16 minute read
Chapter 2: How to Use This Book
How to Use This Book
The Stepping Stones curricular framework is backwards planned from student proficiency outcomes and cross-curricular literacy goals, and not from grammar points or wordlists.
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The Performance Descriptors and Can-Do Statements give us a roadmap to proficiency and guidance on how to assess student progress in listening, reading, writing, and speaking performance.
Thus, our national professional organization - and SLA research - recommend a whole-language approach, and does not recommend that students study certain word lists or grammatical constructions.
ACTFL’s guidance focuses on communication over form: taking in information and making oneself understood, interacting with increasingly complex text, and deepening thinking skills and habits of mind.
The General Trajectory of a School Year
The cyclical nature of the academic term is one of the great joys of the teaching profession. The school year has a life of its own. It is full of fresh starts, of chances to reinvent ourselves. Every term, the wheel begins its great turn again, and we fasten our seatbelts to see what kind of ride this one will be.
This book is organized to help you navigate the realities of how the term tends to go.
It will help you establish a routine in your class and also to keep things fresh and novel by introducing new activities and new twists on old activities as the term goes on.
This combination of novelty within the routine is key to good classroom management. When students know what to expect, but also learn to expect novelty within the familiar structure of class, they are comfortable and engaged.
The curricular framework is organized to help you bring freshness and novelty to your instruction, to keep the students engaged throughout the term.
We all know that engagement waxes and wanes depending on the time of day, the month, the season, and the year. Everyone’s energy and enthusiasm is high at the beginning of the term: pencils are sharp, erasers pink, apples polished, and back to school clothes are pressed and fresh. At that time, we usually do not need to work too hard to captivate their students’ attention.
mesmerized by the fact that they can comprehend a new language, or pleasantly surprised at how much they can do with the language after the break.
As the term goes on, and your students need novelty to help them maintain their enthusiasm for listening to the language, the strategies shift and provide new activities that build upon the routines you have already established. By the end of the term or year, when your students’ attention spans have waned from months of work and growth, and you are tired and longing for a break, you can use the End-of-the-Year sessions that require less and less energy from you while providing much-needed novelty and interest for your students, and still keep the comprehensible language flowing.
The purpose of Stepping Stones is to guide you in providing high-quality proficiency-based instruction, authentic assessment that is aligned to proficiency standards, and, perhaps most importantly, to help you protect your own mental health.
We teachers are precious and each one of us is a gift to our society. We are much needed in this world, and it is my ardent hope that Stepping Stones framework will help you relax into your career and remain in the classroom for a very long time, making a difference in our world, inspiring and supporting our precious students, and finding happiness, ease, and balance in your life.
Implementing the Stepping Stones framework can help you guide your students up the proficiency scales on the students’ own emotional and intellectual timeline.
The strategies outlined in this book are designed to build community, include everyone in the classroom, foster success for all students, and develop creativity and a group esprit de corps in a relaxed, easygoing workshop-type environment that is focused, work-oriented, and driven by students’ interests and ideas.
The Organization of this Book
This book is long. It is not designed to be read straight through in its entirety, like a normal book.
Part 1, chapters one through six, was designed to be read in this way, all at once. It is an introduction to the instructional program found in Part 2, which comprises the bulk of this book.
Part 2 was designed to be read as you move through the year, used as a curricular resource and friendly voice at your side, guiding you step by step, as the year unfolds.
Part 1 - The Foundational Chapters
These first chapters are an introduction to your work this year. They provide an overview of comprehension-based instruction and recommendations on how to prepare for the year ahead.
Chapter Three
Chapter Three, Setting up Your Classroom, guides you through setting up your physical environment, with student jobs and student engagement in mind. This classroom setup shifts a considerable amount of power to your students, which is an important component of the classroom management approach offered in this book.
Sharing the responsibility for the daily workings of the classroom builds community and increases student buy-in. This preparation will serve you well this year.
Chapter Four
Chapter Four, Classroom Management, outlines ways to guide the class’s attention so that everyone is able to calmly focus on taking in comprehensible messages delivered at a leisurely, unhurried pace, in a safe, easygoing, relaxed environment. It guides you through mental and physical exercises designed to increase your self-confidence and leadership capacity, and also through step-by-step responses to student disruptions and disrespect.
Chapter Five
Chapter Five, Introduction to the Stepping Stones Curricular Framework and Overview of the Foundational Instructional Strategies, will introduce you to the yearlong structure of Stepping Stones, the Daily Instructional Framework, the specific cycles and phases from Stepping Stones that you will work with in this transitional year, and simple descriptions of the activities in the order in which they are introduced later in the book.
This framework for daily instruction undergirds all the work we do throughout the year, regardless of the particular activity that we choose to deliver the input.
It is a powerful sequence of oral input followed by co-creation of a shared writing text, and then reading the text together to provide written input, mixed with oral input, as the class discusses the co-created text.
Chapter Six
Chapter Six, Your Gradebook, outlines suggestions on how to set up your gradebook to best foster student motivation and positive self-concepts as language learners, and to align to the Stepping Stones instructional and assessment system.
Part 2 - A Year of Instruction and Assessment
When you arrive at Part Two, you are advised to begin using this book as a desk reference, a day-by-day guide to walk you through the three cycles included in this book.
There is no need to digest the entirety of these next chapters, which are long and detailed, before the school year starts. The intended use is for you to keep this book open on your desk and use it as a desk reference as you would a lesson plan book. It will be a guide at your side and provide you with step-by-step directions on how to instruct and assess.
It will lead you through three cycles of the Stepping Stones yearlong curricular framework: Description, Narration, and Information.
You will work through the instructional sessions, with explanations of the instructional strategies we will use in that cycle, step by step with lots of modeling and guidance.
You will find lots of how-to practical advice as well as friendly pep talks, emotional support, and management ideas.
Each session contains a mixture of practical step-by-step instructions on the nuts and bolts of teaching, as well as friendly passages that provide a supportive presence in your work this year, as if I could be there with you, coaching you and cheering you on from the sidelines during your work day, every day, all year. How I wish that were the case!
A Note on Beginning This Work During the Term
If you are picking this book up in the middle of the year, it is still recommended that you work through the sessions one at a time. They are offered here in a particular sequence for specific reasons. You will simply use the sessions that you are able to get to before the end of the term. You will still benefit greatly from working through the sessions as long as you work with them in the order presented and are able to avoid rushing through them.
Let This Book Be Your Guide
It is my firm belief that the teachers who will benefit most from this book are those who can find it in their hearts to entrust their year to its guidance. If you can commit to taking a sabbatical year from the endless pursuit of shiny new activities, and commit to following the steps outlined in this book, you will most likely gain the most from your work with it.
My goal is help you relax into the Stepping Stones approach to proficiency-based instruction, to work alongside you all year, as your coach right there on your desk, or in your bag at soccer practice or propped on the steering wheel while you wait in the daycare pick-up line.
For many teachers, this represents a real leap of faith. But please know that this work, when pared down to its essence, requires clear thinking, a mind uncluttered by “what ifs”, and a heart ready to connect with your students day after day. That is why I ask you, in utter humility and friendship, to give me a year of your time and why I strongly urge you to give up mixing in new stuff from elsewhere.
Of course, you can always choose to use this book as just another storehouse of strategies. You can continue to use the “grab bag” approach to CI. You can certainly keep on reading all the blogs and looking everywhere for something new. It is your choice and, understandably, many teachers might not want to jump ship into the Stepping Stones boat and set sail to unknown vistas.
There are indeed a lot of good strategies in this book that could be used alone. But my mission is not just to add some strategies to your “to-try” list.
That is a very tall order and what I have seen from teachers who have used the first edition of this book is that it will only be accomplished if you rid yourself of the “cafeteria-style” or “grab bag” approach to teaching: a little of this, a bit of that, and a smidge of the other. That statement is the heart and soul of this book.
Allow it to lead you through a time-tested sequence of instruction and assessment that will, if followed faithfully, give you all you need for the year’s planning. Give yourself the gift of a sabbatical from the hamster wheel, from all the hunting and searching and cobbling together.
Retooling your language program from a traditional grammar-oriented approach to a proficiency-oriented, communicative approach is a big step. On the other hand, taming a communicative language program that you have built over the years from ideas and strategies you found in the Great Grab Bag of the Internet is also a huge undertaking.
I’m not going to lie and tell you that it will be an instantaneous process, or that there will not be some cognitive dissonance or discomfort along the way, as you rethink, rearrange, reorganize, and, above all, prune and cut those strategies and materials and tools that are not serving the goal of language acquisition, or are not derived from/aligned to the standards and Can-Do Statements.
No matter what approach you use, or what collection of strategies you develop, there’s going to be some work involved with bringing your language programs in line with the standards and the recommendations derived from research on Second Language Acquisition and how our brains acquire language.
But what I want for you is for the work to become as easy as possible as fast as possible.
That’s why I feel so committed that you need to invest your time in following the recommendations in this book.
Through doing, going through the instructional and assessment strategies in this book, you will develop a “bones-deep” sense of what Stepping Stones is all about.
Here, you will read a brief overview of the Stepping Stones framework, but it is truly by working through the instructional sessions that you will come to know, in a deep and “forever” kind of way, what makes this approach “work” and why it is proving to be such a gamechanger for individual teachers and departments.
See the graphs below for a visual representation of the general amount of effort required over the long term when learning a curricular framework like Stepping Stones versus learning a bunch of disconnected, yet fun, strategies with no overarching way to make it all make sense.
The Learning Curve with the “Grab Bag” Approach
The Learning Curve with a Curricular Framework
Please take note of how both the “grab bag” approach as well as the “framework” approach have a steep curve at the beginning. But please pay special attention to how the effort invested in the “framework” approach goes down and STAYS down, while the teacher who invested the same amount of initial energy and enthusiasm in the “grab bag” approach is still working hard, much later, when the “framework” teacher is feeling much more solid and working much less.
Also, please note that when the “framework” teacher is ready to train others or introduce their colleagues to this approach, their task is much easier, because they themselves are operating from a system that they can simply teach to others, instead of being in the all-too-common situation of being just as confused as ever about the overall structure of everything, and trying to somehow impart that to their colleagues.
Especially in the case when working to share with colleagues who really do want it all laid out for them (like the textbook does), we often find that the “grab bag” approach makes them want to literally grab their bag…and head for the hills, clutching their trusty textbook and workbook, because they can’t imagine jumping ship into the “grab bag” of “whatever idea I happen to want to try next.”
It’s a Solid Investment in the Rest of Your Career
If you are ready to make that investment of time, and go all-in to learn a framework that can guide you for the rest of your career, no mater what level, what language, what content you need or want to teach, then you are in the right place.
Rest yourself here in this book with me this year.
It is designed to hold your hand through the year. Simply leave this book open to the current session, and use it as your guide through the year. If you do this, you will cut down your time spent searching for new strategies, and be able to relax and recharge after school.
You will know what stress-free teaching is, and what quick, sure planning can look and feel like.
You will also know what it means to have engaged students who exhibit a real desire to be in your class, and you will become more rested and settled, so that you can enjoy these engaged, eager learners each day in class.
The step-by-step coaching program found in these pages is designed for your growth and peace of mind as much as for your students’ success.
Proficiency-based teaching, especially of beginning students, requires more of us emotionally. It requires us to connect, and connect again, and to be with our students, really be with them, day after day.
It requires us to be responsive to a child’s energy, to maintain eye contact with face after face, day after day, down through the long arc of the school year, rain or shine, sleet or hail, well-rested or tired, or eyes red and raw from whatever life has thrown your way lately.
Your students deserve a well-rested, calm teacher in front of them in the classroom. As well-rested and calm as possible, given how life can toss us around.
Some might see it as hubris to suggest that you make this book your sole source of ideas and professional development for the year. I see it as a rescue move.
If you can put your trust in the detailed system this book lays out for you, a product of many years of testing and refining, I predict that you will feel a shift. This year will be an important pivot point for your career and your sense of ease and confidence as a teacher.
I predict that you will begin to feel calmer, more centered, more grounded, and less frazzled and confused, and that your calmness will transfer into your students and be observable by anyone who comes into your classroom.
Thank you for joining me on this journey. A whole new approach to the year! How exciting for you!
I take my obligation to our profession very seriously, and to you, my dear reader. Let’s work through this year together, hand in hand, and let’s turn our backs for a time on the mad online dash to find the Next New Thing.
Let’s get you strong and centered, and let’s tend to your skills, one session at a time, not leaving a session until you have mastered it. You will be amazed to see how that process works for you.
I have hammered out the ideas and strategies in each of the instructional sessions in this book with class after class, year after year, focusing my entire career 100% only on proficiency-based teaching.
I have been there. And I have picked myself up, feelings bruised, confidence shaken, and I have wrestled this way of teaching into something that actually works for me, brings smiles to my face, and allows me to relax, finally, into teaching.
I know how it is. Perhaps one day we can all meet up and exchange stories and congratulate each other on doing real work, tough work, challenging and emotional and big, important work.
I would be honored to serve as your pilot this year. Fasten your seat belts.
Get ready for liftoff.
Your pal,
Tina Hargaden
tina@curriculumclub.com
