Category: Path to Proficiency

Path to Proficiency Teacher Preparation Tpep

It’s TPEP time again criterion #1… revisited

August 7, 2019 Published by: Lynn

This will be the seventh year of the Washington State Teacher/Principal Evaluation project or TPEP. Every public school teacher in the state of Washington is evaluated against eight criteria and graded on a scale from 1-4. A rating of four means distinguished, a rating of one means you are in trouble.

I had been teaching middle school for 30+ years and figured I was starting to get the hang of it. Until seven years ago, the evaluation process consisted of establishing some professional growth goals at the beginning of the year and then meeting with an administrator at the end of the year to discuss the achievement of the self-established goals. It was a piece of cake. Formal evaluations were for new teachers in their first three years of the profession. And then TPEP came along…

At first I was really nervous, lots of us were. I know teachers who left the profession because of fear of the process and the possible ramifications. I decided seven years ago that I wanted a four, or a rating of distinguished, and I was going to study the criteria and the rubrics for evaluation. So I did, and I know the rubrics better than most administrators.

I still get nervous, over plan, and can’t sleep the night before my formal evaluations each year, but I did score a four and realized the eight criteria are just good teaching.

I have been sharing my learning on TPEP for many years but I am continually changing and updating the workshop. I will be doing a free presentation Wednesday, August 14th at the University of Washington so I will be posting a series of blog posts to support the presentation.

Although everyone is evaluated on the same eight criteria, there are three different frameworks districts can choose from as an evaluation instrument. They are the Marzano Teacher Evaluation Model, the CEL5D+ Teacher Evaluation Rubric (commonly referred to as the UW model), and Danielson’s Framework for Teaching. I am focusing on the areas in which the three frameworks overlap.

Criterion #1 Centering instruction on high expectations for student achievement.

The overlap of the three frameworks for criterion number one is communicating learning targets to students and celebrating success.

I have been posting learning goals for some time, but the shift for me is constantly physically going back to the posted goals and checking in on where we are during and at the end of each class period.

I also explicitly teach the students about the path to proficiency and how to level up. Here is an example about Seafair, a hydroplane race extravaganza held the first weekend in August each year in Seattle. I explain Seafair to my students using the different proficiency levels.

Novice Low- Boats, airplanes, swimming, sun, fun, bathing suits, Lake Washington, food, music, drinks (At least two target language words related to the prompt, no cognates or brand names)

Novice Mid- Seafair wild many boats airplanes Blue Angels Swimming in lake, food, fun, music, drinks (At least one connection to a verb related to the prompt)

Novice High- I like Seafair. fun Lake Washington food races airplanes there is boats. People swim in the water. (At least two complete clauses with two different verbs related to the prompt)

Intermediate Low- Seafair is in Seattle each year. people boats. They watch races. There are airplanes. water fights I like Seafair and it is fun. Do you like Seafair? (3-4 simple sentences related to the prompt with at least 3 details)

Intermediate Mid- Seafair is in Seattle each year. There are lots of people in boats on lake Washington. They watch the boat races. There are also airplanes that fly, the Blue Angels. I like Seafair because it is fun to have water fights with other boats. Although it is really crowded and rough on the lake sometime, Seafair is a lot of fun. (At least two complex components with groupings of sentences)

Intermediate High- Ever since I was a little girl, my family has gone to the hydroplane races at Seafair which happens the first weekend of August in Seattle each year. First, we load up the boat with food, drinks, water balloons, and squirt guns. Then we put up our pirate flag, which means we are willing to participate in water fights. Then we look for other boats that want to have a water fight, and launch water balloons at them. I like Seafair because it is fun to have water fights with other boats. Even though it is really crowded and rough on the lake sometimes, Seafair is a lot of fun. (Evidence of at least 3-4 complex components and connectedness)

Then I have the students do a matching activity where there are descriptions of a circus by proficiency level and labels for the different proficiency levels and they have to race to match them up. Lastly, I have them describe school in groups according to the different proficiency levels and write their descriptions on butcher paper and we try to guess the proficiency level of each description.

I like to show my students how to level up with the resources at the Shelby County Schools World Language Website.

level_1_h_unit_3

And then we celebrate success! Here is a link to a former post.

Tpep Criterion #1: Centering instruction on high expectations for student achievement.

Path to Proficiency Teacher effectiveness Teacher Preparation Tpep

#TELLcollabseattle

January 21, 2017 Published by: Lynn

Today at TELLCollab in Seattle, Thomas Sauer reaffirmed my belief in the posting, copying, chanting, and choral reading of the learning targets with students.

The Washington State Teacher and Principal Evaluation Project (TPEP) has eight criterion. Public school districts in Washington State evaluate teachers on these eight criterion using one of three frameworks: Marzano, Danielson, or CEL5D+. There are differences between the frameworks but for criterion number one, all three models agree that teachers need to communicate clear learning targets to students. Below is how each of the frameworks addresses criterion number one and the commonalities.

Criterion 1: Centering instruction on high expectations for student achievement.

The Marzano Teacher Evaluation Model

1.1: Providing Clear Learning Goals and Scales (Rubrics)

1.2: Celebrating Success

1.3: Understanding Students’ Interests and Backgrounds

1.4: Demonstrating Value and Respect for Typically Underserved Students

CEL 5D+™ Teacher Evaluation Rubric

P1: Connection to standards, broader purpose and transferable skill

P4: Communication of learning target(s)

P5: Success and performance task(s)

SE3: Work of high cognitive demand

CEC3: Discussion, collaboration and accountability

Danielson’s Framework for Teaching

2b: Establishing a Culture for Learning

3a: Communicating with Students

3c: Engaging Students In Learning

Learning targets are best when they are consistently used and revisited during, and at the end of each class. Teachers can check for understanding during the lesson by having students ask each other how they are doing in relation to reaching the target for the day. Have students self-evaluate at the end of class on their progress toward the learning target. How do you communicate learning targets to students? Follow the conversation at #TELLcollabseattle.

Here is a comparison of the three frameworks used for Washington State Teacher Evaluation. commonalities among frameworks

Path to Proficiency Teacher effectiveness Teacher Preparation Tpep

Let’s Talk at TELLcollab Seattle!

December 3, 2016 Published by: Lynn

Give yourself the gift of professional rejuvenation! Reserve your spot now to join state and national leaders in world language education as we come together January 21st and 22nd, 2017 for TELLcollab Seattle! This “unconference” is a different type of professional learning experience where according to Thomas Sauer “whoever comes are the right people” and “there are no attendees only participants.”

Catherine Ousselin and I attended this unconference in Austin, Texas in June 2016 and we left inspired, invigorated, and we would like to personally invite you to join us for a weekend of collaboration. Check out my blog posts about the experience.

For more information go to the website and register here http://www.tellcollabseattle.org/. The cost is $99 + $6.44 processing fee for advanced registrations. At the door it will be $129 + $8.09. The Washington Association for Language Teachers (WAFLT) is providing free clock hours. Morning refreshments and lunches are included. There will be an optional evening activity on Saturday night to further network, make friends, and show off our beautiful city to the out-of-town participants.

Organizer Michele Aoki states “This is a unique opportunity for teachers. Not only will you have access to two of the strongest leaders in K-12 World Language education in the country from the TELL Project, Thomas Sauer and Alyssa Villarreal, but you’ll have their expert facilitation to help us get the most out of our own local expertise. In other words, it’s not just new information about language teaching and learning, it’s a new personal experience in learning. WE EDUCATORS need to continually refresh ourselves so that we feel inspired and ready to inspire our students.”

This is a great way to take a leadership role and bring a different kind of professional development experience to your building. So, please register, come, and help spread the word among your colleagues. Check out the flyer here tell_collab_uw_2017.

Path to Proficiency Teacher effectiveness

Progress toward Proficiency: Supporting Student Learning.

August 31, 2016 Published by: Lynn

After a learning experience, I try to reflect on ideas I want to incorporate into my teaching. This blog post is a reflection of the Tellcollab Unconference I attended in June. I decided to do three blog posts: preparing for student learning, advancing student learning, and supporting student learning. I also decided to publish one in June, one in July, and one in August, so that I would revisit and refresh my memory and carry it into my school year which starts after Labor day. Plus, this area is the one I most need to work on, hence it took me the longest to write. So here is part three, what I learned at Tellcollab about supporting student learning.

Supporting student learning, it’s a shift. This year I am going to focus on what students can do, not what they can’t. It’s about growth and opportunities to compare their current performance to their previous performance. Progress is addicting and I want to get them hooked.

How do I provide more effective feedback to push that progress? How do I get students to provide quality feedback for each other? They need to see quality feedback modeled, and have meaningful practice on how to assess peers. One suggestion is to watch the television show The Voice and listen to how the judges give specific descriptive feedback. I posted this before but I LOVE this example of descriptive feedback called Austin’s Butterfly.

Critique their peer feedback sometimes, not necessarily just their work. Find ways to link feedback to spontaneous output, and for them to reflect on it! Possibly record themselves and transcribe for homework? Have them ask how did I do? What do I need to do to get to the next step? Provide in the moment feedback… to get to the top layer you need to…

Other ideas from the unconference: give the students a punch list of 5 things and score your partner. Provide demonstrations on quality feedback and practice activities like fish bowl, think a-louds, and Socratic seminar. I want to create a list of comments students can say to provide feedback to each other in French and Spanish.

Technology has made it much easier to record students and easier for me to provide feedback. Check out this Google form for self-evaluation from Catherine Oussselin. Students can call google voice and respond to a prompt, record, and keep all their recordings in google classroom from Sept to May to show growth. Other recording options include Flipgrid, WEvideo, and Vacaroo.

My biggest take away from the unconference is that this year I am going to use more student reflections. This can be as simple as highlight something you are proud of, or highlight something you are not sure of in a different color, or write me a question. Reflecting on learning is higher order thinking.

I plan to introduce quality reflection processes to students at the beginning of the year. I want to keep a running dialogue with students about their progress in their interactive notebooks.

Don’t forget to use these self assessment and feedback tools from the Tellproject.org on yourself.

Path to Proficiency Teacher effectiveness

Progress Toward Proficiency: Advancing Student Learning

July 29, 2016 Published by: Lynn

Now that we know where we want to go, how do we get there? How do you advance student learning?

Well you build your arsenal of activities, curate authentic resources, continually add to your tool box of techniques for providing comprehensible input, and provide opportunities for students to be autonomous learners. A really good place to start is at Tellcollab.org/Startalk. There are videos of classroom vignettes, interviews with veteran teachers, essays, self-assessment tools, and my favorites, the infographics!

An interesting activity that I just added to my arsenal, is the day two opening activity of the Tellcollab Unconference called Powerpoint Karaoke. Prepare slides with various random pictures that can be described in the target language. Give each student a minute to describe the images and vote on the best one by audience applause! See the video on twitter #TELLcollab.

Teaching grammar in context was one of the session topics. Here is an example of how I teach grammar in context. I prefer to use the pace model and storytelling, Teaching-Grammar-in-Context. How do you teach grammar in context?

To keep students in the target language, provide lots of practice in circumlocution and clarification techniques. To teach circumlocution, there are a couple of phrases that are very helpful: It’s a thing that… It’s a person that…. It’s a food that…Play the Pyramid game. Have one student with back to board, the rest of the team takes turns to get through list of 6 words.

Another tool I intend to incorporate this year is Interactive Student Notebooks. In the target language, we will set up interactive notebooks with proficiency charts and their first day writing sample. In the first day lesson, the students do a 5 minute write, if possible they describe themselves in the target language or list all the words they know. If they don’t know any French or Spanish I have them write about themselves in English which also gives me information about them and their writing abilities. I write the proficiency level on the paper and it becomes evidence of student growth for me, the student, the parents, and my administrators. Here are more websites with information on interactive notebooks. Here is a blog in french and this one too. Here is one in Spanish and this one. Most importantly, interactive notebooks are not craft projects. It’s about students organizing and reflecting on their learning and becoming more autonomous.

Check out the TELL videos on Youtube and below are links to those infographics I mentioned.

AdvanceLearning_Engagement_Infographic, AdvanceLearning_TargetLanguage_Infographic, AdvanceLearning_EmpoweringLanguageUse_Infographic

Path to Proficiency Teacher effectiveness

Progress Toward Proficiency: Planning

July 6, 2016 Published by: Lynn

One of our first tasks at TELLcollab was to describe an effective language educator in three words. It was amazing how many different variations there were, I chose progress toward proficiency. This would be a great activity to use with students. Use three words to describe yourself, three words to summarize a reading, three words to describe an event, simply share out, or create memes and post to a padlet page.

It’s not what the teacher knows it’s what they do. What are these things the teacher does that make them more effective? The TELL framework divides these things into seven domains. These seven domains fit into three categories: planning for learning, advancing learning, and supporting learning.

Planning for Learning: Goal #2 How do you get started?

My opening routine allows me to start from day one, minute one with 90% of the class period in the target language, however this year I am adding a refined focus on the learning of the proficiency levels which might require a little more English, but I think it will be worth it. After modeling the greeting and singing the song of the week, I get a writing sample to determine the starting level for each student.

Then, I do a proficiency level demonstration in the target language introducing my family. First, I give examples from novice-low with just relationship words like my husband, my daughter, my sons, and then give another demonstration at the intermediate-mid level describing each person. This year, as a comprehension check, we will use English to have students demonstrate knowledge of the proficiency levels by describing Seafair to someone who has never been to Seattle, this could be done with any topic like a circus, or a school environment. Here is my day one lesson plan, Progressing Toward Proficiency Curriculum by Lynn Johnston, and practice activities, Progressing Toward Proficiency. Also, check out the resources at SCS world languages weebly and the Creative Language Classroom.

Step one, set targets and educate students and parents about the proficiency levels. Step two, monitor progress toward goals. Another thing I am going to try this year is proficiency bulletin boards. I like the idea from the Creative Language Classroom website of having the path visible and as a manipulative for students to celebrate their progress.

Other hot topics at the #TELLcollab unconference under the planning category included: staying in the target language 90%, using comprehensible input, using authentic resources, designing thematic units, and using Integrated Performance Assessments, check out the resources at tellproject.org/tools/startalk for more information on these topics. I really like this infographic.

AdvanceLearning_LearningTargets_Infographic_4

At the end of the first day we were asked to tweet out our learning or take way for the day. This would also be a great closure activity with students. You can see these on twitter at #TELLcollab. My take away is that we are all progressing toward proficiency and we are never done learning.

Path to Proficiency Teacher effectiveness

#TELLcollab 2016

June 27, 2016 Published by: Lynn

What is Tellcollab?

Wednesday, June 22, was my last day of school this year, a full work day for me, and I still had to get the groceries for my mom’s birthday dinner that evening. Thursday, June 23, I spent the day traveling to Austin, Texas for the Tellcollab conference June 24-25. I arrived back at my home in Seattle last night at 11pm, and I am up today, Sunday, June 26^th at 6:00am excited to design my new first week of school unit, teaching the students about the path to proficiency.

What inspired me to start planning the next school year before I even had a chance to celebrate the end of this one? The Tellcollab conference on Teacher Effectiveness in Language Learning has me excited to take my students away from points, and focus on progressing toward proficiency instead. This is going to be a huge shift after 33 years of playing the points game, but after this conference, shifts gotta happen.

The Tellcollab conference is an unconference where the attendees set the schedule and collaborate around goals. We started by identifying something we wanted to learn and something we could teach to others. We wrote them on sticky notes and created sessions on common topics. There were no presenters or powerpoints, but like-minded educators sitting around a table discussing and creating to improve teacher effectiveness in World Language education. You can check out the information shared at the conference and the hot seat speakers by clicking on the schedule links to the google documents that were created at the conference.

The Teacher Effectiveness for Language Learning (TELL) Framework establishes those characteristics and behaviors that model teachers exhibit. There is much more information and loads of teacher tools at tellproject.org. You can follow the conversation on twitter at #tellcollab.

The framework is made up of seven domains that reflect the crucial characteristics of an effective world language teacher.

I am creating my first unit for next year teaching the proficiency levels to students and parents. I like the idea I heard from Alyssa Villarreal of having students describe a circus to an alien by proficiency level. So the group with novice-low can only use words, novice-mid can only use words and phrases, novice-high uses single sentences, intermediate-low uses sentences and connectors etc. See her complete lesson plans here. There are some other ideas posted here.

Over the next few days I will be sharing my learning on preparing for student learning, advancing student learning, and supporting student learning. Two other fabulous resources are the Path2proficiency website and the SCS World Language Weebly.

One of the first activities was to record your self on flipgrid with your goals for the unconference. My original goal was to learn about the unconference, how it is structured, the benefits. I left with so many new goals I didn’t even know I had before Friday. Goal number one achieved. Now on to creating student badges!

Path to Proficiency

The Path to Proficiency

July 30, 2015 Published by: Lynn

Last June while doing final interviews, I used this rubric from Jefferson County Public Schools which I found at the Creative Language Classroom website. When I explained the rubric to my eighth graders and told them that to reach novice high or intermediate low they needed to start stringing sentences together on various topics. It became like a game to see who could make the longest sentences or say the most on a single topic. I was impressed with the amount of language they were using and the original sentences they were creating. Click here to download this rubric.

jcps-rubric-pic (1)

This summer, I found this path to proficiency poster on pinterest thanks to the SCS World Language program and I am going to start school showing the students the target instead of waiting until the final exam. Click here for link to this poster.

On the first day of school I have the students write down anything they can say in the target language on a piece of paper. I collect them and score them on the rubric. Most students are novice low. At the end of the year I do the same thing, ask them to write about themselves and score their papers with the same rubric.. Most students can write on a variety of topics to land between novice high and intermediate low. This becomes evidence of student growth for my evaluation and the students are impressed by how much they have learned.

Check out this free resource http://www.creativelanguageclass.com/product/proficiency-indicator-signs/

Screen-Shot-2015-08-01-at-11.48.56-PM