Spanish teacher Mireya Ramos tasked her students with teaching their peers about a verb tense.

“After seeing all my kids’ mistakes, I wanted them to actually research and teach themselves and then help the others too,”

Students had multiple topics to choose from, including present, past, future and subjunctive tenses, along with other topics such as how to format sentences or the difference between two similar words.

“We had to create one Google slideshow with the other people who had the same tense in the class,” freshman Keeley Sorgenfrei said. “In the slideshow, we each got a few slides to make our presentation to teach the class with. I chose the present progressive tense. Creating the slides was really easy because I picked a topic I was super-familiar with, and we got a lot of time in class to work on it.”

As part of the project, students also had to create an interactive game based on their grammar topic for the class to practice what they learned.

“I thought the game was hard,” Sorgenfrei said. “Not so much creating it but getting it into the slideshow in a way that Mrs. Ramos could access it. Most students in my class struggled with this, making us way behind the other periods.”

After going through presentations in her classes, Ramos said the project was effective.

“Individually, there has been improvement,” Ramos said. “But they are not teachers, so the students are not very interested in learning from another student.”

Sorgenfrei said she found the project helpful.

“Teaching is the best way of learning,” Sorgenfrei said. “I definitely have it [the topic] more memorized and am way more comfortable using it now.”

By  Kris Rosa