Loud and Clear

Students in a new advanced Spanish class showcase their mastery of the language through research-based presentations

Sienna Mercaldi ’27, a day student from Gloucester, Massachusetts, studied Spanish throughout elementary and middle school, but never felt that she truly progressed in her understanding of the language until she came to The Governor’s Academy. “Once I got to Govs, I grew my skills to the point where I felt confident communicating in Spanish whenever I traveled to a Spanish-speaking country,” she says. This past year, Mercaldi took Advanced Spanish: Language, Culture, and Ethical Inquiry, a new honors-level V language course taught by Jake Falconer P’19,’21, who joined The Governor’s Academy faculty in 2007. “This advanced course has especially helped me grow,” Mercaldi says. “Now, coming this far in my Spanish-speaking journey, I could not fathom dropping the language.”

For the past several years, Falconer’s primary teaching responsibilities have been the Honors Spanish III and AP Spanish Language and Culture classes, but recently, in line with a broader trend among independent schools, Govs has begun replacing some AP offerings with equally rigorous, faculty-designed curricula. Falconer worked throughout the 2024-2025 school year to prepare the syllabus for the new Advanced Spanish class, which launched this past fall. “It freed me up to think, what do I really want to do?” Falconer says. “If I could make my own class, what would I do? That’s the approach I took.”

The class is organized around the same six themes as the standardized AP Spanish and Culture class: families and communities, personal and public identities, science and technology, beauty and aesthetics, contemporary life, and global challenges. “There are a lot of things I like about the AP curriculum,” Falconer says. “I was excited by the opportunity to continue to use what I felt were the really important and meaningful aspects of the AP curriculum, and then combine that with some of the things I really wanted to do.”

Falconer felt the existing AP activities related to Spanish-speaking focused too much on preparing for the AP exam through simulated conversations, rather than on developing effective oral communication. “Best practices in second language acquisition incorporate the idea of scaffolding, so that you have a resource that is able to lift you up,” he says. Falconer learned Spanish while he and his wife were living with a host family in Guatemala. With six hours a day of intensive one-on-one instruction, it was all scaffolding. “It’s difficult to do that in the classroom,” he says.

In an attempt to achieve the same level of language mastery, the new advanced-level class curriculum emphasizes developing students’ Spanish-speaking skills through public speaking. “One of the things that was really central for me in redesigning the class was figuring out a way to have my kids come to some honest understanding of whatever the material was in front of them, and then for them to find an effective way to communicate that understanding to other people,” Falconer says.

Falconer consulted David Brooks P’23—a veteran of the entertainment industry who teaches a Govs course called The Art of Storytelling—for inspiration. Brooks has experience developing movie trailers geared towards members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “He spent a lot of time talking to me about what he does to help him connect with the films that he’s working on, and how he helps people understand what the movie is about,” Falconer says. Brooks also presented his process directly to Falconer’s class.

Throughout the year, students gave concise, PechaKucha-style presentations on cultural, historical, and ethical topics, utilizing multimedia and visual storytelling. Sixty percent of class time was spent on traditional skills development, with 40 percent focused on the presentations. “I got into this idea of creating essential questions the kids would have to grapple with in the course of developing presentations,” Falconer says. In the spring, the class tackled the topic of AI and chose from 14 different essential questions to base their presentations around. Because Govs is currently embarking on an initiative to incorporate more experiential place-based learning into the curriculum, some units’ essential questions relate back to life at Govs.

Some unit presentations are made to the class, and others to outside groups. For the AI unit, the students presented their completed slides to Falconer’s Honors Spanish III students and had to communicate in a way that was comprehensible to that target audience. One unit’s presentations were open to the entire school community, with around 80 teachers and faculty in attendance.

Because the PechaKucha format is so short, Falconer has access to the students’ working documents to gain a broader view of their learning process. “I spend a lot of my time just reviewing their thoughts,” he says. “They can use whatever language that they want in their working documents, and I encourage them to try to create an interplay between their native language and Spanish. The output all has to be in Spanish, but it’s also about skills development.”

For each project, Falconer sets up pillars of success for himself that he shares with the class, including getting to know his students better intellectually so he can teach them more effectively. He also asks students to follow the pillars process to determine whether they are effectively tackling their essential question. “The idea is that they’re presenting something that they believe, but also something that stands up to scrutiny,” Falconer says. “They need to be mindful of the opposing point of view as they’re developing their presentation.” Depending on the audience, students may need to be prepared for a question-and-answer session.

Will Fuller ’26, a day student from Lynnfield, Massachusetts, took Honors Spanish IV his junior year and enrolled in the new Advanced Spanish class his senior year because he wanted to continue his studies with the same level of rigor, and liked the idea of focusing on more than just the AP exam. “With Mr. Falconer, we focused less on learning the grammar and more on the application of the language,” he says. “We frequently did projects exploring both ethics and cultures with our Spanish skills. My goal is to have fluency in the language one day, and my confidence has increased greatly this year.”

Caroline Justicz ’26 had a good experience taking Honors Spanish III with Falconer before enrolling in Advanced Spanish. “He will make sure you feel supported in the material you are learning,” she says. “I felt it would be a good challenge, while pushing myself out of my comfort zone, to gain more proficiency in Spanish while also doing a lot of engaging projects and presentations.” Justicz holds citizenship in the Czech Republic and the UK and hopes to study Slavic languages in the future. “But now I will always have Spanish in my back pocket,” she says.

While the end-of-year goal for Advanced Spanish students is to articulate complex ideas in Spanish with clarity and sophistication, those interested in taking the AP Spanish Language and Culture Exam can still do so, thanks to the skills covered in class. Of the inaugural class’s 12 students, five took this year’s exam. For Falconer, the greatest accomplishment was seeing how the new format motivated his students. “Because they’re speaking in front of people, they want to be prepared,” he says. “It’s an extrinsic motivator for kids to really work hard. It has been fulfilling for me as a teacher to see kids buy into that.”

Looking ahead to next year, Falconer is reflecting on how he can further improve the curriculum. “I’m very happy that I have a good foundation of different projects,” he says. “Now I’m just excited to delve back in and make them better.”