LKT Klassisch

Some of you may be entirely new to Waldsee. Welcome! If so, you may want to check out the Tagesplan and everything else in the New Staff tab.

As credit teachers, you (like counselors in the two-week program) have three major roles:

  • HausbetreuerIn: You, along with two or three other counselors, will live with and supervise a cabin of high school credit students.

  • AG-LeiterIn: Where 2-week counselors are responsible for offering an activity during one of the two Veranstaltungsstunden, you are expected to offer at least one two-week ArbeitsGruppe, which will tackle one broad theme (e.g., Österreich, Fechten, Politik, Deutschland sucht ein Superstar) and culminate in one of the five projects that go in students' portfolios.

  • KlassenlehrerIn: Of course, you also have a class to teach. LKT classes typically include 5–10 students of approximately similar language levels; they meet three times a day (during the three Unterrichtsstunden — again, see the Tagesplan). LKTs produce three of their portfolio projects in your class, using themes that you can either choose yourself or decide on with input from students.

Running a credit class requires a fair amount of grading and other paperwork, but your credit facilitator (2016: Katrin / Otto) will share with you all of the documents you will need.

On the left, you can access the credit teacher handbook, which includes more in-depth information on the goals we want our credit students to achieve and the proficiency standards we use to evaluate them. In the meantime, here are a few tips (courtesy of Johanna) on how to go about planning your three in-class projects.

Tips:

    • First themes that are more general and involve getting to know your students and/or Waldsee work well. (Identität/Beziehungen)

    • Have a few possibilities in mind for your second and third themes, so you can make a decision after you get to know your kids.

    • You can involve your class in the choice!

    • If you have students that have been an LKT before, ask what they have already done!

    • Choose a topic that you already know something about; you don’t have a lot of time for your own education.

    • Keep the three modes of communication as the center(s) of your project.

    • Make sure you will meet the Waldsee goals outlined in the Portfolio Guidelines Handout.

    • Plan using backwards design: 1. What is the goal? What should the students be able to do at the end? 2. How will I know if the students have reached the goal? 3. How will I help the students learn this?

  • Look at past frameworks and adjust them to your needs.

Stumped on how you want to plan out your three projects? A veteran LKT-Klassisch teacher outlines her typical projects:

1 Projekt: Something that relates the individual to the group. This could be Identität, concentric circles of community (I just made that up, but visualize yourself in a tiny circle, surrounded by family/friends (Haus), then by geographic region (Klasse/Village), and then by society (CLV) or something of the like). My first project is always something that the whole group does, but with individual aspects, or slightly altered/tailored. However, everyone does the same basic project (like, everyone's taking 9 photos and captioning them with 2-3 sentences, plus writing up 3-4 sentences answers to a set of reflective questions, for example).

2. Projekt: Class decision. I've come at this from a few different angles, but usually after the first few days of getting to know the students, I figure out their hobbies/interests, and try to tap into this. Then, they get a selection of 2-4 topics, and vote (as a group) which one we will do. Each person explores the topic with their own constructed project/activities, but all centered on one theme, and with equal language production, but in various formats. For example, one year, we did Musik. I had a kid who played guitar well, and liked to write songs, so he composed his own song, and recorded himself singing and playing guitar. Other students decided to teach a song at Gesang, and had to teach a few verses and the chorus over the course of a few days. As a group, we made a music video to a Jan Delay song, because that's the best. So everyone had a music video, and then some other component that they made up themselves. This way, they had something centralized on which to reflect and write for that portion of the project (and could collaborate with one another, if desired) as well as an individualized aspect, geared towards their interests/strengths.

3. Projekt: Something that gets them out in the village/site/village life. Once, we made a silent film, and I made them film in as many locations as possible, and especially in the Zwergensumpf because it's so rare for them to go there. Another year, we made Tract (Dirndl and faux Lederhosen). Yet another we wrote children's books, and then bound them ourselves, and had to read them to other villagers and get their critique on the story.

Basically, it's like this:

1 — We do the same project on the same topic (but each their own version).

2 — We do individual projects, have a smaller portion as a group, but really diverge in structure/style.

3 — We do the same project structure, but with individually directed aspects (e.g., one person in charge of finding scenes/settings in Waldsee to fit our script, one in charge of adding comedic aspects to the storyline, another in charge of costumes — OR, one person making uniform fabric decisions for the group, another organizing all pattern creation, another supervising cutting, and someone else tracking daily vocab for the group or steps in the process to share with others in a written format).