undertaking other leadership roles in the classroom.

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Lesson Plans

** Three documents are attached below, including my 1st lesson plan and my 4th (2 versions; 1 in English and 1 in Spanish). My professor never gave us a particular structure for formulating these plans and thus my classmate and I tried the best we could to create activities based on our own knowledge and research **

First Lesson Plan

The above document displays the first lesson plan I have ever created (made alongside my co-teacher classmate). Each section is written in a mix of English and Spanish, demonstrating our confusion about the class guidelines for lesson plan creation. We laid out each component of our instruction very briefly, simply noting our ideas and scripting out a few words or phrases we could use when teaching. However, further explanation of our plans of action are missing, leaving room for a lack of clarity and a host of questions for any future viewers.

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Fourth Lesson Plan (Spanish)

My co-teacher and I created this lesson plan halfway through my junior spring as part of our Teaching Spanish course. After going through various phases of trial and error and consulting our larger class cohort, we came to find our rhythm in lesson plan creation. Our format grew to be more rigorous, detailing each activity and including specific script language. With each lesson plan came greater consistency, as can be noted through our developed class ritual that began every session: the welcome song (mentioned above as “actividad de llegada/rutina”). By indulging in second pedagogy literature and practical implications of instruction, we learned the value of multimodal methods of teaching and keeping track of activity times. This took the form of predicting the length of each activity with time markers (red lettering next to activity titles) and including teaching through several mediums, including but not limited to videos, photos, worksheets, and interactive discussions.

** As our professor requested that we write lesson plans in Spanish, this document does not include any translations. For an updated English version, please see the document below **

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Fourth Lesson Plan (English)

This document was created later in the academic year after I had completed my Teaching Spanish course. Though drawing from the same structure and template, certain components (i.e., activity descriptions and time markers) are slightly altered to provide greater clarity and align with realistic goals.

** This document was later translated into English for comprehension purposes. However, the contents are only for display, as my classmate and I did not reference this lesson plan for teaching **