As I mentioned in a family letter last summer, this year, in addition to a series of small-group faculty dinner discussions at my house about teaching, I’ve had the privilege of spending time with six teachers from throughout the school, visiting their classes and interviewing them about curriculum and how they think about the art and craft of teaching.

To share a window into the classroom, I’d like to relate my visit to Dina Cohen’s French I class in the late winter. It’s an eclectic group of students, from 9th through 12th grade, some adding French as an additional language, some beginning French as an intentional change from earlier Spanish or Latin study.

The class starts immediately in a complete immersion style, French only. Dina is asking warm-up questions about our latest snow day, asking who lost electricity, what families had to do to weather the storm, how kids had spent the time away. I note that every child is part of the conversation and wonder how this has become an obvious norm in the class.

Next, Dina passes out profiles of characters on index cards that she has created. The students learn that they are to find their “twin” by asking questions of each other in French. Once found, they settle side-by-side to have a conversation around several questions:

En général, qu’est-ce que tu fais après l’école? Tu aimes aller à la maison tout de suite? Tu préfères discuter avec tes amis à l’école? Tu dois faire du sport?

Comment est-ce que tu étudies pour les maths? Tu poses des questions à ton prof? Tu travailles à la maison? Avec de la musique? Tu travailles avec un ami?

Où est-ce que tu aimes aller pour les vacances de printemps? Pourquoi?

After a lengthy discussion with each other, each student tells the whole class about their partner’s after school activities, how they prefer to study for math or where they like to go for spring vacation. Dina asks lots of follow-up questions, with such warmth and curiosity that the students glow under her attention and stretch to find words and syntax to tell more about themselves, all with a level of comfort and expressiveness that is remarkable for first-year French students.

Next, Dina shifts to the centerpiece of this 70-minute class. They’ve been watching a French film called Monsieur Lazhar, the story of a teacher and his class in French colonial era Algeria. Dina has told me about her ingenious method for having students watch a French film without English subtitles. She shows the film in segments and before viewing the segment they read a plot summary she has written for them in French. She tells me that the language of the summaries is a deliberate stretch, introducing new vocabulary for which there is a glossary at the bottom of the page and exposing them to new sentence structures. The key is for students in pairs to ferret out the gist of the scene, reading to each other aloud.

Then we watch the scene and it is a wonderfully rich experience to see the drama without the distraction of subtitles but nonetheless catch bits of meaningful language and understand what is unfolding. After the scene, the students have close work to do on worksheets that contain excerpts of dialogue, questions to answer and language to play with.

I am struck by how ingeniously constructed the entire class experience is for the students, starting with engaging warm-ups, incorporating lively discussion with Dina, with gentle French music playing from time to time in the background. The experience with the film is also carefully constructed for full cultural immersion, with a compelling story and built-in, language stretching exercises.

At the end of the class I realize that each student has been immersed in the French language for almost the entire 70 minutes. I later learn that Dina has a rubric for active class participation that she reviews weekly with each student. They’ve become accustomed to being fully engaged in language activity, the only way to truly learn a language, with explicit, encouraging expectations. Taken all together, I marvel at Dina’s craft as a teacher.

Even more amazing to me is how consistent this experience has been across all six classrooms that I’ve been visiting, from Early Childhood through the Upper School. I wish I had the space to give similar detail about 3 and 4 year olds exploring geometry, 1st graders in brilliantly designed reading workshops, 3rd graders learning about bronze artifacts from the Shang dynasty and then embossing bronze to decorate their own versions, 6th graders studying plate tectonics, or 10th grade Politics and Protest students discussing post-Apartheid South Africa.

Every one of these classes showed similar intellectual reach, exquisite curriculum planning to fully engage each student and, of course, the incredibly close and rich relationship of teachers with their students.

I’ve been inspired and impressed by these experiences. The intellectual zest of the AFS faculty, their ongoing professional study, commitment to creating engaging experiences in the classroom and their passion for seeing growth and inspiration in their students all power the learning environment our students are engaged in each day.