The ice is broken, and you worry that your Latin instruction, held afloat solely by your enthusiasm and love for the language, is sinking. Here are three practical tips for teaching and building confidence in your Latin lessons:
1. Keep Moving
When planning and executing your lessons, maintain a quick pace. Don’t get bogged down in any one concept at a given time. If you find yourself hitting a roadblock with students on a particular idea, move on and return to the concept at another time.
One easy way to keep the class moving is for you to segment your instruction into brief intervals.
For example, let’s say you are instructing on first declension noun endings. Begin by having students chant the paradigm with you as you present it on the board. Following that, give students multiple first declension words for them to decline on their own. Once you have done that, give them several sentences to translate that use first declension words. Finally, read and translate with the students a short story in Latin from the curriculum guide.
This is one of many ways to segment your lesson to keep students moving through the material.
2. Use Whiteboards
Whiteboards are an excellent way to check students’ understanding of individualized practice. They allow for quick, ample, and efficient practice that provides timely and direct feedback to students’ work, especially in a subject like Latin.
Teachers can swiftly and effectively take note of the strengths and weaknesses of their students, which allows them to use their time more efficiently when planning lessons. Because whiteboard responses are a low-stakes assessment, they can galvanize students to give their best effort without the fear of performing poorly.
3. Prioritize Translation
Prioritize reading and translating Latin stories with your students every class period. As a Latin teacher, prioritizing sentence translation is one thing, while maintaining it is another.
To help with this: select translations that give students an interactive story with the payoff of immediate success. If you find yourself choosing stories where you are giving every other vocabulary word and/or grammatical concept to students, you will take the wind out their sails. Feel the freedom to pivot to a different story, if you find yourself holding the students’ hands too often during the lesson.
Your aim in translating Latin texts is to gain exposure and confidence. For instance, you might consider translating from a text like Lingua Latina three times a week, while translating from an ancient text two times a week. This distribution would help build student confidence, while also exposing them to texts from the ancient world and help maintain your prioritization.
If experience is a great teacher, then following these tips will help you gain ground and remain confident in your instruction of Latin this school year.
