Workshop explores new ways of Spanish instruction

Local, and a couple of Columbus, educators from high schools and colleges convened recently at Hawken`s Upper School for a workshop hosted by Hawken Spanish teachers Joaquin and Fernando Soldevilla. This is the third year the brothers have organized the professional development event for Spanish teachers in the area. The workshop could have easily been one that hundreds attend. But Joaquin said he`d rather the attendance be small and manageable; a larger crowd would take away from the quality of the event as he sees it. "It [the small crowd] gives everyone the opportunity to exchange ideas and talk," he said. The first of two sessions explored the oft-ignored teaching of Spanish poetry. While most high schools commit to teaching the basics of the language in first, second, third and fourth year Spanish classes, few delve into a course completely devoted literature. That`s a topic typically reserved for college and advanced collegiate levels at that. At Hawken, the Soldevillas teach-in addition to other Spanish courses-an AP Spanish Literature course that draws from a rich pool of Spanish and Latin American fiction, drama and poetry from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Joaquin presented his visual method in analyzing poetry, using, in this case, paintings and a poem from the Renaissance. It`s an approach he said that his students recently completed. The like characteristics of paintings of certain time periods, he found, can be compared with descriptions, phrases and words found in the poetry of the same period, creating a picture of what the poet had in mind when writing his/her piece. Poem standards-structure, phrasing, metaphors and rhyming-are all explored, but the goal of using the visual piece, Joaquin said, is to leave the students with a deeper understanding of not only the poem itself, but also the time in which it was created. Luis Escobedo, a Soldevilla colleague, presented an interactive approach to using the SMART Board in classroom instruction during another portion of the workshop. The relatively new technology connects an interactive whiteboard with a computer and projector. Users write in digital ink on the board, which is then projected on a screen. Joaquin noted that the days of using a chalk and a blackboard are rapidly disappearing. For him, it`s already a thing of the past. "I don`t use the regular board anymore," he said. Escobedo introduced an even greater level of SMART board interaction-one where the instructor writes a question on the "board" and where the student answers with a remote control. Hawken Spanish teacher Susan McNamee attended the day`s workshop and said it was second-to-none. "I think everyone was impressed and took away a lot of awe for what my colleagues are doing here with technology and the depth of their expertise and knowledge in Spanish," she said.