Agent Rebecca Blouwolff (Teaching Language Authentically)

2020-04-19

Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to teach students how to use a foreign language using authentic resources and relevant units, with the goal of making proficient speakers. The special agent assigned to help you with this task is Rebecca Blouwolff of Wellesley Middle School in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Rebecca and I share a similar background: we both started our careers intending to teach Social Studies, and we both found ourselves teaching French instead! To make a long story short: ...

Rebecca and I share a similar background: we both started our careers intending to teach Social Studies, and we both found ourselves teaching French instead! To make a long story short: in my second year of teaching I was given a contract that included teaching French because I was the most qualified of the unqualified, and then I fell in love with it. (If you’re interested in the much longer version of this story, I spoke about my journey to becoming a language teacher on Kris Broholm’s Actual Fluency podcast.) Along with going back to school to become qualified for real, I was able to become better by finding role models online who represented the kind of language teacher that I aspired to be, and Rebecca Blouwolff is definitely one of them. And I’m not the only one who thinks she is amazing; the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (or ACTFL) named her the 2020 National Language Teacher of the Year!

In this episode we discuss:

Rebecca’s transformation to a proficiency based teaching model
Why she chooses to use authentic resources
How she’s still learning how to let go of accuracy in favor of proficiency
How to help parents understand new ways of language learning
Her favourite unit: “Un Meilleur moi” (“A Better me”)
Why she’s so generous with her resources
Her experience (so far) with distance learning
What she looks forward to for when she’s back in the classroom
Advice for beginning teachers
Areas she’d like to improve in
Rebecca’s inspirations: Lisa Shepard, Amy Lenord, Natalia DeLatt, Creative Language Class, We Teach Languages, ACTFL books, Paul Sandrock, Leslie Grahn
How listeners can contact Rebecca through Twitter or her Blog