Best of GWATFL 2018 presents at NECTFL and beyond!
Marcela Velikovsky, Bullis's Middle School Foreign Language Coordinator, developed world language lessons for the Smithsonian Learning Lab this year, working in partnership with Vicky Masson, who also teaches Spanish in the greater DC area.
The three collections they created use museum digital resources and create lessons around artwork and artifacts. Their collections also incorporate Project Zero Global Thinking Routines and U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. They presented their work at the Conference for Greater Washington Association of Teachers of Foreign Language (GWATFL) and were selected Best of the conference, giving them the opportunity to present in New York City to the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (NECTFL).
The blog they wrote shows the sense of adventure they bring to their work, and why Bullis Middle School students are so lucky to study with Sra. Velikovsky.
Our journey began
We created three collections in the Smithsonian Learning Lab platform (SLL) called "People, Place, and Time: How Art Reflects Culture." A "collection" is like an interactive folder where you can organize a wide range of resources to develop a lesson or unit and keep them in one place. The Smithsonian Learning Lab has more than a million digital resources for you to discover, design your own student-centered lessons, create new collections or customize those already published, and share them with the world for others to use.
In each collection, we integrate museum resources into world languages across the curriculum and focus on the three modes of communication: interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational. This allows students to learn toward proficiency by using the language as a tool to learn about different topics. Because we both teach Spanish, our collections are based on resources that highlight Latinx history, art, and culture. As teachers, we strive to widen our students' worldviews, so we also include the Project Zero Global Thinking Routines and connections to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.