Maybe it was turning 50.  Maybe it was hitting the 20 year mark in my profession. Maybe it was my own children starting high school and giving me more free time.   Maybe it was that I couldn’t hear one more parent tell me, “I took 4 years of French in high school and I can’t remember a thing”.  Maybe it was looking at my students and knowing I could do better…do more…be more.  Maybe it was a combination of all of the above. All I know is that something made me start this quest to make my classroom more communicative, more comfortable, more creative.  I hit the reset button and I hit it hard.

I have always been a dedicated, hard-working teacher.  But like so many world language teachers before me, I realized I wasn’t actually producing SPEAKERS of the language.  I was producing conjugators, fill-in-the-blankers and vocabulary listers.  My memorizers excelled and continued French for 4 years.  My less motivated or less studious learners dropped out, even though they loved French.  Something was obviously not working.

With a few of the awesome and talented colleagues in my department, we set out to learn how to better prepare our students to learn a language.  We read, we researched and we discussed.  And then we set fire to our old curriculum!  Our new plan included emphasizing communication, downsizing vocabulary lists, using authentic resources,  and above all else, guiding our students to love language learning. (Huge shout out to my fellow lead teachers-Karen, Juanita and Lori!  I could not have done it without you.)

The last couple of years have been the most rewarding of my career.  I have learned so much and continue to learn. My students have been wildly successful.  I mean ALL of my students are succeeding- my academically talented students , my students that tend to not do well in school, my students who have no idea about parts of speech, my special needs students.  And you know what they are all doing?  SPEAKING FRENCH!!  Really, isn’t that our goal as language teachers?