Best Practices

High school, college, and continuing education instructors offered their tips on teaching with Destinos.

Watching a video is active teaching — you’ll want to pause and discuss plot developments, important expressions, cultural elements. It is essential to replay and discuss.

For beginner-level classes, certain scenes should be re-watched, to be sure students understand what’s going on.

As all episodes are available online, so episodes can be assigned as homework or for review.

Teenage students might giggle at the outfits and the hairstyles. Allow them to talk about this aspect of the series at the start as a means of diffusing their silliness.

Showing captions (which are in Spanish) changes Destinos from a watching and listening activity to a reading activity. Try leaving captions off, to challenge students.

Destinos allows you to introduce realia to students without having to bring physical materials into a classroom — this is especially valuable for distance-based learning.

Teaching Foreign Languages K-12 Workshop is a free learner.org course that examines research topics from the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages National Standards as it applies across languages and skill levels.