(Feel free to skip down to the practical videos on Estabishing Meaning and on Pop-up Grammar!)
Good language teaching consists of identifiable, learnable skills.
Regardless of the curriculum you use, regardless of your personality or overall teaching style, these skills are what make it work.
But what are those skills? How important are different skills compared to each other? Is there an ideal order in which to develop these language teaching skills?
I’ve thought about these questions for years and, while I don’t think there is only one right way to define, subdivide, or sequence the skills, I’ve recently come up with a system I’m satisfied with.
Inspired by the desire to support teachers in ongoing skill-building throughout the school-year, I defined nine core skills for Acquisition-Driven Instruction—one for each month. (Acquisition-Driven Instruction, or ADI, is instruction geared toward acquiring a language for the sake of communicative proficiency, which therefore prioritizes engaging with comprehensible input, as opposed to instruction that spends a lot of time teaching about a language.)
Here are the skills:
Each of the skills has lots of subskills and associated key practices, so I spent the summer breaking the skills down even further and assembling them into a “curriculum” for language teachers, which I was able to flesh out into an entire course using the Classroom Voces® / Teacher’s Discovery® teaching platform.
Here you can see what this looks like with the September unit showing:
I put a lot of guidance in.
Here is the expanded version of that same September menu:
I wanted to include enough that even experienced teachers would find plenty of pro tips and ways to be challenged, while newer teachers would know what was most important to focus on.
The program is kept bite-sized and focused (I think and hope) by…
- having each item within each unit be very short, targeted, and clearly labeled;
- collapsible menu sections; and
- frequent reminders on the content pages of what is more essential and what is less essential.
Can-Do Statements for Teachers
One of the things I’m especially excited about is the use of can-do statements for teacher skills. All the menu items in the above screenshot that have the little blue mountain peak have at least one can-do statement associated with them.
If you feel like this approach might help you grow this year, check out the course! You can participate at whatever level works for you: just following along and applying the content, or growing with a community of fellow teachers, or meeting with me one-on-one along the way.
Either way, I encourage you to get back to some basics this year. Here are two videos from the September unit to help you do that!
I wish you a year of joyful teaching and of rewarding growth!
