I’ve been teaching for a decade. When I first began in 2014, students had phones. Most grades were getting one-to-one devices. All classes had SmartBoards. But it was different. The hunched-shoulders classic phone-addiction pose wasn’t the norm in the hallways yet. You could walk through the halls and see students writing on paper, engaging in class discussion, and working without headphones. Today, most classes in my school rely heavily on one-to-one devices and Google Classroom to deliver their curriculum.
I understand. I teach Spanish, and using technology like SmartBoards, online reading libraries, language computer games, Google Classroom, and Quizlet Live has simplified my life. If I’m exhausted, I can start a Quizlet Live game and just sit down for a few minutes while students are reviewing important vocab for our class. I love those moments when it’s been a long day.
But in the last years post-Covid I’ve started to notice something. Many of my students seemed unable to focus without a screen. Handwriting has progressively become more difficult to decipher. Chromebook work time became really work-avoidance time for so many. Of course, some students aren’t engaged regardless of the tech situation, but this felt different.
Storytelling over screentime
I started to wonder if the convenience of my classroom technology was contributing to a greater problem with our youth today: screen addiction. No need for a study or statistics to tell me it’s a problem. I teach high school. Teachers know it’s a problem. Many of my students report 7 hours of screen time a day, not including their use of Chromebooks in school. I asked myself: Is low-tech teaching still possible?
I believe it is. In language classes, many teachers are making the shift to comprehensible-input and storytelling rather than a grammar-focused approach. Our brains were created to hear and share stories! We do this by interacting face-to-face and making connections with our lives and physical environment. My goal this year is to ditch the online libraries and engage students with real-time storytelling. I’ll still use my SmartBoard to present and support comprehension pretty often, but I want us all to be communicating and learning without the barrier of individual screens. I’m committing to incorporating more old-fashioned pen and paper comprehension-based activities and storytelling using just our voices and the chalkboard. It requires up-front work in classroom management to show students how to engage as part of the group, but I’m realizing in the post-Covid classroom that my students deserve a return to low-tech human-to-human communication.
The world language class is the best place to start. Language teachers really are professional storytellers.
To support my goal, I’m developing more storytelling mini-units like Lemmy y la granja and the Top 10 AR Verbs to expose my students to high-frequency structures and introduce grammar topics in ways that keep the tech low and the focus on communication and comprehension. I love activities like these because they center around a shared story. We need stories. We need human moments without a glowing screen to entertain us. And I won’t miss the shuffle to find missing chargers, work through tech issues, deal with slow internet, or crack down on Cool Math Games. With intentionality, maybe this year we’ll find the beautiful in the boring.