{"id":643,"date":"2023-11-26T21:15:41","date_gmt":"2023-11-26T21:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/?p=643"},"modified":"2023-11-26T21:15:42","modified_gmt":"2023-11-26T21:15:42","slug":"teaching-world-languages-remotely-part-1-rapport-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/26\/teaching-world-languages-remotely-part-1-rapport-building\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 1: Rapport Building"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Since September, I have had the distinct pleasure of working part-time for a company based in California that offers remote middle and high school credit-bearing courses in world languages. LanguageBird<\/a> is perfect fit for a retired public school teacher and I am very contented working for them (not a paid promotion). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pandemic placed we public school teachers in the position of teaching remotely, some for the first time. A lot of that went poorly in some places, but in other places it went pretty well. My work teaching remotely now has given me the chance to re-explore online teaching practice and the kinds of 21st century learning spaces that meet the needs of that situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides my work for LanguageBird, I also am enjoying teaching a remote French class for the public school district from which I retired last June. This is very different from LanguageBird in many ways and teaching in both contexts has provided a wealth of interesting experiences that I feel are instructive. In this series of posts, I would like to share my experiences and conclusions as well as the apps I am developing to support remote teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the public school remote teaching context, we had set it up as a daily synchronous class. This was informed by our pandemic experience that asynchronous courses are a bad idea for most adolescents. It is a small class of five, two for French III and three for college French, credited from a local community college who approved my application to work as adjunct for them in a high school. Each school day during period 2, I fire up a Google Meet and students log in. They are supervised by a language teacher (Spanish).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We (administration and I) were concerned that remote teaching made it difficult to maintain the kind of teacher-student rapport that was so necessary for learning. I suggested that I work in-person for a half day at the end of each marking period (ten weeks) to teach a class and meet with students individually so they can present their projects and practice French conversation. (The district is a 45-mile commute for me one-way, so going in-person for one daily class was not practical.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At LanguageBird, we only teach one-on-one lessons. I find this extremely useful, so from start I modified my public school lesson plans such that I would only teach whole-group for the first 15 minutes and then each student would have an individual “tutorial” with me for the balance of the time. This turned out to be a fantastic idea and I am guessing the students like it too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the pandemic in my district, we had two days to launch into teaching by video-conference (Here is a post on my experience teaching during the pandemic<\/a>). My current students, many of whom were then in my sixth grade social studies class back in 2020, had a mostly negative experience learning online in general. I felt strongly motivated to demonstrate from the start of the school year that this remote learning experience would not be like that. The first upgrade I made to what I was doing in 2020 was to focus on individual lessons over group lessons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think of positive rapport as being a trusting sense of mutual goodwill between an instructor and a pupil. Building a positive rapport with students is extremely important. I had the sense that this was possible only to a very limited degree in remote learning. However, I now stand corrected. In remote instruction over video-conferencing, it is necessary to favor one-on-one teaching situations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fostering positive rapport extends not to just being present to interact one-on-one. It is also built on online software applications that foster efficient and readily accessible learning interactions for delivery, practice, evaluation, and debriefing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next post: teaching composition to world language students remotely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since September, I have had the distinct pleasure of working part-time for a company based in California that offers remote middle and high school credit-bearing courses in world languages. LanguageBird is perfect fit for a retired public school teacher and I am very contented working for them (not a paid promotion). The pandemic placed we … Continue reading “Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 1: Rapport Building”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-learning-in-digital-environment","category-teaching-world-languages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":645,"href":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions\/645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.innovationassessments.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}