.jpg)
Growing With Proficiency The Podcast
Welcome to Growing With Proficiency: The Podcast! Are you a World Language teacher who is looking for ideas, strategies, activities, and inspiration to create a World Language class where you and your students enjoy using the language to learn about the world and each other? Do you want to transform your class into an acquisition-driven instruction space where you intentionally provide a ton of comprehensible input?
If you are, you're in the right place.
Let's start this journey together. Head over to IG, and send me a DM @claudiamelliott to let me know what topics you would like me to cover in an upcoming episode.Join my free Facebook community, Growing With C. Also, check out my blog to start discovering some of these ideas and strategies at growingwithproficiency.com
Growing With Proficiency The Podcast
Episode 111: AHA Moments and Intercultural Competence with Alicia Shoemaker and Ben Fisher Rodriguez
In this episode of "Growing With Proficiency The Podcast," I'm super excited to chat with two incredible language educators, Alicia Shoemaker and Ben Fisher Rodriguez. We dive into the magic of 'Aha Moments'—those lightbulb moments that bring so much joy and energy to both students and teachers. We talk about what the research says about why these moments are so important and share some practical tips on how you can create more of them in your classroom.
We also get into the nitty-gritty of intercultural competence and cultural humility—big ideas that can take those 'Aha Moments' to the next level by making learning more inclusive and meaningful. Alicia and Ben share some awesome examples and resources that have worked wonders in their own teaching.
Resources:
Dr. Wesley Carpenter at the University of Akron - His definition of 'Aha Moments' as "a sudden conscious change in a person's representation of a stimulus, situation, event, or problem."
Dr. John Hattie and Dr. Jay Berkeley, University of Melbourne - Their 2023 article, Making Learning Visible: Observable Correlates of the Aha Moment when Moving from Surface to Deep Thinking, discusses how 'Aha Moments' in students lead to feelings of joy, relief, self-efficacy, and increased engagement.
2017 ACTFL Can-Do Statements on Intercultural Competence - These statements define intercultural competence as the ability to interact effectively and appropriately with people from other language and cultural backgrounds.
Common Ground: Second Language Acquisition Theory Goes to the Classroom by Florencia Henshaw and Maris Hawkins
Randall Munroe's "What If?" Questions - A resource mentioned for its effectiveness in encouraging students to think critically and reflectively about cultural scenarios, helping to create 'Aha Moments.'
Teaching Tools in a Flash by Dr. Deborah Clark and Dr. Sharma of Kent State University** - This resource provides practical examples of how to approach cultural humility in language classes.
Maris Hawkins’ Blog
Ben Fisher Rodriguez’s Blog
More resources:
Back to School Bundle for Spanish Classes
