4 C's February, Day 9 - Guen Butler

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Guen Butler, current ToSA and former French teacher at San Dieguito Academy and Torrey Pines High School:


“Les Quatre C”

The AP French Language and Culture course requires that students express themselves in French and make insightful cross-cultural comparisons on a wide variety of topics. The course is based around six themes: Beauty and Aesthetics, Global Challenges, Personal and Public Identities, Families and Communities, Science and Technology, and Contemporary Life. To keep up with the high-demand for up-to-date information in this class, the teacher of this course could easily find him or herself spending countless hours researching current events throughout the 44 countries of the French-speaking world, and crafting lessons around those.

Pneumonic Plague in Madagascar? Charlie Hebdo? The Arab Spring? Sure, I could research those and present them to my students. But who would really be doing the learning? Probably me. Why not have THE KIDS do the research and present a topic to the class? This is a language class after all. Shouldn't THEY be the ones collaborating, communicating and thinking creatively and critically?

And, so, inspired by Christophe Barquisseau’s MAC project, that’s what I did. Groups of 4 students in my AP French class chose one of the six course themes. Then, on that theme, they found a newspaper article (en français, bien sûr!) a related 2-minute video or audio clip, and a chart or a graph around which they’d base a multi-part presentation to the class. These groups, working entirely with documents written for a Francophone audience, would, in French:

• Present the article, video, and graph, sharing the information and asking questions to the class
• Teach key vocabulary as needed 
• Synthesize the 3 sources, and lead a class discussion around it.
• And then, of course, create a wildly competitive Jeopardy-style game to review their presentation.

The projects my students presented included:

• Fashion in France for plus-sized women
• Graffiti vs Public art
• Banning cigarette smoking on the beach
• The Burqa in Switzerland
• Drug use among teenagers

My work during these presentations shifted, from being the “finder and presenter” of information to helping students refine their projects, find appropriate sources of information, learn how to interpret complex graphs and charts made for a European audience, develop their public speaking skills, craft engaging questions for their peers, distill complex articles down to their essence, or connect a far-away topic like graffiti in Paris to a local concern, the Surfing Madonna in Encinitas. In short, when I pushed my students to engage deeply with the 4C’s, my class became more engaging, more relevant and, more fun. Not to mention, my students’ spoken and written French got quite a workout!