How Learning Finnish Strengthened Millbrook’s Spanish Program

Tatiana Quintanilla is a Spanish instructor in Millbrook School’s World Languages Department. This summer, Ms. Quintanilla’s dedication to her craft took her all the way to Seville, Spain, for a seven-day workshop on teaching Spanish as a foreign language at the Spanish Institute for Global Education.

“I was looking for an opportunity to be immersed in a Spanish-speaking country and at the same time do a professional development about teaching Spanish to students who don’t speak it as their first language,” Ms. Quintanilla said. The workshop in Seville presented an ideal situation.

As the training took place in Spanish—in a Spanish-speaking country—Ms. Quintanilla was thrown into the immersive experience she was seeking, connecting with educators from Mexico and various European countries. She enjoyed the chance to use more complex Spanish than she normally would at Millbrook, where she’s typically either speaking basic vocabulary with students or discussing teaching strategies in English with other faculty members.

Throughout the training, Ms. Quintanilla enjoyed the opportunity to be a student for a change.

“We had professors from the University of Seville, and they were our teachers, so we were on the side of the room that my students are usually on. The cool part about that was, yes, we were the students, but we were also able to comment on the different methods that they used and the different activities that they had, and we were able to adapt them to our own way of teaching.”

The methods the professors used were backed by neuroscience findings indicating that learners best pick up and retain a new language when they’re actively engaged in using it. In other words, while memorizing vocabulary is necessary, most students won’t internalize the language until they’ve put it into practice.

“If they’re actually saying it and they’re actually writing it, they remember it more,” Ms. Quintanilla summarized.

Another highlight of the professional development for Ms. Quintanilla was the way instructors seamlessly blended traditional and modern learning techniques. To practice with a new language—again putting teachers in their students’ shoes—the workshop participants learned Finnish. Ms. Quintanilla noted how one exercise involved repeating phrases describing images on a printout, a technique that’s been around for ages. But the same teacher also used a random digital popup in her on-screen presentations, using this modern method to provide new vocabulary and keep her students engaged in the material.

“It was so amazing to see how we can use both the newer methods and the old-school methods and morph them into one,” she said. And that synergy between old and new ways of teaching is a concept she’s bringing to her classes at Millbrook.

For example, Ms. Quintanilla said she plans to use her own version of the Finnish presentation popup to help keep her students stimulated during lessons. Also, she will continue using repetition, writing, and conversation role plays to ensure her pupils are practicing what she’s teaching them about, firmly lodging the new information in their brains by connecting it to their everyday lives—or, as she termed it, “the art of doing.”

Along with guiding students to apply their new language skills to their lives, Ms. Quintanilla checks the pulse of her classrooms to ensure they’re always in sync, a practice reinforced by the workshop in Seville. She explained the high impact of the subtle shift in language from “Do you have any questions?” to “What questions do you have?” in creating an environment that encourages students to admit to and resolve confusion.

Ms. Quintanilla’s experience isn’t a one-off. Many Millbrook faculty members spend valuable time during their summer vacations fine-tuning their ability to educate young people. The result is the continued academic excellence that’s a core part of what makes Millbrook, Millbrook.