What a language teacher's job is

 On Thursday, I had a long, intense conversation with my colleague Kris.  She's our instructional coach this year, and I strongly hope that she will continue that role in the years to come, even as she returns to full-time teaching duties.  She expressed the concern that I jump the gun in my classes--I move too quickly from building buy-in, directly to speaking Spanish.  She worries that the students don't get why they're doing what they're doing, and thus never engage, and thus never really learn.  I take her observation to heart, because I'm pretty sure my kung fu is strong, but my students are not learning Spanish at the rate they should be.  Good practice done badly is bad practice, and if my students aren't learning, I'm not quite doing something right. 

According to Krashen, as cited in Lee and Van Patten (1995), "...as long as there is motivation and the right affective environment (e.g., low anxiety), a person cannot avoid learning a second language if there is sustained comprehensible input" (29).  They cite other researchers that say this is overstating the case somewhat, and they themselves stake out the position that using the language in communicative settings is necessary for learning languages.  However, to the extent that this statement is true, it has powerful implications for language learning and, by extension, language instruction.  The whole rest of their book is dedicated to outlining what those implications are.

But for now, I just want to worry at that one sentence for a little while, pick it apart and apply it.  I'm writing lesson plans right now, so the action items are immediately applicable--I can go from this blog screen to my unit plan, to my weekly plan, and apply what I figure out.


It looks like this: 

motivation + affective environment + sustained COMPREHENSIBLE input = language learning.


According to a source I don't remember right now (it was in an audiobook I borrowed from a friend, which I've since returned), as cited by Sprick (2007), motivation is a function of value times expectancy of success.  So, if students value what they're learning, their motivation increases.  If the students expect to succeed at a given event, their motivation to do it increases. 

The updated equation looks thus:


(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained comprehensible input = Language Learning


I don't know enough about what Lee and VanPatten mean by "affective environment" to perform any cute faux mathematical operation on it.  I believe, though, that this largely refers to classroom management issues, about which I've typed extensively.

Lee and VanPatten dedicate most of their book to outlining the concept of sustained comprehensible input.   They later add "meaning-bearing" to the list of qualities of valuable communication.

(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained, meaning-bearing comprehensible input = Language Learning

This means that a student has to catch that there is a meaning she is supposed to understand in the utterance.  The student also needs to be able to understand some portion of the communication.

This is a pretty clear description of a language teacher's job.  These work out to these action steps:

1.)  Sell the value of the learning.  This means explaining reasons that a student should learn languages, but also why a student would want to.  (I always think of the Rosetta Stone ad: "He was a farm boy from Iowa.  She was an Italian supermodel.  He had one chance to impress her.")  This corresponds to increasing the value of learning.

2.) Increase the expectation of success.  Celebrate baby steps.  Define milestones, and move heaven and earth to drag your students towards them.  Once they get there, make a big deal over it.

3.) Run your classroom well.  I've had a lot to say about this.  Marzano has a lot to say about this.  Jackson has a lot to say about this, Wong and Wong have a lot to say about this, and Sprick has a whole lot to say about this.  It sort of boils down to these.

• Have a very few rules which apply all the time.  Be consistent about reinforcing them positively and correcting them when necessary.
• Have procedures for everything.  Teach them explicitly and rehearse them.  (Behaviorism at its finest, but it will help if the students create their own procedures.)
• Make your classroom a place where it's okay to make mistakes, and teach students how to make GOOD mistakes.  As Kryza likes to say, "This is a risk-taking, mistake-making classroom."  In fact,  Corder (as cited in Lee and VanPatten (1997)) says that mistakes are "indispensable to the learner himself" (in Lee and VanPatten, p. 22.) 

It feels like I'm missing one or two, but we'll go from there.

4.)  Give your students language they can chew.  Lee & VanPatten say that if your students are at level N of comprehension, then you should communicate with them at N + 1.  That's a hard number to hit consistently, especially with a class of 20, 30, 40 language learners.  (Not that I have a class of 40 people, but it's probably not far off for many of my colleagues.)  Lee & VanPatten have things to say about that, too.

So, there.  I've defined what a WL teacher's job is.  Not exactly my original goal, but that's okay.  My next trick:  Matching this up with Marzano's 10 reflection questions from The Art and Science of Teaching, Jackson's 7 principles of master teachers, Kryza's "Chunk / Chew / Check" lesson-planning and differentiation model, the National Board's teacher assessment tool, and Kris's "Hook your students" principle.  Also, what this means to what my class looks like.

Resources:



Jackson, R. (2009).  Never work harder than your students.  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Lee, J., & VanPatten, B. (1997).  Making communicative language teaching happen.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marzano, R. (2008).  The art and science of teaching.  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Sprick, R.  (2008). Interventions audio.  Eugene, OR: Northwest Publishing.

Components of lesson plans

(REALLY long.)


 In the last year, I've blogged a lot about curriculum and lesson planning.  These are the hardest things for me to understand, I think, although every year, every week, I'm getting better at them.  (Classroom management isn't the hardest thing to understand--I get it.  I'm just not very good at doing it.)  Planning a good lesson, much less 5 good lessons, much less 5 good lessons a day for a week, is mind-bogglingly complicated and massively important. 


Planning a lesson is always an interesting trick.  In Robyn Jackson's outline, you start where your students are.  This takes into account their interests, their skills, their emotional needs, etc.  Then, you know where your students are going.  Again, that's Jackson's phrase, but Marzano says the same thing--the first part is learning goals.  We've been working hard at learning goals at our schools this year.  After you know what you want your students to learn, you break it down into steps.  (I think this is something that I'm only just starting to do since Winter Break.)  After that, you see through time in order to pick out the potential challenges--Billy will certainly have a bad day on Tuesday, he always does; I'll have a guest instructor on Friday, so I won't be able to teach anything new; et cetera. 

There's a lot to consider in there, and I'm starting to get a good enough feel for Learning Goals that I can start worrying a lot more about the efficacy of Learning Activities.  I was already pretty good at Learning Activities, and a lot of my training has been focused that way.  Learning Activities without a solid grounding in Learning Goals don't mean much, though.  Now I've got a much better handle on the Learning Goals (so when I rewrite my curriculum again this summer, I might finally have something to work with), so the more specific things are coming back up.


When I'm writing lesson plans, I want to know the students I'm teaching.  For every group of students, I want to know: 1.) what they're interested in; 2.) how they learn most effectively (or at least think they do); 3.) what they want to know about the topic at hand.  Having some idea as to how they react to certain stimuli is helpful, too.  For example, every time I utter 3 sentences of Spanish together, a number of my students want to know why they have to know Spanish at all.


While I'm designing learning goals, I need to make sure that I'm really writing learning goals and not communicative goals.  The difference is that my communicative goals outline a situation in which, if nothing weird happens, my students should be able to talk their way through.  Learning goals go more universal.  At the moment, this tends towards a comparison of that social situation in our society versus the society we're studying (Mexico, Spain, Ecuador, Argentina, Puerto Rico, whatever--there are of course sub-societies in those countries, of course), or even an examination of what that social situation means for the human condition.  It makes for more of an aspiration than a goal, but it's what we're working towards.

One of the things I'm trying to do when designing lesson plans is this--how am I going to model this?  How am I going to help them practice them?  How am I going to get them to practice without help?  How am I going to get them to do it?  The general phrase is--I do it, We do it, You do it.  (That's Kathleen Kryza's phrasing.) 

In the World Language world, there's a similar structure in communicative methodology theory.  You start with structured, comprehensible input--utterances in the target language that a student can nevertheless understand (using context clues, illustrations, acting or other things).  You have to check a student's comprehension for the language--yes/no, true/false, point-to type activities are usually what goes on here.  The students have to process the information and then respond to it, but their response doesn't require a huge language output.  Then, you move to structured output--there are only a limited number of responses, but the responses aren't formulaic or meaningless.  Then, you can go to more and more unstructured input.

Then, of course, the National and State Standards and Benchmarks prescribe the communicative modes--conversation, comprehension, and presentation.  And in living languages, there are two different vehicles of communication--oral/aural speech, and written/read texts.  So you have to work your way through the "structured input / structured output / less-structured output" assembly lines on both of those lines.  Not all of these things fit into a single day's lesson plan, but there should be some examples of all of them throughout the week.  Some of these things lend themselves better to different stages than others, of course--listening and reading comprehension are obviously much better structured-input activities.

Kryza's lesson plan structure is "Chunk, Chew, Check," and that method really helps me think about what each activity is meant to do.  It means that when I'm really, REALLY writing out my plans, for each of the above things, I write a "chunk"--what Marzano calls a "critical input experience"--a short bit of structured input (usually), either spoken or written--with a lot of examples of the vocabulary or grammar or culture I'm presenting, and a few non-examples that the students are generally already familiar with.  Then there's a "chew," something where the students have the opportunity to process what they've just heard or read, and have to react to it in some way.  And then there's a "check," where I see how well the students are doing and change instruction accordingly.  (Marzano calls this a "formative assessment.")  Mostly, like I alluded to, I focus on input activities, so I may be stiffing my students on practice time opportunities.  I make our practice activities count, though.

 Mix into this mix Gardener's multiple intelligence theory, the need to work culture into everything, a burgeoning realization of the importance of social justice as a component of Spanish instruction, and a disinclination by disposition to pay attention to details, and I begin to see why my struggle with lesson plans has taken up so much time.  It's likely to keep doing so for some time, but I finally feel like I have a usable document that covers most of the bases.  Have I ever written a complete plan?  Nope.  Has my plan ever gone off without a hitch?  Not even close.  All I know is that the more time I spend planning, the better on average the week goes for me.  So I keep doing it.

Update, 1 hour later:  And differentiation!  I forgot about differentiation!

Never work harder than your students, Cha. 4

Support your students

Jackson starts off this chapter by defining the "Curse of Knowledge," knowing something and being unable to imagine what it's like not knowing it. She suggests that it's one of the big reasons that teachers have a hard time teaching until the remediation stage. Then, she suggests that by having remediation plans without intervening during instruction is tantamount to planning on our students' failure. This, of course, leads to frustration all around.

The mitigation to this--the principle for this chapter--is to plan interventions in to the lesson. In the planning stages of a class or a unit, a teacher decides what students should know. (This is reflected in "standard and benchmarks" and whatnot.) He then breaks that up into smaller bits, steps and stages of learning goals to put together some kind of continuity plan so that he's not just randomly pulling activities out of his file drawer. Then, he builds in learning supports over the course of the unit, so that when students trip up, they have a system to help them keep their footing.

Jackson identifies the following elements of an effective intervention system:

1. The Plan is developed before students begin to fail.
2. The Plan has a red flag mechanism that triggers action--objective, based on learning objectives (not behavior).
3. A concrete procedure is in place such that when the conditions are met (less than 76%, missed standards, whatever), the procedure kicks right in. It's in the letter home, the syllabus, the class's website, on refrigerator magnets. Everybody understands the procedure, what it's for, when it happens. It's not punishment and it's not busywork.
4. Students have shared accountability in this Plan. They have a well-defined job and responsibility for their learning.
   

Jackson suggests a number of interlinking steps to help support students' learning:

• Anticipate confusion. Having once been learners of our subject ourselves, and having taught our subject every year more, we have a pretty good idea where our students will get tripped up. Prepare your students for those moments and have a variety of teaching strategies in your pocket.
• Pinpoint confusion and uncover misconceptions. Know where your students are getting tripped up. She points out that this is tricky, because you can get right answers using wrong strategy. This action step (or whatever it is she calls it) addresses the strategies that students are using, and making sure that they're using the correct strategies.
  
• Demystify the process. The process of education makes sense to educators. We live it, we dedicate ourselves to improving it, we've invested huge amounts of time to thinking abstractly about it. This is not so for student. Help them to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
  
• Gradually remove supports as students improve. Make it clear that some of your "crutch" methods may be necessary now, but they won't be available forever. She makes the point of saying that, rather than changing the learning activities, try keeping the learning activities the same and changing the students' relationship to it. I'm not exactly clear what she means by this, or what this would look like in an WL class, but I get the shape of what she's saying.
  
• Support the learning of students who have already mastered the learning goals. The teacher prep looks nearly the same for this step as the previous. Instead of taking the ambiguity out of a learning objective, leave some of the (learning-goal-relevant) ambiguity in. The students who already know a lot need to learn, too.
  

And in this way, Jackson comes back to content differentiation. These are all things that a teacher prepares for as often as possible. Jackson suggests doing this systemically, making sure that you have this process available all the time.

Our school has an "Interventions" class this year, a class we've been struggling with getting right all year long. We know that we need a mechanism to help students learn content they may have missed the first time, and this year it took the form of a 1-hour-a-day class. We've had trouble organizing the class logistically, re-teaching standards, getting students into and out of Interventions, and keeping occupied those students who don't need to make up standards. This chapter reads like Jackson has been through a number of projects like that. She's taken those experiments and tried to turn them into something.

Never work harder than your students, Cha. 3

Expect to get your students there

The bottom line of this chapter is to have high expectations for your students. Jackson moves very quickly to make a couple of things clear, though: giving students a harder test is not raising expectations. Praising students for mediocre performance is not raising expectations. In fact, she maintains, faking higher expectations until making higher expectations is one of the more damaging practices out there. She differentiates between "standards" and "expectations." Standards are what students need to learn. Expectations are a teacher's belief about how far s/he can take her / his students towards the standards.

[Michigan is working on publishing "content expectations," which is the list of things a student has to know. These lists used to be known as "standards." In neither list is there a measure of how far on this list the state believes a student can get. With this chapter, the terminologies become completely muddled, and are now more or less meaningless (for a given value of "meaningless." Whatever that means.)]

In fact, over half of this chapter is spent defining "expectations." Jackson suggests that expectations are what we think we can help students to learn, combined with how much we value the learning objectives. And the big takeaway line is, "Expectations say more about your own sense of efficacy than they do about your students' abilities" (84). It's not about taking responsibility for learning away from students and putting it on teachers, but it IS about teachers knowing their power (Nancy Pelosi is playing on the Daily Show, plugging her book, and it was too tidy a phrase not to use) to improve their students' learning. She (Jackson, not Pelosi) goes on to explore what it means to have lowered expectations, and where it comes from, and she decides that lowered expectations are a defense mechanism: they "reduce the gap between our own understanding about what good teaching should be and our perceptions about our ability to teach effectively given our current teaching situation" (85). That makes sense--it explains why it's such a common phenomenon, and why it's so hard to get over. Fortunately, she does offer some concrete steps to help.

As the basis for these steps, she quotes Jim Collins's book Good to Great (one of my principal's current favorites) quoting Admiral Jim Stockdale: "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end--which you can never afford to lose--with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be (Collins, 2001, p. 85)" (Jackson, 2009, p. 89). She breaks this into two parts-- "Adopt an unwavering faith in yourself and the importance of your work" (91) and "Confront the brutal facts of your reality" (95).

Part of the "unwavering faith" involves teaching philosophy; why did you become a teacher? What gets you out of bed in the morning? Part of it is more pragmatic: walk the walk in your classroom. We can all sit on our blogs and bang out, "I believe all students can learn, that teamwork is more effective than individual work, that homework needs to be utilized carefully, that extrinsic awards are counterproductive," or whatever was in the most recent professional development article we've read. But it's totally different to say those things than to actually utilize group work, to give meaningful homework assignments, to never give out candy for performance.

Confronting the "brutal facts" involves more self-knowledge: what are you good at? What teaching strategies are you currently using? Then some knowledge of situation: What is the teaching task at hand? What's challenging about teaching this time in this place? (Jackson tells a story about trying to teach Shakespeare to a group of, erm, students she didn't naturally connect with.) Then some judgement: are your current strategies up to the task? If not, what can you do about it?

Jackson ends the chapter with the admonition that you have to attend to both of these parts. Faith in yourself is a necessary condition for improving your teaching, but not a sufficient condition. Knowing your situation without tending to your philosophy is a recipe for burnout. And, ultimately, once again, know that your expectations for your students are really your expectations for yourself.

Never work harder than your students, Cha. 1

Start where your students are

This chapter takes a look at some of the disconnect between a teacher's values and students' values. Let's face it--sometimes it feels like you're speaking an entire different language from your teacher. (Well, in my case, I am. But that's not the point.) Jackson uses the metaphor of "currency" to describe this difference. "Suppose," she says, "youadvertise that your house is for sale and I come take a look. [...] I dig into my pocket, pull out a few shiny beads, some seachells, and a couple of wood carvings, place them on the table, and ask for the keys" (31-2). She suggests that this is like the frustrated teacher and the unmotivated student. The teacher doesn't know why the student doesn't value the "currency" of the classroom. The student feels like she's trying her best, but the teacher just doesn't appreciate her effort. Jackon's metaphor for this is that the two parties aren't trading in the same currency.

She recommends that teachers understand what they value (what currencies they're accepting), what their students value (what currencies they're spending), and the disconnect between the two. Find ways to show students how to use their values in school (use their currencies to acquire school currency) and to code switch based on situation (acquire and spend multiple currencies). As a final point, she suggests creating community as a valuable way to help students see the value in school.

It seems like a good metaphor for the eternal disconnect between teachers and students. I value learning inerently; it's a huge part of why I became a teacher. I think that people should know as much as possible, and that they should be able to think as well as possible. So it always comes as something of a shock to me when students say, "Why should I know this?" My response is usually, "Why wouldn't you want to?" Of course, that argument doesn't work with students. It's not enough, nor should it be. In Jackson's language, we're not spending the same currency. I've spent a great deal of time in the last year striving to create community in the school, at the expense of creating it in my classroom. My frustration level has grown in the last couple of weeks, as I can only assume the frustration of my students has. Now might be an excellent time to re-examine my currencies and those of my students, and to work on creating meaningful community in my classroom to help ease these frustrations.

In a meta-analysis of the book, I like the way Jackson has her chapters structured. She outlines the scenario and describes what less-expert teachers might do. She then presents her principle, breaks it down into do-able steps and how to implement them. She occasionally adds in a "Yes, but..." box, to address probable concerns from experienced-but-not-yet-expert teachers. It's a good way of getting a huge amount of information out in an organized fashion. Also, she illustrates this with a lot of personal stories from her extensive experience. So, good on her! I'm enjoying it so far; wish I had more time to study it than once a week.

Never work harder than your students, Preface and Intro

The preface has some inspiring words and what certainly seem like keen insights into the development of teachers. Jackson defines what she calls the "master teacher mindset," a way of thinking about and looking the craft of teaching which exemplifies really effective teachers. The defining point seems to be that instead of looking for hard-and-fast answers to questions that arise while teaching, a master teacher understands that asking the right question is the more important act (2). She suggests that all teachers can be master teachers with practice, a sentiment with which I certainly agree.

The introduction reminds me of nothing so much as a quiz in Cosmo. (Erm...or so I'm told.) You answer the questions, you give yourself a score based on your answers, and then the test tells you who your true love is, or what your ideal profession is, or whatever those tests are supposed to tell you. Or, in this case, what level your teaching practice rests at. I rank in as a practitioner, the third stage of four in this hierarchy of professional development, by exactly 1 point. As you can probably tell by my tone, I'm always a little skeptical of such things; it's like a horoscope. They're vaguely enough worded that they could apply to anybody. Some parts of the "practitioner" description are very accurate, but others are not. (I flatter myself that I have a pretty high awareness of both my skills and areas of needed improvement).

Having said all that, Jackon's primary objective in giving the quiz seems to be to initiate self-reflection and increase self-awareness. This reflection seems like it's going to be a key to Jackson's book, and I don't think it's something that can be over-practiced. So despite the teen-magazine feel of the beginning of the book, Jackson's purpose in the book seem to fit pretty tightly to my motivation for reading it.