Philosophy of Teaching

By Katie Rose Frey

The World Language Classroom should be an environment where students can experience the world outside of their classroom, city, region, and country. The goal of the World Language is to provide students with an environment where they may grow into world citizens with a global and open perspective on different languages, cultures, beliefs, customs, and ideas. World Language encompasses learning all different subject matter through the perspectives of others. I believe in an environment where students feel safe to ask questions, explore, make mistakes, communicate, and foster meaningful connections with each other and the target language (French). Stepping into the World Language Classroom should be like stepping into a different world filled with connections to the target language and cultures that students can hear, see, touch, smell, and taste. Students should be able to hear French music, newscasts, conversations, videos. Students should see pictures, videos, and other artifacts of French and Francophone cultures. Students should be able to touch cultural artifacts such as money, tickets, books, symbols. The classroom should smell and taste like cultural foods such as couscous, croque monsieur, and crepes. Classroom activities should have meaningful communicative goals that allow students not to just study the language, but experience it as well. The content and materials would allow students to engage with real people, places, and artifacts of French and Francophone cultures. Just as every person, place, and artifact in the many Francophone cultures is different and cannot be forced to conform to one single idea, so my students are as individual as the cultures and people they will study. The structure and rules of my classroom will apply to all, but with the intent of equity. Every student and every situation is different which I keep in mind when addressing every single one. Classroom management will be a balance of self, classmate, and teacher monitoring, most importantly focusing on positive behavior and rewards. Strategic, linguistic, discourse, and sociolinguistic competencies will be developed through communicative activities where students are critical thinking to learn. Student production and communication in the language will be encouraged for effort before correctness. A safe environment will be fostered in order that communication will have no hindrance. The role of the teacher is to provide and engaging environment for students. The role of the student is to engage with every artifact and activity to create meaning for himself or herself. The role of the teacher is to guide students through their language study. The World Language Classroom should be as a team, with students helping each other as their team leader, the teacher, guides their growth.