 This first session, this morning session, which is soon coming to a close, is about understanding that first level of understanding what a flight lesson is, what are some of the inherent concepts. So we've talked about the literary. I mean, you can see examples in the textbook. In my textbook, you can see a range of different examples. These two goals of bridging the divide between language and literature and also then getting students to work with language as a system of systems for meaning making, let's say, as opposed to a more rule-based approach. So these are two examples. But flight, so we're trying to understand, well, what might a flight, what does flight mean as an approach? And as we work into the afternoon, Chantel is going to be walking you through a way of understanding how to create a flight lesson. So we will break it down further for you so you can see you're already getting a feeling for it. You're getting those intuitions. You're getting those perceptions going. The flight approach is not one thing. It's rather vast. And so people can interpret it in a number of ways. But as long as you're working with those basic principles, there's a lot that you can do and a lot that you can do to adapt it to your given context for your languages, for your students. And to me, that's the exciting part. But it does mean that it's about taking a step further, understanding where you're at, taking a step further, and sharing. Ultimately, our goal is to get you all to be interested in creating flight lessons and then publishing them as open resources so that you can share that work with other people and engage in conversation with other professionals in your particular language or in other languages. So yeah, so these two lessons do embody. There's something that you can see. There are things that you can see that are the same, but they are different levels. So we're trying to help you to identify, OK, how might I work at this at the beginning level? How might I work with this at the advanced level? So they're not different in texture so much, but level. I have a couple of issues I want to flag for this afternoon, but I want to wait and see if there's any other comments on thinking about how these lessons compare, not with one another, but with other ways of working with texts. I know what we've heard, the ways in which it's integrated and task-based. I think that's what we're talking about this afternoon a lot, is how do you pull those tasks together into an integrated lesson. We spend a lot of time saying we don't want to talk about activities. We want to talk about lessons because a lesson is a sort of integrated set of activities. Anything else that stands out to you before we start to shift and close out? Getting the student, but step by step. For example, think about the definite and indefinite articles, but there is an aim to understand the text, not only to use the language. So the same with the other tasks also. And then writing, analyzing, and the same way. So I mean, we have the same idea how to get the student to understand. And at the same time, he or she is using the language appropriately without noticing that at the beginning. So let's say it helps leading the student, but indirectly. And make them be professional in the language. But let's say maybe after finishing a semester. Yeah, I don't know. That's what I feel. OK, I'm going to think. OK, so I want to hang on to a couple of them have been mentioned, but I want to plant them in your head for this afternoon. And then people might have responses to them. And one thing that's come up a lot is level. What level is it? What is level appropriate? And Richard Kern, who's written one of the early books, it's from 2000. So it's already a little bit old, but it's really good on teaching literacy in foreign languages says, don't change the text, change the task. Which isn't to say that you're not going to necessarily throw proust at your first semester or first year students. There's an extent to which that text selection has to do with what resources they have. We had mentioned, for example, past tense, having some awareness familiarity with past tense before they read this Hemingway text. But that part of the approach is that the tasks help the students to meet them where they are and help them into the text. So that's something we'll be talking about this afternoon, that sort of scaffolding the step-by-step that you were mentioning. One is the question of objectives that's sort of been implicit in our lessons a little bit. We focused a lot on the play, but thinking about why you might focus on certain aspects of play over others in a given moment in your course is part of what we'll be talking about this afternoon. Because one thing you noticed when we sort of threw the Hemingway text at you and you responded is that I think someone in the room found about every type of play somewhere in that text, right? But taking that on a whole hog in a language class is probably too much to tackle. So how do you decide where your focus should be? That ties into your course objective, so that's something we'll be coming back to. And then there's this issue of language awareness. The word command came up, I think, earlier in the introductions about the AP. The confidence, I think, has come up in a couple of the groups. Students feeling this challenged and able to talk about this, so that's gonna be a priority, is thinking about how do we help to foster that kind of language awareness. But that ties to another issue, which I don't think we've talked about, although I talked about it in this group a little bit, which in my mind, the metaphor is kind of the forest or the trees problem sometimes. And it's a really important pedagogical concern, is at what moment are you paying attention to the trees? Or even the leaves? Or maybe you're even breaking down to the cellular structure of the tree, right? Sometimes there are moments where that makes sense, but sometimes you just wanna stand back and appreciate the forest. And that's sort of the reading for gist, in a sense, right? Reading the text, enjoying the text. And then at what moments do you get in there and sort of start to look at its little bits and parts? And those are both legitimate pedagogical choices, but they do really different things in a classroom, in a lesson, in a moment, in a lesson. So thinking about when do we make which choice and what are the pedagogical effects of that and at what level is also gonna be really important. And then how do we help our students, if we want them to see the forest, we have to get them up on high somewhere, right? We have to get them the right vantage point. How do we do that? If we want them to look at the individual leaves of the oak tree and how they compare to, I'm not good with trees, maybe another kind of tree. They're the maple, how do they compare to the maple? Then we need to give them the resources and tools in order to do that, right? So thinking about those choices and then what they need. And then tied to this is the scariness question, I think in some ways, standing up high on the mountain can be scary sometimes, right? Being down there in the middle of the forest can be scary sometimes too, but thinking of that as something that can be a kind of meaningful part of your lesson rather than something to avoid. And whenever these questions of affect and anxiety come up, my head always turns back to one of my graduate students who I worked with and she's grew up bilingual, she grew up on the border half of her family in Mexico, half of her family in Arizona and then taught French. And so I think she had a lot of really interesting unique perspectives on language teaching and she was in a methods course I taught where we were kind of going through all of the different concepts of language teaching and many of you have probably encountered the term the effective filter or something like that, this idea that if students feel too much anxiety, too much fear, they'll shut down, right? And they won't learn. So we had talked about and read that and then we were talking about proficiency and meaningful communication and making language meaningful to our students. And she looked at me and she said, this doesn't make any sense. And I said, what do you mean? And she said, well, the moments that are most meaningful to me are often effective. They're often the most effectively charged. They're sometimes scary or full of anxiety or full of excitement. So if we're telling our students they can only use meaningful language but we wanna avoid affect, this doesn't make any sense. And I think she's got a really important point there. So the question isn't to avoid the affect, but to support them, to kind of guide them into that affect. And that's where I'm gonna maybe end with just one parenting metaphor, which we've already sort of mentioned can be helpful, is when you're learning to ride a bike with kids, how many of you have taught a kid to ride a bike? I have just curiosity. Okay, so there's the teaching to ride a bike on the training wheels, right? If you've done that, which is how I learned where you're all wobbly and then you get on the bike and inevitably you fall into a bush, which is what I did when my dad let go, right? And nowadays in Europe they have these balance bikes if you've seen those, right? Where the kid works on their balance first and I kid you not, my son when we let go, he zoomed off and for 10 minutes rode straight after that. So part of this question of scaffolding is not just giving support, but giving the kind of support that will let them go free, right? If we're giving the wrong kinds of support, they might feel really safe and secure at first, but as soon as those training wheels are off, right? As soon as we throw them into the target language or to talking to native speakers, they fall over. If we give them the right kinds of support, then they've got the resources to keep going and to kind of maneuver and to figure things out. So that's kind of what we're going. And so we'll try in the afternoon to be a little bit more concrete and a little bit less metaphorical about what some of those forms of support might look like. Yes? Starting out and talking to them about how their expectations that they need to kind of recalibrate that, that they're learning, that they're gonna make mistakes that it doesn't matter. And I'll tell them that like when I graduated from UT with a good GPA, I wasn't fluent in Spanish. And one of the jobs I had, after I had kids and I was home for a while and then I got back into teaching was an ESL. And I would have to, we would go to the library and at that time I was an aide and we would go to the library and I would read to kill a mockingbird to the kids in ninth grade and translate it into Spanish. And they would laugh. My Spanish was horrible and they would be correcting me. And after like, and I really didn't care. It was fun. They would laugh. We would laugh at each other. They would make, but it made them feel good that they were correcting me and then it was a two-eighths way street. And so we would talk about how you're learning Spanish while we're learning English. And after a year and a half of that, it was fluency. So it's just kind of kids that are 15, 16. They're thinking, well, I'm 15, 16. I should be speaking Spanish like a 15 or 16-year-old. And you just kind of have to remind them, no, you're not gonna just show up and be fluent. It's something that you have to be patient with yourself and constantly telling them, because kids these days are so used to just getting their burst of information on their iPad or whatever and then having this knowledge base and this proficiency that's just there. And language just doesn't happen that way. It's a process and just, and mine always seemed to kind of like ease up after that. Like just being told you're not gonna be fluent right away. It's rarer and rarer in our educational settings and what I like about part of the flight approach is that it allows students and teachers to luxuriate in a text, to take time to not have that instant that we're so trained now to respond, to get that quick burst of information, boom, boom, boom. And here it's about let's suspend time and let's roll around in the text. Let's get into that text. Let's just see what is going on here with the goal of ultimately not only making sense but having something productive come out of it. It's not just spacing out, right? This is a process that's going to bring them something and that's an appreciation. That's a word that of course in universities is despised in literature courses. You don't appreciate a text. You're not supposed to appreciate. There used to be courses, right? About appreciation for reading. You don't do that anymore. It's all about literary theory in this very esoteric way. Getting students to really just luxuriate in a text I think is lovely. And some of them takes a little bit of time to get them to free themselves to do that but ultimately I find that my students anyway really enjoy it. I was gonna say, I think the appreciation of text has gone away not just from the university level. It goes all the way down into elementary levels with all the focus on testing these days. Kids aren't given a story, read the story, enjoy it. No, it's what type of text is this? My kindergartner was like, oh, that's a text-to-text connection. How about we just read Clifford and enjoy Clifford for what he is? And so much of that literary appreciation has just gone out the door altogether that I've found when I read picture books with my eighth graders, they're actually appreciating the fact that we're reading a story about some little boy in Puerto Rico. And they get to enjoy it for the text that it is because I'm not going to ask them to analyze the character to the depth that they would in their ELA class. I'm gonna have them describe him and all of that but not to that depth. Let's just enjoy it. Let's see what he does. Why does he do this? Great, fun, move on. Just something I've observed. It's not just the literary appreciation going on from university classes. Yeah, that's true. Listening to the story and enjoying the story is one way in which we enjoy texts but I think about texts that we read, especially as children, but sometimes it doesn't stop there if we continue to read poetry but things like Amelia Bedelia, if some of you've heard of, a lot of children's texts are really about playing with this plasticity of language that Joanna mentioned. And so, and we lose that in a sense as we become older as well. We lose kind of that ability to appreciate those multiple levels of a text. Yeah.