Preview Foundations: Chapters 5 &6

Chapter 5:

Introduction to the Stepping Stones Curricular Framework and an Overview of the Foundational Instructional Strategies

In proficiency-based teaching - especially with beginners - our only job is to exchange messages that the students understand and find interesting enough to attend to. If the messages can reach the level of compelling, that is ideal.

But it is important to remember that simply hearing messages in a new language that they can comprehend effortlessly actually feels quite magical to most students.

So, even the most basic discussion of the calendar or weather can feel quite compelling when the language is skillfully used in a calm, slow way, with copious visual support. The strategies outlined below have helped me achieve compelling input status more often.

Are my students always, constantly listening with rapt attention? No, of course not. 180 days is a long time and I cannot always provide compelling experiences. Sometimes I am tired, or I have a cold, or the kids are not “with it” for whatever reason. Life happens. So we learn to go easy on ourselves. We strive for “interesting” and bask in the times when we hit “compelling”.

Providing understandable and interesting spoken and written messages to students is the backbone of proficiency-based instruction, especially in lower-level classes. There exists an unlimited number of activities that we can use to deliver these messages.

This book presents what I consider to be the very best best bang for the buck in a sequence of instruction that builds upon itself, leading you from one activity to the other in a progression that helps you develop your skills.

The activities I have chosen, therefore, are not simply good activities - they have the added advantage of providing you, the teacher, with a program of professional skill development. As you deliver an engaging, personalized, colorful instructional program with time-tested activities like One Word Images, your students will be developing their language proficiency and you will also be growing as you strengthen your language delivery skills. It’s a win-win for everybody.

You will work your way up through activities that increase in complexity through the course of the book. What follows in this chapter is a brief overview of the year-long curricular framework and the activities in the order in which they appear in this book, where they are described in step-by-step detail.

Please note that the Stepping Stones curricular framework is a framework, which means that it is a “container” or “organizational system” for strategies and content. It is not the content itself. Once you internalize this framework, you will be able to select from the wide array of strategies and content that is out there for communicative language teaching. There are so many excellent ideas!

But without a framework or organizing system, these ideas can overwhelm us. Where to fit this cool new strategy? How to assess it?

Stepping Stones was designed to be larger than any specific content or strategy.

You can think of it like the Dewey Decimal system versus a specific book. The curricular framework is the Dewey Decimal system. It tells you where the specific book “fits” into the whole system of the library. Stepping Stones can show you the natural place to “shelve” the specific strategies and content (the “books”) in your curricular plans.

In order to provide a training ground or “on ramp” to Stepping Stones, I have selected the Description, Narration, and Information cycles (you could also call them “units”) for you to use during your transition. This combination will provide a gradual development of your skills as you move through the three cycles. Each cycle is based on a “genre” or language function (e.g. Description, Information).

Each cycle is designed to last about six weeks total. Within the four “phases” (or “mini-units”) that provide a pivot point, that shifts the content and literacy focus within the larger “genre.”

However, these phases (and the cycles themselves) are designed to be modular, meaning that you can skip some of them and still deliver a strong, literacy-focused, meaningful learning pathway through the year.

Below, you will find the entire curricular framework, followed by an overview of each cycle.

The Stepping Stones Cycles of Instruction

(Note: in this book, we will use ONLY Cycles One, Two, and Four.)

Cycle One: Description

How people, places, and things look, sound, smell, feel, etc using sensory details, personality & physical traits, and comparing/contrasting cultural practices, products, and perspectives, and comparing descriptions in the past and present time.

Cycle Two: Narration

Stories of what happened, who said what, who thought what, who wanted what, where they went, and how they solved their problem or achieved their goals. This cycle, like all the cycles, is divided into four "phases" that focus on (1) personal stories, (2) imaginative/literary stories, (3) cultural stories, and (4) historical stories.

Cycle Three: Going Deeper with Narration

Stories with more "writer's craft" such as stronger and more meaningful descriptions, dialogue and thinking that reveals more about the characters, and commentary on the significance or importance of the narrative, culturally, historically, or personally.

Cycle Four: Information

Teaching about content (e.g. culture, geography, history, significant places, celebrations, global challenges, the environment), using facts, examples, and short stories to provide details, in well-organized writing and speech to lead through the topic and teach topicspecific vocabulary.

Cycle Five: Opinion

Stating and supporting opinions on topics of personal relevance (e.g. holidays, school subjects, family responsibilities, activities, locations, clothing, food) with reasons or facts that explain the opinion (e.g. data from surveys, facts, personal stories, or quotations) to show examples of why one might hold that opinion.

Cycle Six: Argument

Constructing arguments to support a claim and refute possible counterclaims by situating the claim in its historical context, citing and explaining evidence and reasons from credible sources with authority on the subject, and addressing and dismissing counterclaims by refuting their evidence/authority.

Optional: Writing to Make a Difference in the World

Creating lasting resources for future students, or to memorialize the year’s learning in a tangible way for the current students to take with them, such as the Classroom Library Books Project, the Festival of Worksheets, Class Storybooks, Film Festivals, or Class Yearbooks.

After working through this book, you should be able to return to this page and understand how everything fits together, so that you can begin to “tweak” the content and go forward for the rest of your career with a solid system to organize and sequence your instruction.

The "Foundations" Sequence

This book will lead you through the “Foundations” sequence illustrated below. Don’t worry too much about these cycles and phases at this point. The book will lead you step by step through the phases so you understand them by doing, so you are prepared to continue on to the full Stepping Stones framework in later years, if you want to deepen your work with these literacy-focused cycles.

Below is a complete list of all the phases. You DO NOT need to understand these fully now; just take a look to get your bearings.

The Foundations Phases

The Daily Instructional Framework

Teachers all over the place tell me that their top concerns in their communicative language classrooms are

(1) how to sequence their instruction and

(2) how to assess and measure student progress in a way that shows students that even though it “feels easy”, they are actually making progress in their language abilities.

A close third is how to stop the sense of overwhelm as they feel they are recreating the wheel day after day and chasing new instructional strategies without a sense of how they fit together.

It is my sincere hope that this seven-step daily lesson plan and four-phase unit planning model will help teachers to find solutions to all three of those common problems, so that proficiency-oriented language teaching can become smoother, more relaxing, and more joyful, with less planning, less uncertainty, and less stress for everyone involved — teachers and students alike.

What a Daily Lesson Framework Does for You

Working with the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP) materials for ten years trained me to appreciate a flexible, student-centered daily lesson structure that can be repeated day after day, unit after unit, and year after year without becoming stale. It was actually quite the contrary to becoming stale; I found that using their well-structured lesson plan template allowed me and my students to be more creative and more responsive to emerging ideas and needs, because the cognitive load of “what are we going to do today?” was removed, for all of us.

This freed me up to be more present to my students. It also allowed me to plan lessons very quickly, because I only had to find an appropriate way to introduce the teaching point and think about the writing or reading I wanted to model for the class, in order to illustrate it, and the rest of the lesson was able to run on auto-pilot.

Developing an instructional framework with a repeating daily and unit structure, and a limited repertoire of flexible strategies that can be used to deliver many different kinds of content without growing “old” or “stale” has allowed me to really put the brakes on the lesson planning hamster wheel. I hardly plan at all, most days. Sometimes during my prep, I go outside and sit in the sun and listen to a meditation. Literally.

How can I plan so little? It is because the only part of class I really need to plan on a regular basis is the 12 to 15 minutes that we spend in the Guided Oral Input portion of the day’s lesson (#3 in the graphic above), when the students and I are co-creating a new experience using the language to communicate.

The rest of the daily lesson framework is pretty much on auto-pilot as the information and language from the Guided Oral Input is recycled through the four parts of the framework that come after the input: Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, Shared Reading, and Student Application and Assessment. The strategies used in each of these four lesson components can be reused again and again, so they do not require much, if any, preparation, once you have learned and practiced a few strong strategies.

Once you understand how to use this framework, your lesson planning usually takes only about five to fifteen minutes of preparation per day, but still allows you to teach robust and varied lessons full of language and cool information, presented in engaging, interactive ways.

Another very important benefit is that this daily and unit framework gives structure, but not so much that it takes away your ability to be creative, teach about things that you love, and connect with your students in a meaningful, personal, responsive way. That is how it was designed: to give structure you can live and grow with.

See the Appendices for sample lesson, unit, and term/year planning sheets.

Chapter 6: Your Gradebook

Sadly, many teachers today end up with students who have not gained much in the way of language proficiency even after years of language study, and whose grades have communicated to them that they aren’t really cut out for this whole language learning thing. It’s time for those days to be over.

We can and must do more for our students. We want them to gain true proficiency and happiness while they are with us.

We want them to leave our classrooms wanting more of what we have given them during our time with us, wanting to keep finding ways to interact with the language and gaining further proficiency. Above all, we want to communicate that they are smart people, whose brains are amazingly well-suited, as all human brains are, to slipping almost magically into the ability to use our languages to express and understand real, authentic communication.

Dr. Krashen has said that the goal of our language programs should be to equip the student with a proficiency level that allows them to to make the world their classroom, able to take in input from the real world and continue to build higher proficiency when they exit our programs. We want our grades to build students’ selfconfidence so that, when they leave us, they are motivated and eager to continue their language learning journey, as Krashen suggests.

This book is not offered as just another book on second language acquisition. It is written as a challenge to world language teachers to make a strong decision to make a break with the kinds of instruction that have come before us. We can now seek the new.

The Messages Your Gradebook Sends

Everyone can effortlessly achieve proficiency in the language they are studying with you, just as they did in their mother tongue. But to fully absorb that truth, and communicate it to students, teachers must finally begin to look at their work with their students through the lens of how people actually acquire languages. If we do that we will know that the only factor preventing all of our students from achieving is really nothing more than our own mindset and commitment to their success.

That bears repeating. The only reason that all our students are not achieving is us. Our instructional practices. Our assessment practices. Our mindset. Our expectations.

If we have the right instructional and assessment practices, mindset, and expectations, all of our students can achieve.

This is a powerful, and humbling truth. It means that the buck stops here, with us. We can set up the conditions for all to succeed. And not just to “give away” the grades, but for students to actually earn those good grades, doing things that feel natural and easy and even enjoyable. What a beautiful vision.

So, how can we achieve that?

First, we need to think deeply about the truth that, barring severe cognitive or physical limitations, practically all people can effortlessly communicate complex messages in their first language(s).

Our students have already proven that they can acquire language. Only people who live with the most profound physical and mental challenges lack the ability to acquire language proficiency from the right kind of environment.

Each and every student can successfully build a mental representation of the language in their minds, and from this representation they can, after a period of time, begin to form utterances to express meaning.

The proof of this? Just listen to them in the hall. Yak, yak, yak!

Even the “slowest” student in your class can most likely hold forth at length, with all kinds of colorful language, and even highly specialized vocabulary, when you get them going on a topic they know a lot about and feel strongly about, like hunting or soccer trivia, or cheerleading, fixing cars, social justice, or fashion.

So, they can all achieve this in another language, given the right circumstances. However, students cannot control the rate and pace of that acquisition any more than a two-year-old can control the rate and pace of their own acquisition of their native language.

What does influence a two-year-old’s acquisition is the richness of the language that they hear around them, the amount of time their caregivers spend interacting with them, how much print material they see and interact with, and - perhaps most importantly - how they feel when they are being spoken to.

Therefore, like parents concerned with optimally developing their toddler’s L1 acquisition, we work to give our students an emotionally-supportive learning environment rich in texts and spoken language. From this environment, students can take what they need to build the language inside their minds, at the rate and pace that are natural for them. Each student will have a different timeline. Still, all can succeed.

In fact, some of the “slow” students in level classes one often turn out to be the most solid acquirers by level three.

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Our gradebooks must reflect the following truth: All can succeed, as long as they are being evaluated according to their own internal timeline.

We must reward growth, focus, and interaction with the language. We must NOT base our grades on the ability to produce (usually memorized) language on an arbitrary timeline set by external, and often for-profit, organizations, such as textbook companies and national exams of grammar.

There are so many factors that come into play in the rate and pace of a particular student’s language acquisition. Their already-established literacy is an important factor. The richer a student’s existing instructional practices that put students on the spot, such as asking individual students, “What did I just say?”), then many will begin to lose faith in themselves and in their innate ability to build a mental representation of the language.

When students lose confidence they, lose focus. Loss of focus leads to disengagement, and disengaged students do not comprehend because they are not paying attention to class. This leads to a further loss of confidence because students feel lost, and also to classroom management problems, as the disengaged students have more motivation to act up and disrupt class.

These disruptions can make it more difficult for everyone to attend to the input, which decreases everyone’s motivation and enjoyment of the class. It is a negative feedback loop. The negativity thus experienced by my “lazy” or “disengaged” students is usually fully attributable to my failure to make sure that I am delivering messages that all of my students understand.

If we are to indeed fulfill our school mission statements to serve all learners, and we intend to live up to the promise of communicative language teaching, which is that everyone can do it, then we must avoid entering into that negative feedback loop at all costs.

Students’ self-concept as language learners is fragile. We teachers must take great care not to erode this allimportant foundation of confidence through conveying to students that their listening and reading efforts are not bearing adequate fruit. The efforts required from students to sustain focus on our messages and the rigorous mental work that they must do in order to comprehend on a daily basis meaning in a new language should be their only concern. It is concern enough.

Students’ self-concept as language acquirers can be almost irrevocably damaged by even one message that indicates that they do not measure up to expectations. Thus, our only expectation at the beginning stages of language instruction should be attention to, and comprehension of, the spoken and written messages that we are conveying.

This, truly, is the only factor over which anyone has have control in the process, and the responsibility for providing understandable messages rests fully upon our shoulders as proficiency-based instructors. If students are not comprehending the messages they hear and read, then we must take the responsibility for slowing down, rephrasing, repeating, or scaffolding with visual supports or translation.

It has been said that “a flood of input must precede a trickle of output,” meaning that we would expect students’ performance in the receptive skills of listening and reading to outpace their productive skills in writing or speaking output.

The assessment tools in Stepping Stones are designed to accommodate this reality; the receptive performance targets are, from the beginning, set higher than the productive language targets for writing and speaking.

See “Performance Guidelines for the First Two Years” in the Appendices for more specific examples of learning targets and typical student performance at various levels, for summative assessments at the end of the first four semesters (year one and year two) of working with the Stepping Stones curricular frameworks and materials.

Our Gradebook Categories

I set up my gradebooks with categories for both formative and summative assessment. If my school required me to weight the formatives and summates using a certain percentage, even if the percentages were not the way I would personally prefer, these assessments will work, regardless. It honestly does not matter how you weight these grades.

The more important considerations are that you use a consistent structure and format in your assessments and consistent assessment tools (e.g. rubrics, continua) over the course of the term or term(s). A portfolio system of regular performance assessments in reading, writing, listening, and perhaps speaking allows students to lay their collection of work samples out and see evidence of real, measurable growth in concrete, meaningful skills.

For example, they can see their progress in writing more complex sentences with clauses and conjunctions, or incorporating more dialogue and inner thinking into narratives, or using organizational phrases in their informational writing or speech.

Example of a writing portfolio

Our gradebooks often have a lot of “cooks” in the “kitchen” looking over our shoulders, adding a dash of spice here, or substituting an ingredient there, in efforts to improve the department’s or building’s grading practices. Administrators and departmental agreements often mandate certain gradebook setups one year or semester, and then adjust or change the requirements, so that the next year or semester, teachers need to readjust.

Stepping Stones was designed to “roll with the punches,” meaning that, since I have been through many different administrators, in several schools, and in multiple districts and programs, and also worked with teachers in many different situations, I designed the assessment systems and tools to be flexible enough to fit into a variety of possible grading setups, since they seem to be constantly changing.

And, at this point, teachers faced with all kinds of requirements have ben successfully using and adapting the assessments in Stepping Stones, for three years now, and I have yet to work with a teacher whose gradebook requirements, no matter how specific and onerous they seem at first glance, have created any real impediment to implementing the assessment systems provided in this book.

After seeing the success, flexibility, and adaptability of these measurement tools and systems, used in a wide variety of teaching contexts, I can confidently assert that they truly represent the next generation of World Language assessment practices and tools.

The Meeting with My Boss That Led to This Book

I clearly remember the meeting in which I decided to take on the task of creating these materials. It was in late 2016, and I was debriefing a recent class period with Mr. Kellen, my supervisor. We were looking at some of my students’ portfolios, which at the time we were assessing with a general rubric derived from the ACTFL performance descriptors: Novice Low, Mid, High, Intermediate Low, and so on.

Mr. Kellen’s question to me that day was, “How do students see their progress when they go to Intermediate Mid writing performance by the time we completed the first round of portfolio assessment in early October of the first year, but then they are still at Intermediate Mid six months later?”

My response was, “That’s just how it works; it takes students a long time to grow from Intermediate Low to Intermediate Mid, and that process is out of my control. Students just need to listen and read, and the process of language acquisition will proceed on its own timeline, which we cannot alter or hurry.”

Most administrators do not like to hear “I can’t measure that, and I don’t actually care about it all that much,” which, while technically true, is not how schools are designed these days, with all the data and accountability that we are expected to demonstrate. So, understandably, my boss pushed me on my statement and assumption.

If he had not pushed me that day, Stepping Stones might never have existed.

But he did push me, saying, “Be that as it may, Tina, there surely must exist some assessment tools that would show World Language students more tangible progress, in smaller, more achievable increments than the huge jumps in the ACTFL performance descriptors.”

I replied, with growing frustration, “Actually, they do not exist. I have attended many ACTFL and World Language trainings, and I have looked far and wide, but I have not seen any tools for World Language that are as finely-tuned and student-friendly, with concrete, “next-steps” learning targets, as what I had when I was

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