Hi!

My name is Laura-Jane Barber and I am a Spanish teacher in North Texas looking to create a professional network.  I am looking for people with awesome ideas that I can use in my classroom and will gladly share my own great ideas.  Collaboration leads to the best ideas in my experience.

What do you need to know about me?… I have wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember–my mom said it was almost as soon as I knew what one was. When I was a little older, I fell in love with Spanish while trying to teach myself from one of my young aunt’s junior high Spanish books. I still have it somewhere.  It was between Spanish and my other love, history.  Spanish won out because it can easily combine both!

My thoughts on teaching?…  I love interacting with high school students and am always eager to try new and fun ideas in class. If I’m bored, I know my students are too and try to mix up as often as possible. I also believe that I am more than just a Spanish teacher. I strive to help shape my students into better human beings through every opportunity that arises in the classroom.  I’ll dedicate a post to this soon.

Some words and phrases that describe my teaching style:
-target language teaching
-discovery learning
-PACE lessons
-comprehensible input
-maximize student engagement
-differentiation
-facilitating learning
-scaffolding
-modeling

I also have a love of blogging, though I never considered having one that relates to my job until I attended an amazing presentation by Silvia Tolisano on Thursday. She presented at my beginning of the school year professional learning day and demonstrated some of the cool things online that we can use to better engage students.  The students we have today are not the students we were.  They communicate and learn in different ways than we have/do.  We have to keep up or become irrelevant.  She also stressed the importance of having a professional network.  I loved every second of it and now am on the journey to create my own professional network.

So here I am.  Let’s see how it goes :).