View Content #25210

By Lindsay Marean, InterCom Editor

“A stitch in time saves nine.” “For want of a nail... the rider was lost.” “Spend a week teaching behavior at the beginning of the year and save weeks of instructional time throughout the year.” Pick your proverb; the idea is the same. Work up front can save us from terrible stress later. Here are some examples relevant to language teaching:

• Invest extra time and effort in student relationships when you first meet them, and enjoy a cooperative group of learners all year.
• Decide what the essential understandings of your year’s curriculum are before you start creating learning experiences and sketching out the year’s schedule, and feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the year no matter what setbacks you encountered.
• Reflect on and hold true to the strategies that you hold most dear (target language use? authentic resources? learner choice?), and feel good about your teaching style when questioned or observed.
• Visualize in detail what a good student behavior looks like in a certain area (entering the classroom, working with a partner, participating in whole-class discussion), and you can present clear expectations to your classes.
• Save exemplary student work (not only excellent products but also evidence of processes that lead to learning) to use as models for future years, and you will have crowdsourced your reputation as a teacher for incoming students.
• Choose and defend your protected professional development time (#langchat once a week? ACTFL convention in November? 15 minutes on Monday morning to digest InterCom?), and you will feel the energy of a person who is growing in his/her profession.

Here are a few caveats: first, each of these (and any other example you can think of) requires hard work up front. Yes, you will have less stress later, but that doesn’t erase the difficulty of the initial work. Second, remember that you can’t do all of the up-front things at once. Last week’s Topic of the Week article by Mandy Gettler reminds us all to articulate our values and prioritize our use of time. Be kind to yourself in your expectations. And third, you will need to know yourself in order to be true to your values and commit to the hard choices that support them. We encourage you to reflect often and deeply on your values and practices; the languaging dispositions that Christopher Daradics introduces in his July 2 Topic of the Week article are a good place to start.

We at CASLS are unfailingly awed by the passion and accomplishments of the language professionals that we encounter in our work, and we wish you the best this summer and in the coming school year.