Storytelling seems to be everywhere these days, and for good reasons: it is the most effective way to connect emotionally and intellectually with an audience. Set up your MFL students for success with a storytelling/roleplaying activity which will teach them how to evaluate an essay (remember the good ol’ days when evaluation used to be at the top of Bloom’s taxonomy, before creativity displaced it?) and carry out basic peer review. Class of Spanish Students Become First Examiners in History ÍNSULA BARATARIA brings to you, with the blessing of Sancho Panza (our sapiente y comiente Gobernador), a flipped-learning, blended class, using Microsoft Sway and a storytelling/role-playing strategy: “Class of Spanish Students Become First Examiners in History. Intro to peer evaluation.” Download the pdf and import it to your own Microsoft Sway to make any appropriate modifications for your class. Learning Intentions Familiarize students with the essay question in the A-Level Paper 2 (AQA Examination Board) and the rubric Provide students with tools for future peer-review workshops in class. Boost students’ confidence level and improve outcomes. Go ahead, do your thing, go teach!

Whether you are a communicative language teacher à la Jack Richards or a freestyling libertarian pedagogue à la Ivan Illich, you probably think that nothing is more important (and complicated) than language production. Specifically, nothing is more complicated in a language classroom than getting your students to speak. Sometimes any utterance in the target language feels like a triumph. No matter how much you drill and instill in your students a growth mindset based on Carol S. Dweck’s Mindset: the New Psychology of Success and defend the uses of getting it wrong following Alina Tugend’s Better by Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong, there is a chance your students will resist it with every fiber of their body—and hide behind their books, their classmates, or even their tables. However, language teachers embrace failure… because failure can be productive, as Dr. Manu Kapur has amply demonstrated in the realm of STEM learning, and as any MFL teacher will tell you without feeling the slightest urge to reach out to a research-based study. ÍNSULA BARATARIA brings you (under the watchful eye of Sancho Panza, our sapiente y comiente Gobernador) these conversation starter questions, based on the 5 different color-coded modules of the second edition of Pearson’s Spanish Viva 3 Rojo Pupil Book for KS3 (Y8). This resource corresponds to Module 1, “Somos así”. All 10 questions in each module are formulated in Spanish and English, and accompanied by a daily breakdown of 3-4 questions with their corresponding response sentence starters in Spanish. Depending on the level of your students, chances are that you will use them for 2 or 3 classes. You will begin every single class with students speaking and give a little boost of confidence to anyone struggling in the room. It could get sweeter, but it probably would not be ready-made and dirty cheap. Go ahead, do your thing, go teach.

Writing short shorts is a great introduction to creative writing in the MFL classroom, as a means to develop language mastery, boost subject interest and enhance creativity. Creative writing should not remain an arcane practice limited to those among us who fancy call themselves writers: it is the surest method to learn a language in a lasting, fun, and memorable way. Now that creativity is once more in vogue, has been declared a budding academic field and is a solemn matter of concern to HR pundits, startup accelerators, education leaders and even PISA 2022 and the Department for Education… And bearing in mind that Malcom Gladwell probably overstepped his mark and, let us be straight, punching in 10,000 hours will probably not make you a genius, leaving you a better performer, but as unsagely as before. We could sulk, huff and puff, as contrarian luddites. Or, instead, learn to value and embrace creativity for creativity’s sake, spreading the writerly love to our MFL students. Have you already picked sides and decided what kind of creative teacher you aspire to be? Planning on teaching creatively or teaching for creativity? A li’l of this and that will probably go a long way. ÍNSULA BARATARIA brings you (under the watchful eye of Sancho Panza, our sapiente y comiente Gobernador) this modular creative activity, Minificción (Short Shorts) (KS3/KS4/KS5), where students of Spanish will be introduced to the formidable art of flash fiction: championed by writers like Italo Calvino as a worthy adversary to its more hefty counterparts; veloz saeta… que presurosa corre, and should feel just as fleeting as life fell short for Góngora. This activity is easily adaptable to various levels and degrees of depth, by removing slides according to proficiency, scope of learning and time available. Every slide is accompanied by a suggested Think/Pair/Share, quest, or plenary activity. However, if you are short on time, you can always present a few examples and launch your recruits knee deep into the writing camp swamp.