Empowering Educators

The Proficiency Cohort: Empowering Teachers Through Curriculum Development By Catherine Ritz

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our years into my job as Director of World Languages at Arlington Public Schools (MA) (arlingtonworldlanguages. blogspot.com), I felt good about the quality of our language program. All the teachers in my district were now using the target language 90% or more, classes were mostly student-centered, and we had developed a series of common assessments that focused on the three modes of communication. I was proud of our accomplishments. Still, something was gnawing at me that I couldn’t quite identify. We had made progress certainly, but had we really moved away from traditional grammar-based courses to focus on communication and proficiency development? I wanted to believe we had, but something held me back. Then one day, I was chatting with a teacher about one of her Spanish classes when I started to see things a bit more clearly. This teacher has been on board with the shift to focus on proficiency development since the day she was hired. She is as committed to professional development as I am and usually the first one to test out new teaching methods or new assessments. Like me, she believes strongly in proficiency. So when I heard her explain a unit she was preparing where the focus was the subjunctive, I was puzzled. I followed up with another of my teachers and asked her how often she was using the district curriculum maps. She gave me a sideways look and I reassured her that I really wanted her candid answer. When the truth came out, she confessed that she hadn’t looked at them once all year . . . or ever. So, how was she planning 47

Empowering Educators

her units, I naively asked? She reached for a textbook and started flipping through it. As she did, she explained that most of the textbook chapters were focused loosely on a theme, but there was always some annoying grammar point she had to shoehorn in that didn’t make any sense, but she taught it anyway. Sometimes, she explained, she felt like the kids got overwhelmed with some of the grammar, but it was in the book and that was that. Curriculum maps weren’t needed because, quite simply, the textbook was the curriculum. These conversations and others made me reconsider the premise upon which all our teaching was taking place. Yes, the teachers had the tools they needed to immerse students in the language, engage them in interactive activities, and assess their speaking, listening, reading, and writing ability—but were they doing all of this on a curricular foundation that was fundamentally flawed?

The Cohort If we were ever going to really move forward as a district, I concluded, we needed to let go of our textbooks and develop our own thematic-based, proficiency-oriented curricula. The teachers knew what their students needed and how to best deliver instruction, but they felt an obligation to cover what was in the book. I wanted to empower teachers to design thematic curricula that met the needs of their students and kept them engaged. With the support of the district administration, we launched what came to be known as the Proficiency Cohort. My goal was for teachers to take ownership of their courses by developing a deep understanding of best practices in world language curriculum and then designing new units for one of their classes. Most importantly, we would work collaboratively in this new adventure, learning and growing together as a team. In designing how the Cohort would work, I identified four main phases:

1. Recruit motivated teachers. These teachers would become ambassadors and advocates for proficiency-based curriculum. I invited all teachers in the department to join so as not to exclude anyone, but I also tapped some teachers I knew would be particularly motivated. In the end, the Cohort had seven teachers from both the middle and high schools—two Mandarin teachers, one Latin teacher, four Spanish teachers— and me.

2. Study group. Once the teachers were in place, we held a study group throughout the spring semester, meeting once a month. We used this time to build our knowledge base. We read two books together: The Keys to Assessing Language Performance: A Teacher's Manual for Measuring Student Progress by Paul Sandrock (2010), and Implementing Integrated Performance Assessment by Bonnie Adair-Hauck, Eileen Glisan, and Francis Troyan (2013). I wanted to focus on working backward from the summative assessment to design our curricula. Using the books as our guides, we each wrote sample units and 48

sample Integrated Performance Assessments (IPAs), which we discussed and critiqued as a group. We all really wanted to see some courses in action, however, so I reached out to a friend and colleague in Wellesley Public Schools, MA—Tim Eagan—who graciously allowed us to come observe. We were all blown away by a French class we saw taught by Rebecca Blouwolff, who had (on her own) undergone the same transformation to her curricula that we were just beginning. [She wrote about her experience in an article in The Language Educator, March/April 2015: “Reinvigorating Teaching Toward a Student-Centered Classroom.”] Blouwolff was kind enough to come speak to our group after we observed her, and this turned out to be a critical component of our success. We had been looking at a lot of theoretical teaching, but needed to see something concrete. After talking to her, we all started to feel like we had a clearer vision for our courses and could imagine what the day-to-day classes would look like.

3. Collaborative curriculum writing. Over the summer, my district funded some time for us to work collaboratively on writing our very own curricula. We had each written a practice unit during the Study Group time, so the next step was to flesh out a full curriculum, with each teacher committing to working on one course. The other courses taught would not change, which made the task a little less daunting. We structured our summer time together as fluctuating between independent work and frequent collaborative time to ask questions and share work for feedback. We had 3 full days to work together, and then teachers were given 5 more paid days to finish their work over the summer on their own.

4. Implementation and PLC. In September 2015, it was launch time! With our revised curriculum maps in hand, we each began teaching our new courses. I knew that everyone would need ongoing support, so we agreed to create a Professional Learning Community (PLC) during dedicated district PLC time. We have had meetings about once a month to check in and share our work, our successes, our frustrations, and anything for which we needed support.

Our New Curriculum Each of the units we developed started with a description of the summative assessment that provided students with an authentic and meaningful context for their learning. For example, in the Home & Family unit for our Spanish 1 course, the summative assessment overview is: You’re spending a summer in Venezuela as part of a study abroad program, and are living with a local family. You’re also taking classes as part of the program, and have been asked to put together a presentation about your Venezuelan family and home,

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Students see a purpose to what we’re doing because the lesson is connected to their reality.

Go to the interactive version of The Language Educator to see a sample unit from Arlington Public Schools.

which will be posted on the program’s website to help promote it in future years. In order to prepare this presentation, you must first gather information about local families, family names, and what typical homes look like, imagining what the family you live with and their home is like. You will then discuss your findings with a classmate and interview them about their Venezuelan family and home. Finally, you will create a digital slideshow in which you present your Venezuelan family, their names, what they are like, and what their home looks like. We drilled down the goals of each unit using student-friendly “can-do” statements, and made these available to students before beginning each unit. I also began collecting authentic resources for some of the units and housing them on Pinterest. (You can check out my collection, sorted by unit for Level 1 French and Spanish at www.pinterest.com/ritzforeignlang). In launching our new curriculum, we fully expected the need to make some tweaks and adjustments as we went. How long would each unit actually take? Did we choose the right authentic resources to support our goals? Would the students be engaged in our units or would we get a lot of eye rolling? We found that—while we definitely needed to make revisions to our curriculum moving forward—there was one thing that challenged us the most: time. Arlington High School Spanish teacher Christina Toro put it most succinctly: “I want to do a good job for my students so I spent hours scouring the Internet for just the right resource.” Her colleague and fellow Spanish teacher María Arévalo agreed: “It’s very rewarding when you teach a classroom enriched by authentic materials and performance assessments. However, sometimes the amount of time that you spend trying to find the right material or creating something authentic is a little bit too much.” As the department leader, my job will be to find ways to better share resources, and reuse and recycle material and assessments so we are not constantly reinventing the wheel, and take this new initiative one step at a time so as not to overwhelm our hardworking teachers. Still, the long hours we each put into redesigning curricula was worth the positive impact we are seeing on student learning and engagement. Arévalo notes that students “enjoy the class more because they get more involved,” and that they “appreciate that you aren’t

using ‘fake’ material that they usually find very boring.” Toro also quickly saw positive changes in her students, remarking that since we have begun using the new curriculum, “students are happier,” and that they “see a purpose to what we’re doing because the lesson is connected to their reality.” Common assessment results from the courses where the new curriculum is being taught have confirmed what we have been seeing anecdotally; students are performing as well or better than their counterparts in courses using the old, textbook-based curricula.

Moving Forward with Empowered Teachers Through the structure of the Proficiency Cohort, our district has taken its first steps toward curricular freedom. Taking the power away from our almighty textbooks and putting it in the hands of our teachers has been an exciting endeavor. Our work is still in its infancy, however, and our next steps are to continue to grow the knowledge and experience base of our pioneering Cohort members, as well as share what we have learned with the rest of the department. Looking at the Level 1 Spanish curriculum we designed, for example, we have begun revising it to create a Novice-level curriculum that can work for all the modern languages we offer: French, Spanish, Italian, and Mandarin. With an eye on conserving our limited resources, using the same thematic units for the Novice course will help us save time and also facilitate collaboration across languages. We plan to roll out the new Novice curriculum next year in all our Level 1 classes, with teachers from the Proficiency Cohort mentoring those teachers who will be experiencing this new curriculum for the first time. While we are taking the process step by step, we are tentatively planning to roll out more curricula to the department in the years to come. Taking the curriculum journey together as a cohort, we have been able to put theory into practice, transform textbook dependency into teacher empowerment, and better engage our students in meaningful and authentic language learning. Catherine Ritz is the Director of World Languages at Arlington Public Schools, Arlington, Massachusetts.

References Adair-Hauck, B., Glisan, E.W., & Troyan, F.J. (2013). Implementing integrated performance assessment. Alexandria, VA: ACTFL.

The Language Educator

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Blouwolff, R. (2015, Mar/April). Reinvigorating teaching toward a student-centered classroom. The Language Educator, 36–38.

Aug/Sept 2016

Sandrock, P. (2010). The keys to assessing language performance: A teacher’s manual for measuring student progress. Alexandria, VA: ACTFL.

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