Chapter 5: Introduction to the Stepping Stones Curricular Framework

IN PROGRESS - WILL BE EDITED

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 compellinginput 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. cycles are

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.

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.

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 Phases

Describing Setting

Describing Preferences

Describing People Inside and Out

Describing in the Past and Present

Narrating Personal Stories

Narrating Imaginative/Literary Stories

Narrating Cultural Stories

Organizing Information Writing

Teaching Vocabulary

The Daily Instructional Framework

(Excerpted from Stepping Stones)

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.