6 Career-changing Blogs by Your Fellow French Teachers

Are you in dire need of inspiration for your French teaching?

You’re not alone.

Being a French teacher is an incredibly rewarding, enriching profession, but it can often prove isolating.

As an instructor, it’s not unusual to fall prey to self-doubt, routine and even panic when dealing with your students and their parents.

That’s because a heavy responsibility falls upon you: Exposing French learners to the complexity and beauty of the language in order to enrich their lives and benefit their future professional careers.

As a teacher, it’s perfectly normal to feel like you don’t have all the answers.

Your intentions are good, but how do you make sure that the tools and methods you apply are effective?

By turning to your peers for answers.

For this post, we’ve selected some of the most insightful blogs written by French teachers so that you, too, can discover and exchange ideas with fellow French instructors.

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

What You Can Find on French Teacher Blogs

• Shared knowledge. French teacher blogs can be used both for classroom and personal use. That’s because teacher-bloggers are more than willing to share their favorite resources, tips and teaching routines as well as voice their rants and concerns in a friendly outlet. On their blogs, they often discuss concrete issues, including dealing with unruly student behavior, motivating students to learn French or even refreshing your classroom display to make learning more fun and effective.

• Curriculum ideas. Blogs can help you discover content ideas to incorporate into your lessons, including French videos, songs or texts. Most importantly, these are resources that have been already applied by your fellow French teachers for their own students. If they’re worth sharing, you can almost be sure that the students loved them.

• Suggested activities. Are you looking for ways to keep your French lessons surprising and exciting? Reading teacher blogs may prove to be a good source of inspiration. Bloggers often provide a detailed recap of what they did in class, including a certain activity’s objective, how it was delivered, potential glitches and the outcomes. Don’t hesitate to try some of the activities you’ve found interesting with your own students: That’s why your peers shared them with the world in the first place!

• Honesty. On their blogs, French teachers share their personal reflections in an intimate, authentic way. It’s a safe place for them to voice their personal thoughts on their career, their aspirations and the satisfaction and struggles they face as teachers. Reading teachers’ blogs can prove incredibly beneficial if you lack mentorship or find yourself feeling stuck: Teaching is wonderful, but like any profession, it has its highs and lows. Knowing that others go through similar situations can help put things in perspective and allow you to become re-energized.

Get Inspired with These 6 Exciting French Teacher Blogs

Cups of English Tea

Cups of English Tea is the blog created by Kenza, a French teacher from Montmartre in Paris. In her late 20s, Kenza is not your typical French teacher: she’s taught French in Great Britain, Canada, Australia and Hungary. She studied modern literature at the Sorbonne in France and holds a degree in English as well as a master’s in French as a foreign language.

On her blog, Kenza shares her perspectives as an expatriate teacher living all over the world. Her blog is written in French and includes lots of honest content about her life as a French teacher as well as random thoughts and more personal articles on her travels.

You’ll particularly enjoy her post about looking for a job as a French as a foreign language teacher, where she shares her best tips on how to grow your career and find opportunities worldwide. She also talks about the negative aspects of being a French teacher, detailing the realities of the job, ideal for a balanced perspective if you wish to embark on this career and a rather unusual subject that current instructors may find refreshing.

FluentU’s French Educator Blog

FluentU is an innovative language learning method focused on immersion.

In addition to providing Teacher accounts that allow you to share videos with your students, assign them homework and track their progress individually, we use our French Educator Blog to gather together the best advice and tools for teaching French—making use of the expertise of real educators like yourself.

Written by French teachers and for French teachers, the FluentU French Educator Blog features a wide variety of posts on French teaching activities, methods, resources and tips.

Updated weekly, it’s a goldmine for actionable ideas and strategies to keep your French classes fresh, lively and fun. You’ll find content on subjects such as modernizing your classroom using technology, improving French pronunciation, reaching adult students and children as well as advice on how to best prepare your high school students for the AP French test.

Language Teacher Toolkit

This blog is maintained by Steve Smith, a former French teacher from Yorkshire in the UK. In addition to his blog, Steve authored “The Language Teacher Toolkit,” a handbook for teachers, and works for the AQA exam board on A-level French teacher support resources.

On his blog, Steve shares news, views and reviews about language learning and teaching. Posts tend to be incredibly focused and issue-specific, perfect if you’re looking for actionable content and guidelines on how to best implement it.

Articles are in-depth and discuss various topics, including teaching the gender of French nouns, grammar games and even retirement from teaching.

Insuf-FLE

Insuf-FLE is a blog by Jean-Michel Ducrot, a native French teacher with 18 years’ experience and a supervisor at a French lycée in Istanbul, Turkey. Jean-Michel also co-authored books on training French teachers for the Spanish Ministry of Education.

On his blog, he shares his ideas, favorite resources and methods for other French teachers. Posts are straightforward and incredibly insightful, and written in French only, perfect if you want to satisfy your love for the language and appetite for teaching at the same time.

Head over to the archives to find old content organized by topic, and be sure to read his article on interculturality and the challenges of teaching and communicating French culture. Also check out his post on the origins of the French language, a particularly clever one with videos and excellent questions to help you discuss the roots of French in your classroom.

The French Corner

This colorful, inviting blog is written by Samantha Decker, a middle school French teacher with a passion for photography from Saratoga Springs, NY. Launched initially to help French learners master the language, the blog has evolved to become the go-to resource for French language teachers looking for inspiration, elevated discussions on life as a French teacher and pedagogy.

The blog is updated almost every week with incredibly insightful content, often inspired by pop culture and recent events.

You’ll love Samantha’s creativity and original activities, particularly “Which Disney character are you?”, a post on how to use the popular quiz format to teach 7th-grade students adjectives and the verb être (to be) in French. You’ll also appreciate her article about how to use “Humans of Paris” to spark conversation, where she uses this well-known photo project as a support to generate engagement in the French classroom.

Chez Renée

On this blog, Renée Marie Wood, a high school French teacher and a mother living in Michigan, shares with other French instructors her methodologies, tips and best ideas to motivate and effectively help students on their journey with French. A veteran teacher, Renée studied French at a French university near the Alps and currently teaches AP French in a college-prep school.

Her blog is a place to discover new activities, from baking French treats for the winter and using this to introduce French culture to the classroom, to playing a CSI-inspired detective game to teach your students to describe past events in French.

How fun and clever these French teacher blogs are!

We hope you’ll find them as enjoyable as we do and we’re excited for you to try some of the ideas described on the above pages.

Happy teaching!

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)