Chapter 7: Beginning the Year

IN PROGRESS - WILL BE EDITED

Welcome to Part Two of this book! This section comprises the meat and potatoes, day-by-day, session-bysession guide to the school year. So far I’ve talked about the foundational ideas upon which I have based the upcoming section, in which we find the main content, the mojo, of this book. This part will lead you through 31 instructional sessions, four End-of-the-Year projects and celebrations, and three summative portfolio assessment sessions (in the Appendices), aligned to the three cycles in the “Foundations” instructional sequence.

In these sessions, you will find the practical steps to make these ideas come to life in your classroom every day. In the first part of this book, I have given a brief overview of the Guided Oral Input strategies and some of the activities that extend and reinforce the language and content that you will present during the Guided Oral Input portion of the daily lesson framework. I will now present to you - in much, much greater depth - how to implement those activities, one after the other, to build a year of instruction.

The year is organized into three cycles that each last about six to eight weeks. Each cycle comprises five to seven weeks of instruction, followed by portfolio assessments that take about a week (two to three block classes or four to five shorter classes) that closely aligns to the instruction conducted during the preceding weeks. For example, in Cycle One, Description, your portfolio assessments will ask students to read and listen to descriptions, and write (and perhaps also speak) to give descriptions.

In the following sessions, we will work through each cycle, and the selected instructional strategies that I have chosen for you, and then after the sessions on that cycle, you will find an assessment session in the Appendices that provides you with materials you could use or adapt for the portfolio for the cycle.

I am so pleased to be able to share with you my recipe for a fun-filled, language-filled year, and help you ease your way into Stepping Stones, which is truly a groundbreaking approach to structuring a language course.

I certainly hope that you enjoy using it as much as I have enjoyed developing and writing about it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the trust you have invested in me, and in my guidance this year.

It’s now time to get the show on the road. Buckle up, and let’s go!

Chapter 7: Beginning the Year

Teachers, welcome to the year! This is the beginning of a new start for you. Whereas in the past, you might have struggled, as I did and as so many of your peers do, with how to make sense of the vast array of ideas and strategies making their way around the internet and conferences, you will now have a framework to guide you step by step through this first foray into Stepping Stones, so you can take a long break from chasing down new ideas, or working to form them into a cohesive learning pathway, and simply devote your energy to getting good at the foundation.

It is so exciting to share this foundation with you, because, as I explained above, once you have invested the time and effort into understanding the yearlong framework, the daily instructional framework, and the portfolio assessment system and measurement tools, you will forevermore have a guidance system and a way to easily fit new ideas and strategies, and new topics and resources, into a strong yet flexible curricular framework that can serve as your GPS (Global Positioning System) every year, in every class, at every level, from here on out.

This is the start of a new era for you as a language teacher! It is so fortuitous that you have chosen to use this book as your training program this year. I do not take my responsibility to you lightly. I intend to lead you step by step as we work through the year together. Thank you for joining me. It truly means the world to me that my fellow educators find value in what I have been developing and refining for the last 19 years as I have made my way through my career as a language and literacy educator, and an avid student of pedagogy, methods, and materials.

Once upon a time, in 2015, I was in the midst of completing my application to a doctoral program at the University of Oregon, because I felt a restless calling that was becoming more and more insistent, to work with teachers, develop curriculum, and attempt to find workable solutions to questions and roadblocks that seem to get in so many teachers’ way as they transition to standards-based, communicative language teaching, and especially when they are working to effect building-wide or district-wide change, without strong frameworks and materials to train their colleagues, or even to use as a starting point for making the often-nebulous concept of “communicative language teaching” tangible, “explainable,” and doable for departments that might not always agree on every specific element of what makes a strong lesson, unit, course, or program.

But, right in the middle of the application process, which I thought would make me into a teacher trainer with my Bona Fides, life came knocking, and I just went ahead and started teaching other teachers all the things I could, without the official OK from the Powers That Be. It’s all good; what it means is that instead of going off to school again, I stayed in my classroom, and worked out the system that you now hold in your hands. It, to me, is more valuable than a doctorate. Besides, I very highly doubt that I would have been able to work all

this out if I had been busy all these years doing other people’s projects and writing papers that weren’t meant to go directly into teachers’ hands. Better like this. Cheaper, too.

The General Trajectory of the Term

Stepping Stones is designed as a spiral curriculum. This means that the cycles of instruction, based on various “genres” or “language functions” (e.g. Description, Narration, Information) build upon each other through the term.

The cycles are also designed to spiral back to the same language functions year after year. After all, how can one truly say that they have “arrived” as a writer of description, or as a reader of information? It’s just not possible. Even professional writers are still learning, growing, and developing in their ability to write to describe or to teach/inform. For this reason, because there is no “end goal” in the development of morecapable, more-confident, and more-powerful writers, readers, and communicators, the cycles are designed to be used year after year, with different content and language/literacy objectives, and with increasingly-complex discourse within the genres

The complete Stepping Stones curricular framework contains six cycles: (1) Description, (2) Narration, (3) Going Deeper with Narration, (4) Information, (5) Opinion, and (6) Argument. In each cycle, there are four phases of instruction, but in this foundational book, we will not use every phase. Should you want to tackle the entire Stepping Stones yearlong framework, after you have used this abbreviated “on ramp” foundational book, you can check out the complete framework in the book Stepping Stones.

For now, I truly think you have made the right choice. You are starting your journey with a new approach with this Foundations book, which will take you by the hand and lead you to understand through doing. As you implement the sessions, you will develop a very real and concrete understanding of the structures, strategies, tools, materials, and practices that are essential to successfully implementing this approach.

We will begin with Cycle One, Description. We will work with all four phases of the Description cycle: Describing Settings, Describing Preferences, Describing People Inside and Out, and then Describing in the Past and Present. When we arrive at the end of the sessions in this cycle, we will use the Description rubrics, the Description writing continuum, and perhaps the appropriate Speaking Rubric to help students self-assess their performance in interpreting and producing descriptions.

Then, we move on to Cycle Two, Narration. We will work with three phases of the Narration cycle: Narrating Personal Stories, Narrating Imaginative/Literary Stories, and Narrating Cultural Stories. You might well deduce that, as mentioned above, the spiral nature of Stepping Stones will carry forward the language and literacy from Cycle One, Description, into Cycle Two, Narration. When we tell stories, of course we need to describe the setting, and the character’s physical and internal traits and preferences, and we will be describing in the past and perhaps the present, too. So you can already see how the curricular framework is built to spiral back to and reinforce prior learning. Again, at the end of this cycle, after several weeks of Page 93

narrating these various kinds of stories, we will use the narration-specific measurement tools in the summative portfolio assessments.

In this book, we will not work with Cycle Three, Going Deeper with Narration. It is outlined in detail in Stepping Stones, but if you work through Cycle Two in this book, then if you later decide that you want to go deeper, you will find that the strategies, skills, and understandings that you developed as you worked through Cycle Two will be very helpful in implementing Cycle Three.

Next, we move on to Cycle Four, Information. We will work with two phases in the Information cycle: Organizing an Informational Paragraph and Teaching Topic-Specific Vocabulary. Again, we will use the Information-specific assessment tools at the end of this abbreviated Information cycle.

In this foundational book, we will not address Cycle Five, Opinion, or Cycle Six, Argument. These cycles are outlined in Stepping Stones as well, and, again, working through the selected cycles in this book will be invaluable should you choose to incorporate these cycles into your course in future terms.

Finally, to end the term, if you have time, or anytime during your course that you feel your students are ready for a more hands-on, project-based learning experience, you might implement one or more of the End-of-theYear project options in which students use the language to create artifacts and preserve their creativity for the future: Class Yearbooks, the Story Books Project, the Festival of Worksheets, and/or the Word-Off.

The First Six Weeks - A Special Time

The first six weeks are an especially exciting time in the classroom. You will be norming the group, igniting your students’ creativity, and cultivating group bonds. You will be building a platform for your teaching this year to get real liftoff. You will be working on your delivery skills, one activity at the time, with this book open on your desk, guiding you step by step, on a recognizable trajectory to becoming your best teaching self.

This is the part of the year that will demonstrate the power of comprehensible input to your students, that will teach them how it works, that will build their confidence while establishing a positive and focused classroom culture, and send their brand-new language proficiency zooming up the chart. The activities are sequenced to make students feel successful, engaged, and part of a community. By learning these skills and strategies, you will be able to start speaking to your classes comprehensibly, even your beginners, or students who have not had communicative language courses in the past, and you will be able to speak in full sentences, about topics that are of interest to them, right from day one of class.

Even if you are working in a building with strict expectations around your teaching grammar, and you are not able to teach exclusively with proficiency-based strategies all year long, I urge you to at begin the year with 100% language use, just communicating in the language in a comprehensible and engaging way, if at all possible. Grammar lessons are best put off until later in the year. Any discrete grammar instruction is always

easier grasped when the students have first been given a rich bed of comprehensible input on which to base their conscious language study.

During the first weeks of school, all classrooms - science, math, band, and PE - are working on norming the classroom, building community, and inculcating in their students a love of the subject matter. An observer who pops into a proficiency-based lesson at the beginning of the year may even start to shift their mindset about what is possible in language teaching, once they observe first-year students happily participating in a discussion or activity in a language that students only began to study this very month. I recommend fully immersing your classes in comprehensible language interactions, for at least the first six-week unit, if at all possible. If you do this, you will see something remarkable, almost miraculous.

Students need to understand why listening is the focus of the first six weeks. So it is recommended that we take one day to provide them with a basic understanding of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). This metacognitive orientation is suggested on the last day of the first week of school, or about three to four days into the year, after a few days of acquisition-focused communication activities.

CI is unparalleled in building community, trust, and love of the language during the first month of the school year. It just so happens that So in that sense, the activities in the Description cycle deeply support our instruction for the rest of the year. This cycle builds a foundation of goodwill and feelings of success that support students’ growth for the remaining cycles of the year. In doing so, it develops the students’ ear for the language, while building listening and reading confidence to prepare students for later independent reading.

A Note on How to Schedule the Instructional Sessions

The instructional sessions of this book were written to guide you through the year. However, you will notice that there are not 180 instructional sessions; there are 31 total, plus four End-of-the-Year options. Each “session” walks you through a different Guided Oral Input strategy. Guided Oral Input is the third part of the daily lesson framework and the component that changes the most from day to day.

Before the Guided Oral Input, we have a short Reading Workshop. For many teachers, for most of the year this is free-choice reading time, usually beginning in late September or October for students who have already had a year or two of literacy-focused instruction in the course language, or in late November, December, or January, for students in their first year of this kind of language class. However, in the beginning of the year, first-year classes or those new to comprehension-based instruction will not be ready to begin free-choice reading during the Reading Workshop time.

For that reason, and because some teachers will not have yet collected enough texts to begin a free-choice reading program, each session in this book gives Reading Workshop strategies that can be used with a whole-class text, in lieu of (or, especially for block classes, in addition to) free-choice reading.

If you have a sufficient collection of classroom library books or other reading material, you will want to start free-choice reading when students are ready. For my students, that is usually around Thanksgiving of the first year (so, after about three months of class) and at the end of September (after about four weeks of class) for my returning students who, for the most part, have previously had plenty of reading and communicative language teaching with me in their first year. So, after instructional session 15 and the first portfolio assessments, you will read strategies for launching free-choice reading, and then after that, you might use most of the daily Reading Workshop time to lead free-choice reading.

As noted above, the “heart” of the lesson is #3, Guided Oral Input, so that is the longest part of the average instructional sessions.

After the Guided Oral Input, the remaining lesson components are basically comprised of various ways to continue using the language and information in different formats.

In the interest of simplicity, it is best for you, to lighten your planning workload, if you have a repertoire of about four to six options that you can re-use for the various lesson components. For that reason, you will find that as you work through the instructional sessions, the later sessions do not include very many new strategies for these lesson components. Rather, they simply direct you to re-use a strategy that you already learned and used in a previous session, perhaps with a modification to deepen the strategy or to better align it with the phase of that particular session. You will be directed to refer back to the page(s) of the book to go back to the previous session in which the strategy was first introduced and explained, so you can refresh your memory if need be, when planning the strategy again.

The first four sessions are written day by day, so that you can get a very solid mental picture of what those first three lessons will feel like, as you plan and prep.

The fourth session is special. It is an introduction to second language acquisition and an overview of how things go in a class like this. It is conducted in the class’s shared stronger language and is scheduled for approximately the fourth day of school, after the students have had a chance to experience a few days of instruction conducted in the course language. After completing the first four sessions, you might feel the need to move on, or you might continue working with the activities in the first three sessions for a while longer, before moving on to the fifth instructional session.

Once the fifth session starts, the rest of the sessions are not laid out day by day. You will most likely spend two to three days (or even more) in each session, either returning to the same content that you introduced in the first lesson using that strategy, or presenting new content that fits with what you taught in the first lesson. When you are sketching out the general schedule for the year, you might want to use the following pages to help you picture the strategies and content that you might cover, and when. I call them “bubble sheets” because the first time I shared these with the CI Liftoff Facebook group, that’s what Cyndi, a group member, said they looked like.

There are three versions of these “bubble sheets” schedules provided for each phase:

(1) for classes of about 55 minutes that meet three to five times per week (2) for year-long block classes of about 80 minutes that meet every other day (3) for 4x4 block classes that meet every day, for only half the year.

Please note that the lesson objectives on these “bubble sheets" will be for Beginners. In the instructional session, you will find suggested performance objectives for Intermediate and Advanced students.

Further, on the “bubble sheets” you may notice that in the learning objective it says “L” for “Language.” You would want to replace the L with the name of the language you teach.

In the instructional sessions, it says French, just because that is the language that I have taught the most, et elle me tient très à coeur ❤ .

Well, enough dithering, dilly-dallying, and delay. Time to jump in to the rest of your career! The water is great! Time for liftoff!