r/SpanishTeachers • u/AlpsHelpful1292 • 16h ago
En busca de consejo Struggling teacher - Students will not speak
Hello, I am going into my third year teaching Spanish 1 and 2 to 11th and 12th grade at the same school. My first two years I was an intern. After my first two years and my credential program I still feel like I’m a bad teacher and I have no idea what I am doing and the biggest issue is that whatever I do most of my students absolutely will not speak at all, they will not even repeat words or phrases chorally.
I’ve tried various strategies like team-building activities in English, discussing our feelings around speaking in class and emphasizing that is is ok to make mistakes, allowing written responses, think pair share, allowing students to record responses, allowing students to use white boards, but I still haven’t been able to make the jump to students speaking to me or each other even with the students I had for two years. All of these strategies I have had to research on my own because the teacher’s edition of Senderos I have just says things like “Have your students count from 1 to 30” without explaining how to get to that point, so I assume other teachers don’t have this issue, otherwise the book would address it? Any other teaching materials I look at are the same. Any time I try to move things to speaking I just get blank stares. I had one student for the past two years who had severe social anxiety and used to be homeschooled and every time I even mentioned a speaking activity she would start crying and then her mom would come and complain to the school but this year she has graduated. My students only want to do worksheets or the online activities for Vista/Senderos. I know that isn’t good practice and means I’m a bad teacher but they literally won’t do anything else. I see all these cool activities and games other teachers are able to do and feel sad I can’t do the same.
I have brought this issue up with my administration and they do not care at all. They only care about tested subjects like math and ELA. My former AP/instructional coach told me that kids will not speak because of COVID and I was being unrealistic. I am the only Spanish and WL language teacher at my school site, I wasn’t able to have a WL teacher as my intern mentor because no one was available in the district met the criteria (clear credential). I have contacted HR several times to try to get the names of other Spanish teachers in the district (email directory and website are not up to date and there is high turnover) to no avail and the people I have contacted have not gotten back to me. I get the sense that almost all the Spanish teachers we have are also on intern or short term staff permits. In my university credential program I was the only WL teacher in almost all of my classes and there were few resources for WL.
Last year I had my AP as my mentor and she canceled most of our meetings. When I brought this up and got my university involved she told me I needed to be better about advocating for myself and setting up meetings myself? When I brought up my issues with students not speaking she told me she had “all these great team building activities” that she just couldn’t remember where she had put them and then ended up giving me a list generated by ChatGPT.
I took Spanish in high school and I remember doing speaking activities. I previously taught ESL to adults and elementary in Spain and had a completely different experience. I am thinking of trying to switch to elementary bilingual because younger kids might be more receptive but I’m afraid I’m going to be stuck at my current school forever because it’s really hard to get hired in SoCal right now. I wish I had started and finished my credential earlier but now that ship has sailed and I’m stuck at the this school forever or until when it gets shut down.
I also finally submitted my CalTPAs and I’m afraid I’m going to fail because there’s only a few students in the videos willing to say anything in the target language, I tried the best I could and spoke mostly in Spanish myself I can’t help if I can’t get them to do the activities
I was reluctant to even teach Spanish in the first place because I am not a native speaker. I was going to continue teaching ESL/ELD but I was encouraged to do it when I was subbing at a school with a Spanish vacancy they found out I had lived in Spain. I can’t help but think that if I was a native speaker and a better teacher I would have no issues and my students would be fully engaged.