Hey, it's Tina here. And I really want you to send me a message. So if you could just please hit the send a message button or go to Anchor dot f m / curriculum Club / message. Then you can send me a voice recording who knows I might put you on a future episode. So if you could just let me know what you think, or what you want to hear from me or how you think I'm doing or if you have aAre you to share or a joke, or you want to sing me a song? I Don't Really Care and here I'll even bribe you so by the end of the month whatever month it is that you're listening to this at the end of the month. I will go look through all the messages that I've gotten through the month pick one randomly, and I will give that person anything. They want any one thing at all from our online school at CI - lift off dot teachable.com. So please hit me up. Send me a message by hitting that button or go. into anchor dot f m / curriculum Club / message In this episode I'm going to talk about or actually just read from a document that I made from Stepping Stones year one and Beyond called go to your administrator. It talks about how we can speak with our administrators to help the administrators help us to show our colleagues. The why behind what we're doing in our world language classroom. So thanks for joining us and let's go. I'm going to read to you from a document that I wrote called go to your administrator. If you're required to give test of conscious knowledge of grammar or vocabulary, my suggestion is to wait that a as little as possible or just count it as a feedback grade. If you can swing that with your administrator, not your colleagues your administrator go straight to your administrator. Your students self concept as language Learners is on the line the boat rocking you might be doing with your grown-up adult colleagues is in my way of thinking worth the hundreds and hundreds of students experiences that you stand to improve. The shift to portfolio performance assessment go to your administrator. Tell them that you've been reading a book on constructively aligned curriculum and assessment that is backwards design from the national or possibly your state standards from cross-curricular literacy goals. Tell them that you want to shift your waiting towards these literacy goals in your language course, tell them that you want to assess them on their literacy in narrative descriptive informational and opinion or Mint genres of listening Reading Writing and speaking. Tell them that you want to increase students eyes on text time and you want to use daily model writing of strong literacy skills to explicitly unpack literacy in your daily lessons. Tell them that you want to make the criteria for success in these literacy skills transparent and achievable by breaking them down through the use of anchor charts and scaffolds for speaking and writing. And then tell them that you'll be teaching more grammar than you can assess on the shared assessment. So you'll need a more robust authentic assessment of their performance in Reading Writing listening and speaking and therefore you either want to revisit the content of the shared assessment or use it as an informational grade to provide feedback on what you need to reteach using Pace lessons. There's a link to a document on Pace lessons in the show notes that you want to teach them grammar in a constructivist way asking them to analyze language samples to construct their own understanding of the surface features of the language. So that students Master the language in a lasting and durable way. It is a rare administrator who will not be interested in such an approach to language teaching and then tell them that you would like to form a PLC or study team to look at the assessment systems you're using in the building or the district. This shows your willingness to work collaboratively with your colleagues. Ask your administrator when they're available to meet with the team you need to ask this with authority as if you assume that they will of course want to support this important reform in the way that you teach languages. If you don't have common assessments or they're not assessments of conscious knowledge of the language and you're basing your Gradebook almost entirely or entirely on the assessment tools provided in this book Stepping Stones your wannabe on then it actually doesn't matter how much you weight your grades using these assessment tools and teaching in the way outlined in this book. No matter how you wait your grades. Most of your students will very very likely be making all A's and B's This is because you have been teaching for Mastery teaching for Mastery is when your assessment is aligned with your instruction. Your instruction is aligned to the standards and you're teaching the way the brain learns the pedagogy exists in every subject area for every teacher in the world to be teaching for Mastery assigning grades of failing to our students unless we're talking about those who don't come to class that is. Could truly be a thing of the past this could happen right now if we all got straight on a very important point. Everyone can learn especially a language everyone unless they have severe cognitive or physical impairments the kind that mean they can't speak their first language can develop the ability to speak and understand any language. They all speak at least one language as proficiently as we hope to have our second language students speak by the end of the typical two or three year program. They can all describe and narrate in all time frames speak of topics of General. Oil interest and string together paragraph lengths discourse on topics that matter to them at least in spoken language and even though everyone will not reach the same levels of skill or literacy or ability. Everyone can get stronger today than they were yesterday and stronger this year than they were last year. Even if their progress is in very small increments and even if it's lower than the bell curve of the rest of the glass everyone can make progress in the language day by day if they show up to class listen with the intent to understand and engage in the language interactions that we plan for them. In fact, it's actually almost impossible to not make progress in language development. Just simply by being in an environment in which the language is being used extensively in a cop. Apprehensive will matter to talk about interesting things. If you want proof, they can all learn a language. Just listen to them speaking. The language is they already know they've already done it once we just need to provide them with the conditions under which they can replicate that process and adjust the instruction to match the Developmental and cognitive abilities of people who are by and large already at least somewhat literate or who are already receiving literacy instruction in the case of their primary Learners in at least one language. Why do we have students failing left? And right if everyone is naturally gifted with the ability to acquire language proficiency? Some of the factors that impede students academic success are indeed beyond our control a parenting student or one with health problems or one who's dealing with homelessness or addiction often feels they have bigger fish to fry than Spanish class. But why do students who attend class regularly and even put forth an effort still fail? This is not what education is all about. We want all of our students to succeed grow and learn. It's generally the foundation of our organization's Mission just take a look around at your average school's website brochures or flyers or even the slides at the back to school teacher in services. Most likely you will not have to look too far to bump into a district and school mission statement that says something like all Learners will succeed or every student will achieve or all students can learn we want this for our students but we don't always act like that is true. We have this notion that our grade distribution should look like a bell curve. However, if we look at standards-based grading or proficiency based grading practices, we can see that these approaches to grading hold forth the expectation that all students will meet the learning targets. Even if teachers need to give multiple opportunities and multiple ways for them to demonstrate their proficiency at say solving quadratic equations in a math course or analyzing the significance of a minor character upon the development of the main character in an English course in a proficiency based or standards-based grading system. This is the expectation the expectation in standards or proficiency based grading is that everyone can achieve a proficient level of performance but that some students might take longer or need reteaching in a different way or need a different method to demonstrate their performance. Perhaps speaking aloud to the teacher to show their analysis of the minor characters influence or making a power point or YouTube video in which they explain how to solve a quadratic equation. So why the fear that we are giving too many A's in our standards aligned carefully-designed World Language programs? Under a proficiency based grading system. We would be held up as teaching for Mastery the first time as long as we had standards base data to prove that our students are indeed performing at that desired level portfolio assessment does just that it leaves a trail of tangible breadcrumbs that anyone can follow to prove that we're not just handing out A's but are instead teaching in a powerful brain brace brain-based. that supports all students to achieve grow and learn just like the school mission statement most likely says Be proud of your work and wear your long list of A's and B's like a badge of honor you are in the Forefront of Education reform, which is ultimately societal reform that does not bear fruit for a couple more decades. Thank you for being you it's high time that language Educators who are teaching for Mastery and working dang hard to learn the very best ways to do that. It's time that we seize our power and build a fortress of Data to prove that miraculously and quite conveniently for us and our level of happiness at work the path of joy and communication and success really is the path to making good on the promise our administrators make every time they hand out their business card with that motto every student succeeds at Sylvan. Tell your principal that you're just trying to back them up on that promise if they question your grading. Tell your colleagues who are talking about you behind your back that you just got tired of failing kids. You can tell yourself that they're just talking because they're jealous. Anyway, who wouldn't be you have found the pot of gold you found the pot of goals with the right goals the gold. Is there shining right there in your students innate ability to learn if only the conditions are right. This book so far has been about the conditions for learning. Now. Let's turn to the nitty-gritty of how to amass that pile of unassailable data until it is so tall that we can use it to show not just our world language colleagues, but also the whole entire profession what it means to teach the whole child in a way that they can all learn.
Learn more about speaking into your administrator’s listening by using some “buzzwords” to unpack what is happening in your World Language classroom using the materials and systems in Stepping Stones Year One and Beyond...and leave me a voice message here. You might find yourself featured on a future episode! In this episode, I reference these documents. Go to Your Administrator Using Grammar Discussions as Noticing Activities + PACE Lessons (Note:  PACE stands for Presentation, Attention, Co-Construction, and Extension) Sample Input Flood (for the "Presentation" step of a PACE lesson) on the "futur proche" in French and sample Attention and Extension activities  If you are not a Curriculum Club member, you can sign up for our waiting list. We will open registration around Thanksgiving for our Fall cohorts. The cost will be $34 a month -- about a dollar a day for daily lesson plans, weekly live coaching with recordings available for you to watch anytime. bonus live webinars (plus recordings available anytime) with Tina, our coaching staff, and special guests, and a private Facebook group where our goal is to answer your questions as we go through the curriculum. To learn more about the book Stepping Stones Year One and Beyond, visit our online school. And if you want to chip in to support my coffee habit, you can donate to the podcast here. 