Why French teachers leave

The Canadian Office of the commissioner of official languages conducted a recent study on the state of FSL and immersion in Canada. In short, it found that parents across Canada want their kids to learn French, and they want it to be available at school.

At the same time, there’s a shortage of FSL and immersion teachers, and some of them leave. Why?

The biggest reasons cited are not enough time to get everything done and classroom management issues.

In manufacturing, “not enough time to get everything done” is a “production capacity” issue. It’s handled using a number of strategies such as:

What does this have to do with teaching French?

A lot. If teachers don’t have time to meet with parents, plan courses, deal with classroom management, find resources, plan for differentiated instruction, evaluation and so on, eventually, research tells us, teachers get frustrated to the point where some leave.

Not good.

Good strategies specific to teaching include going paperless, blending learning and using integrated sites like Planet French, www.planetfrench.com

According to a survey by the Brother International Corporation, over half of us spend a huge amount of time every week searching for stuff we can’t find on our computers.

We decided to tackle the issue of saving teachers time. We had several meetings with teachers and with our internal teams, and came up with ways teachers could quickly find levelled resources they needed on just about any topic, including texts, videos, activities, you name it.

The second way is to click on the “Les cours” menu tab. This reveals clickable links to courses by grade and level.

The third way is through the advanced search on the “search” menu tab, or on the right hand side of most pages. Clicking the “Search” reveals a list of checkboxes from which teachers can select their search criteria: by CEFR level, by difficulty level, and/or by topic.

A student just got a puppy and that’s what the class wants to talk about? No problem. Click the loupe, type in “chien” and voilà! You’ll be served with videos, activities, ebooks and even narrated audiobooks.

It’s a huge time saver.

Another time saver we tackled was the need to find resources at different levels around the same topic in order to apply differentiated instruction. Using the same topic saves time.