This is Jacey's fifth year of teaching at Red Bank Regional, where she also heads the French club and advises the Class of 2007. "I always wanted to teach," she says. "I thought about teaching English or history, but then I decided that teaching French would allow me to teach history, language, and literature all in one!" She enjoys designing problem-based instructional units for her students: "It's fun for me because I get to be creative and problem-solve when I design, and the students get to do the same thing in the class."
"Believe it or not," Jacey admits, "I like writing rubrics! I find it challenging." In Ja
cey's classroom, rubrics are for more than just assessment; she has worked to design rubrics that stress process as well as product. When her students put together an ESPN broadcast in French, the Novice column requires them to compile lists of potentially useful vocabulary and grammatical structures, the Apprentice column asks them to use the terms and structures in context, and the Practitioner column requires that they integrate the vocabulary and grammar into the sportscast itself. She has also designed a rubric for speaking that helps beginning French students ease into oral exams and other spoken performances. The Novice student may start by speaking with an American accent and needing to answer some questions in English, but the goal is for all students to be able to work toward speaking with a French accent and the ability to listen and respond to questions completely in French. Jacey's rubric also shows students how they can build the complexity of their utterances just by adding adjectives to nouns, and guides them in building the modified nouns into complete sentences.
Jacey works to design tasks that incorporate all aspects of language use, not just writing. She feels that her instructional design a
bilities are always improving. "One unit I had students putting together a clothes catalog," she explains, "and they did a lot of internet research and used online translation sites - that's a big problem. When I added oral components, it forced students to go beyond cutting and pasting ... they came up with new vocabulary, asked me for expressions, came up with similes in French. They really thought about what they were saying." Jacey works to ensure that her tasks are content-rich, as well.
Jacey has found exciting ways to infuse technology into her classroom as a means of exposing students to "virtual experiences" in France. She spent the summer living in Angers, France, with a host family, in a total French immersion Master's degree program that was funded by a grant given her by Red Bank Regional Schools. While in France, Jacey took "lots of video. I want to use it so that students can see what life is really like in France." For example, she took footage of a faux "beach" along the Seine River. The Parisians' version of a beach will be brought to life for students who live on the East Coast of the U.S. and can hardly imagine what life would be like without a nearby beach!
Jacey feels that a Learner-Active environment allows students to "have choices. Not everyone has to do the same thing at the same time. Students can have opportunities to collaborate. They can also teach each other ... they make mistakes, correct each other, and learn from it, and it's a small enough setting that it's not embarrassing."
One tool Jacey has found invaluable is a facilitation grid to help her do formative assessment in her classroom: "When students were working collaboratively, it was difficult for me to monitor each student's progress. With the facilitation grid, it was so simple that I couldn't believe I hadn't done it sooner! It gave me concrete information for making decisions."
This September, Jacey is kicking off the school year with a task that deals with a real-life problem: the waning numbers, in recent years, of students interested in studying French, and the subsequent decline of French language programs. "French is a very important language in international business, and it isn't just spoken in France. I want them to be able to present this information to the Board, and to the middle school students who are making choices about what language to study in high school," she says. The task also asks students to consider the American attitudes about learning second languages and compare them to those in Europe. Jacey has designed a pacing guide to help students take responsibility for their own learning as they work on the task.
While she knows that running a LATIC "takes extra work" up-front, she says, "I love to see the end results. The majority of students go above and beyond. All last year, I didn't have a single student who achieved less than Practitioner status. I'm always blown away by what the students produce."
Speaking, reading, writing, and listening ... in Jacey Greider's French 1, French 2, and French 2 Honors classes at Red Bank Regional High School in Little Silver, New Jersey, the language and culture of France and Francophone countries come alive! For the past several years, Jacey has been working with IDE consultant Andie DiMarco to build a Learner-Active, Technology-Infused World Language Classroom.