#47 - 9 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Moving from Grammar-Heavy to Proficiency Instruction

WEBVTT
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What's up?
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Kellokay salute, world language teachers.
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Welcome to the Practical Proficiency Podcast, where we make the transition to proficiency-oriented instruction in your world language class.
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In a way that works for you, your unique context and teaching style, and doesn't sacrifice your well-being along the way.
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I'm your host, Devin Gunning, the teacher, author, conference host, curriculum creator, and consultant behind La Libre Language Learning.
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This podcast is for the creative world language teacher like you, who's ready to touch the overwhelming pressure of switching to acquisition-driven instruction and CI overnight.
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You're ready to discover how using more target language in class can actually bring you and your students more joy instead of having to play with practical, authentic, and down-to-earth strategies that don't require reinventing the wheel for more training.
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We all work together towards the magic of a community-based, target language-rich classroom rooted in the power of community and comprehensible input.
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Let's go.
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Hey, welcome to the Practical Proficiency Podcast.
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I'm excited to talk to you today about a really important topic that's going to help a lot of us in this stage that we're in right now, at least in the US, of transitioning gracefully in a way that doesn't make you want to tear your hair out or feel like a deflated bouncy castle at the end of the day, from what is most common, which is a lot of legacy methods in the world language classroom, into the proficiency-oriented classroom that you are looking for.
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This is the 2026 edition, fresh and updated based on what I, as a curriculum consultant, have been seeing on the landscape right now, what a lot of schools are requesting trainings on.
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And with the teachers that I work with in the Practical Proficiency Network, what they're struggling with and what I myself certainly struggle with a lot when making this transition.
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Let's talk about some of the easiest and most common mistakes to make when you're making this move.
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Because the reality is that in this day and age, there's a lot of Sunday night scaries for getting up to teach your classroom in the morning on Monday because it feels so energy draining.
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Like I'm not kidding when I say you feel like the sad remnants of a bouncy castle at the end of the day.
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So let's talk about how we can pour a little bit back into your cup and make these this transition feel like a journey, like it's joyful, instead of something that's so intense, like a sprint.
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So let's talk about it.
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First of all, let's think about why this transition feels so hard.
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This is the number one thing that a lot of teachers new to this are wondering about because this is proficiency is best practice.
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It's the most research-based method of working with students who are trying to jump from, you know, a beginner in a language.
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And it should, of course, be intuitive, right?
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It should be natural.
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You're just working with the natural processes of language acquisition.
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Ha ha.
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Hilarious.
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It's not like that at all.
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Proficiency does work with the natural processes of language.
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However, we're doing this in an artificial environment, which is the classroom.
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The classroom is a very specific context with a very, very riddled history of how it works with language as a subject.
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So here are some of the big things that you will run into.
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Number one, thinking that your class is a subject instead of a hands-on skill.
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I've said it a million times and I will say it again here.
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My mantra as a proficiency coach is that your class is a skill, not a subject.
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Proficiency means that we are working with a real-world tangible skill at the end of your class.
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It is not an accumulation of knowledge, it is a tangible skill that you can measure.
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Your students should come into your classroom with very limited working proficiency in your language, maybe only saying hi or knowing a few words from the stuff they see on TV in your language.
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Then at the end of a year's worth of instruction, they should be able to get to somewhere between the novice mid and novice high point.
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Elementary teachers, this is not you.
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Don't worry, there's a whole nother episode for you.
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But they should be able to work functionally in a novice mid environment or expectation from the actful 2024 updated performance indicators, which means that a novice mid can tentatively, shakily describe themselves, give some basic biographical information about themselves and understand when somebody else does so.
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They can also give simple descriptions of simple objects and talk about things that are part of their very real and tangible everyday lives, and they can get through a somewhat murky survival situation in another culture.
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Like they can easily greet somebody and they can find things that they need and get things when they need.
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It'll be messy, but they can do it.
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For a full detailed breakdown on this, check out my actful deep dives.
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It's on the blog, and it's also many other podcast episodes that do like a full 30-minute deep dive on like what can a novice mid do?
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What can a novice low do?
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What can a novice?
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That whole deal.
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You'll love it.
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But this is a huge misconception that really steers people the wrong way if you're approaching your classroom as if it's an academic subject, because these two ideas are completely incongruent, which is why many of us are trying to move to methodologies and activities that promote the idea that this is a skill, like CI, definitely promotes that communication is a skill that you have to practice and actually do to get better at.
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Whereas an academic approach involves quite a lot of learning facts about language, learning facts about a culture, understanding how a language works, like the intricacies of it, almost like instead of learning how to drive a car, you're learning how the engine works.
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So these are some of the ways that we're gonna get tripped up in this.
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So there, I do have a whole nother blog post and all kinds of trainings about this topic.
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So to just give you a quick little snippet, if this is the first time you're hearing this idea, here's the idea in a nutshell.
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You are a lot more like the art teacher than you are like the history teacher.
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If you're an art teacher and your objective, the reason you get paid, is to help students express their creativity and learn some essential painting skills by the end of your class, then you should not be spending all of your time in art class doing art history and learning art theory.
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That is a tiny, tiny piece of what it means to be an art class.
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Like if I was in your art class and we were looking at Frida Kahlo Expression and self-portraits, it would be really cool to do like a 10-minute intro, look at some Frida paintings, talk about her really interesting life, and talk about how cool and how much messaging there was in her art and why she did self-portraits so much.
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And then I want to make my own self-portrait.
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I'm inspired by seeing Frida that I want my own creativity to be out there in the world, messy, imperfect, but I'm painting in painting class.
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That's what I expect to do.
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It's the same in music class.
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If you were a band teacher and you're teaching your students mostly about music theory, music theory is, of course, very relevant to music, but it's actually an entirely separate class for most musicians.
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I was a musician for most of my life, and this is like a big debate that happens in there.
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And um, for musicians, like a lot of people struggle with the concept of like music theory is its own deal.
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You don't need to know music theory in order to play an instrument.
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It helps you play the instrument better and understand your music more, but I never took a music theory class in my life, and I was first chair cello for like seven years.
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So it's important to note that the reason I got good at playing cello was because I practiced, because I spent all of my time in orchestra class learning pieces of music and learning how to play more accurately and listening to my teacher when he told me how important it was to practice.
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So it was getting a lot of time on my feet.
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If you play a sport, I play a sport, then the coach might set you up with like 10 to 15 minutes of, hey, here's the play, here's how you accurately pass the ball, here are some strategies to improve your footwork.
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Here's a really great way to make sure that you better understand the rules of, let's say it's lacrosse.
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Um, these are some of the cool history things about lacrosse.
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Now it's practice time.
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We're gonna spend 60 minutes playing lacrosse.
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And as I see that you're making consistent errors in this way, like your swing is always going to the left.
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I, as your coach, am gonna show you, hey, swing it this way a little bit for, I don't even remember what that thing's called, but like the stick and all that, all that junk, the lacrosse stick.
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Um, throw it the other way and you'll probably experience more success.
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Our classes are a lot more like those hands-on disciplines: music, sports, arts, any of that junk, like all that cool stuff.
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We are a lot more like that than we are like history class.
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History is an academic subject.
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There's a lot of cool hands-on stuff to it, but we are not an academic subject.
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We are a skill.
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To understand the differences with this and why this has become a big problem in our profession, you have to understand that language for a long time was taught from ancient languages like Greek and Latin, where the purpose of those classes was to teach literacy and to make you a more well-rounded conversationalist in 18th and 19th century circles.
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So a lot of our language systems in schools are still based off of this concept that we learn Spanish to sound smart, not to be able to speak Spanish.
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We're learning French in order to sound smart, not to be able to read Spanish or write Spanish or speak it.
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So that is what we are up against.
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That is why when you are expecting the transition to feel natural, a lot of the times it's not because we're working in an antiquated system with, frankly, a lot of the times, pretty outdated resources, because it takes a long time in the field of education for the research to actually be reflected in the materials.
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That's why it's so nice when you have a lot of curriculum freedom.
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It's also a lot of responsibility, but you can work around this.
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All of this is a lot of setup to help you with mistake number one, which is this colleague expectation.
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Many of your colleagues have heard time and time again from administrators and from really annoying podcasters like me that proficiency is the most effective method we have right now.
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It could always change, but based off of research, this is the most effective way that we can get students from one proficiency level to the next the fastest.
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And your colleagues, and probably you as well, are working with materials that are actually touting the opposite of that very often.
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And they're very much feeling alienated by this idea that, like, a lot of the stuff that they've been using for years that they've been getting great results with on their assessments somehow no longer apply.
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That can be really alienating.
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So don't expect your colleagues to be really excited to be on board about changing the way that they teach.
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That's not easy news for anybody to hear.
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So, mistake number one is don't expect your all your colleagues to be on board, even if you're presenting really compelling arguments for like why this is a great way to go.
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It's very hard for people sometimes to let go of materials that have worked for them in the past.
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And here's the thing that is working against us in this arena is that a lot of the times if you teach students a memorizable grammar concept that is difficult to wrap your head around, like something like the subjunctive, and you're doing a lot of intense, rigorous conjugation work and memory work and all of that, like that stuff really is difficult.
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However, it's not rigorous because it's the very lowest tier of Bloom's taxonomy because it's a lot of memorization, it's a lot of fact recall, and it's a lot of interpretation of facts and data, but you're not interpreting anything really.
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You're translating a lot of that in in from one language to another.
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So it's uh a little bit more formulaic, it's a little bit like learning a math formula.
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So this is not the stuff that actually is truly higher or critical thinking, but it's extremely easy to test, it's easy to measure, and it's easier to teach because those things are concrete, they're trackable, all of that stuff.
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It's much harder, which is why you need great materials and great curriculum to set you up for this.
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It's much harder to track a student's proficiency if your department is not well set up for this transition, which is what we're gonna talk about next.
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That brings us to number two.
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There's a training gap.
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There's a huge training gap.
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I can't tell you how many times I've walked into a school building to do a training on proficiency where most people in the room have heard of it, are well aware of what Actful is expecting of us nowadays, or CEFR, if you're teaching internationally.
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They're aware of it, but they have no idea how to make it a reality in their classroom.
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I'm sure that that's one of the reasons why you're here, is that it's not that you're not excited about what this could be for your classroom.
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It's that there's a huge gap between the theory of it and making it a practical reality in your everyday classroom.
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Like there's a lot of trainings that I do that talk about all these concepts, but the most important moment in the room is that moment in training when we say, so we're all on board.
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How do we make that happen?
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It's the how that really matters.
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So if you can get training, you're already here.
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This is a great place to get training.
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We dive a lot deeper in this in the practical proficiency network.
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If you want to work on like an easier teacher, you know, month-by-month, easier payment plan.
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If your school can't get you any training right now at the moment.
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But if you do have a department budget, this is also training that I do for schools and training that you can get at conferences.
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And you can come to my free conference every summer as well to give you like a perfect little boost to get you through the first few months of the year.
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But what really makes this happen is long-term, scaffolded, structured, and spiral sequence training on how to teach for proficiency.
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And the third thing that you need, mistake number three, is doing this without a curriculum.
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Oh my God, it's so hard to do proficiency without a curriculum.
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Woof.
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I have so much respect for you, especially for many of the teachers that I work with in the PPN who teach multiple preps.
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They have the entire French program in their laps.
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They're teaching levels one through five and AP.
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Holy crap.
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And they don't have a really solid curriculum to do it, or maybe they have like a different level for each one.
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That's extremely difficult.
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But something that also happens too is a common mistake, is that districts usually do this, is where districts get on board with a very exciting, maybe big name curriculum program that is geared in proficiency and it's a good curriculum and a good program, but it's a very high-demand curriculum, usually that asks teachers to teach with stories right out of the gate almost all day.
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It's really hard.
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That's really, really hard to jump right into.
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Even though these are great curriculums, it is not a beginner-friendly strategy, in my opinion.
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There have been many teachers that I work with that use story-based curriculums who don't have a lot of story-based training and they're just, they're drowning.
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Like it's very hard to jump into that.
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Even though like the stories might be great or the all these ideas and suggestions for like CI-oriented activities are really exciting and their kids like it.
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It's a lot of, you're placing a lot of burden on the teacher when your curriculum is set up that way, if the teacher doesn't have the proper training for it.
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So I would just say that if you're using one of those curriculums and you love it and you're really excited about it, you should be because they're great, but they require some know-how.
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It's not an entry-level deal.
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So know that their stories are great, but they're really not the only tool in the shed that uh a lot of my proficiency-based materials, I only use stories every now and then because I don't ever want a beginner to be relying on stories in order to do this.
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Like there's so many other great ways that you can introduce and solidify new functional chunks that don't require learning or relearning how to teach.
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Let's move on to mistake number four.
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This is a big one, especially when you don't have a lot of materials that I find a lot of teachers do, which is you start going into immersion shock, which is you've heard that more target language will help your students reach higher proficiency, which is true.
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Of course it's true.
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However, if you jump them right into that, if you've only been doing like 30% or 40% target language in your classroom, they get total, they get total shell shock from this.
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So if you jump in on day one without sheltering any vocabulary, or if you've been aspiring to do more target language in your class and you're like, class, today it's February.
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This is when we're finally going to do more target language, and you just jump right into it, it can be very shell shocking for them.
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And something that you can even find too is that it's a little frustrating.
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It's frustrating for you and it's frustrating for them because they don't feel really well set up for it.
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And in all honesty, they're actually not.
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There's a lot of prep work involved for setting up the stage for your students to be successful in a communicative and mostly target language environment, whichever percentage you're shooting for.
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Because in my opinion, 10% more is better than the day before.
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So it doesn't necessarily have to be 90%, but whatever that you can hold consistently makes a big difference for them.
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So be wary that if you're trying this, if you're using more language in class and your students are frustrated, even if they understand you, it's because they're experiencing a lot of fatigue.
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They're experiencing a lot of fatigue in your class that they're not used to.
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And it's good to slowly move into this, both for you and for them.
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You don't have to start right off the bat.
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Number five.
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This can be a real friction creator if we don't handle it properly.
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Now, parents, stakeholders, and administrators will always want the best for your class.
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They will always want the best for your students.
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But we as world language professionals, um, we haven't really done a good job.
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Not, not us specifically, because I know we're great.
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But in general, like in the language profession, we have not really conveyed or communicated well to people how you actually acquire a language.
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It's still such a mystery for people.
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I cannot tell you, and I'm sure you've experienced this, how many times I tell people at a party that I speak three languages, like I go to a lot of parties, it happens like twice a year.
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But anytime that I'm with family or um with my friends and talking about like uh language stuff, or I meet somebody who wants to have a conversation in Spanish and they're they're asking about like, how'd you learn this language?
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And you know, the answer is always, of course, like, well, it took a long time, years and years of practice and a degree.
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But the other part of it, Is that like language acquisition works like this?
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And you give them a little snippet of like, it's kind of like how you learn it when you're a baby.
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You just have to be in conversations that are relevant to you with somebody who's patient and who's gonna use lots of different ways to communicate, not just speech, to help you be understood and is gonna be patient with your mistakes and um will help talk to you in a way that you understand and is interesting, blah, blah, blah.
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And you know, you go on your whole spiel about like this is how acquisition works.
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It's a slow process.
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It is pretty much fixed in the order in which you you acquire things in your brain and blah, blah, blah.
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And it doesn't have much to do with grammar rules.
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And their eyes are lit up because they're like, wait, what?
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I've been spending all this time using flashcards.
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I can't tell you how many times I had to tell my mom, who I'm working with to learn Spanish, that she needs to just put the flashcards away.
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She has a really hard time letting go of it.
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Um, we have not, as a language community, done the best job.
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We're so good at so many other things, but we could use some help conveying to the world at large how language acquisition actually happens, how it actually works, and that it is actually a simple, easy process that just takes time, that it just takes time and exposure.
00:24:54.019 --> 00:25:01.779
So when your parents and your stakeholders don't know that, there's gonna be a lot of miscommunication and a lot of frustration.
00:25:02.019 --> 00:25:19.220
Think of it this way: how many times have you been in a parent-teacher conference where the kid says, I have a D in this class, like you're talking about grades and stuff, and they say, I have a D in this class because the teacher speaks in Spanish the whole time and I can't understand them.
00:25:19.779 --> 00:25:20.900
So full stop.
00:25:20.980 --> 00:25:25.299
If a parent hears that, of course they're gonna think that there's something wrong with your instruction.
00:25:25.539 --> 00:25:29.220
Wait, you're talking at my kid in Spanish and they don't understand?
00:25:29.380 --> 00:25:30.259
Well, that's a problem.
00:25:30.339 --> 00:25:31.380
We need to fix that.
00:25:31.539 --> 00:25:41.940
And what you need to help do and set up in the beginning of the year is a climate of expectations of, hey, this is what's actually happening.
00:25:42.180 --> 00:25:45.700
I'm not just speaking at your kid in Spanish for 90 minutes.
00:25:45.940 --> 00:25:47.380
This is what we're doing together.
00:25:47.460 --> 00:25:54.980
And these are all of the ways and all of the systems that are in place to help your student understand, respond, and participate.
00:25:55.299 --> 00:26:02.180
And please understand that input is the most valuable part of acquisition, you know, blah, blah, blah.
00:26:02.740 --> 00:26:22.740
If your parents and stakeholders, your student, you know, the important adults in your students' lives are comparing your class to what they remember in 1996 of their Spanish class and their experience, it's gonna be really hard for them to hear something like, oh, my teacher speaks so often in the in French and I can't understand them.
00:26:22.980 --> 00:26:24.980
That's gonna be really, really hard for them.
00:26:25.140 --> 00:26:30.980
So we need to appropriately communicate, set up some good foundations and expectations.
00:26:31.059 --> 00:26:33.140
And you can do that anytime throughout the year.
00:26:33.299 --> 00:26:41.860
There's nothing wrong with sending home a quick flyer that you can even use an AI generator to help you with that says, hey, this is how language works.
00:26:42.019 --> 00:26:44.100
This is what we're doing in class to support that.
00:26:44.259 --> 00:27:00.180
And please understand that I'm gonna be using Spanish in class a lot, but that your students will have X, Y, and Z to help them understand, and that we always, always, always clarify meaning when a student expresses that they don't understand, things like that.
00:27:01.299 --> 00:27:06.980
So this is one of the important things that we need to do with setting up those expectations.
00:27:07.460 --> 00:27:12.339
So let's talk about these, like why the transition feels so hard and review.
00:27:12.579 --> 00:27:14.980
Number one, we've got some colleague expectations.
00:27:15.140 --> 00:27:16.740
Number two, there's a training gap.
00:27:16.900 --> 00:27:21.059
Number three, there's um some high-ask curriculum.
00:27:21.220 --> 00:27:24.180
And if you don't have a curriculum at all, that's even harder.
00:27:24.339 --> 00:27:28.819
And then you have sometimes an immersion shock that can happen, that can happen with your students.
00:27:28.980 --> 00:27:39.059
And then number five, you have a lot of stakeholders that might not understand what you're doing in class, and we need to work towards a shared language in that.
00:27:40.019 --> 00:27:50.740
Here is another thing that can really affect how well proficiency lights up your room and adds joy to your practice, or it can really suck the life out of you.
00:27:51.620 --> 00:27:58.500
Mistake number six is when you change your style of teaching, but you don't change the assessments.
00:27:59.140 --> 00:28:07.299
This is one of the biggest reasons that a proficiency-oriented classroom feels like a lot of work without results.
00:28:07.539 --> 00:28:17.860
To some people who are transitioning into this, is that if you are doing conversations in your classroom, your students understand what you're doing.
00:28:18.019 --> 00:28:24.579
Your students can respond to a lot of those questions, whether they do like a thumbs up or a thumbs down or whatever response they're giving you.
00:28:24.740 --> 00:28:25.860
And things are great.
00:28:26.019 --> 00:28:32.019
They're really participating in the conversation, they love it, they're learning about themselves and the world around them.
00:28:32.500 --> 00:28:41.779
And then you hand them a district assessment that asks them to identify between masculine and feminine nouns.
00:28:42.660 --> 00:28:43.700
That's a bummer.
00:28:43.860 --> 00:28:44.980
That's a big bummer.
00:28:45.220 --> 00:28:47.380
This is your district's responsibility.
00:28:47.539 --> 00:28:48.420
It's not on you.
00:28:48.500 --> 00:28:51.220
You cannot fix this part of the system all by yourself.
00:28:51.380 --> 00:28:58.579
But there's a lot of teachers that I work with who are still being forced to use really outdated district assessments.
00:28:58.819 --> 00:29:13.539
So if you are a district leader and you're listening to this, this is one of the hugest obstacles and one of the biggest causes of your teacher's burnout experience, is that they're doing all of the stuff, they're doing the most in their classroom.
00:29:13.860 --> 00:29:20.819
And then their kids are set up for failure with these assessments that are complete mismatch for a modern style of teaching a language.
00:29:21.059 --> 00:29:29.140
So keep that in mind that that's not something that you can really do a lot about, except be real with your kids.
00:29:29.299 --> 00:29:33.860
Tell them, like, hey, this assessment is a little out of date, and I'm sorry about that.
00:29:34.100 --> 00:29:38.420
Let's see if I can make sure that you're very well prepared to experience success with this.
00:29:38.579 --> 00:29:41.059
But do know that this is an out-of-date assessment.
00:29:41.220 --> 00:29:42.420
There's nothing wrong with that.
00:29:42.579 --> 00:29:46.579
There's nothing wrong with being real, especially with middle schoolers and high schoolers.
00:29:46.819 --> 00:29:55.620
If you do it in a professional way, that indicates that you have a solution that helps them to experience success.
00:29:56.019 --> 00:29:57.299
Not everything is perfect.
00:29:57.460 --> 00:30:02.740
We don't have control of everything in a big old system that's much bigger than ourselves, like school.
00:30:02.900 --> 00:30:07.059
There's going to be some things that are don't really fit and are a little bit out of date.
00:30:07.380 --> 00:30:17.779
And we can help students by making sure that they are aware of what's going on and they also have a tangible solution for this.
00:30:18.180 --> 00:30:26.339
Here's another thing: is that sometimes teachers will change the way they teach, but then don't change their own assessments because changing assessments is difficult.
00:30:26.420 --> 00:30:28.339
It's time consuming, all of that.
00:30:28.579 --> 00:30:49.380
So here's a clear roadmap to help you move away from this, which is make sure first that your big assessments are proficiency-oriented, that you're asking for proficiency-based tasks, things like IPAs, things like open-ended writings and speaking assessments, things like that.
00:30:49.620 --> 00:30:55.620
And you're grading them and valuing the work that they're doing in class to prepare for it.
00:30:57.299 --> 00:31:07.860
If you have a lot of assessments that need a lot of overhauling and a lot of updating, just view them on a case-by-case basis of what is the weightiest in the student gradebook at the time.
00:31:08.100 --> 00:31:19.460
If you're looking for more guidance on grading, there's quite a lot of grading, play-by-plays, and trainings from both me and guest instructors in the Practical Proficiency Network.
00:31:19.620 --> 00:31:20.259
Check it out.
00:31:20.420 --> 00:31:23.620
If grading is a huge headache for you, we have a lot of content in there.
00:31:24.579 --> 00:31:35.299
Now, another important thing that we have to talk about, which is the next set of common mistakes for people transitioning to proficiency, is the sustainability factor of this.
00:31:35.539 --> 00:31:38.740
Here's something we really need to understand about proficiency.
00:31:38.980 --> 00:31:42.420
There are stages to teaching with proficiency.
00:31:42.579 --> 00:31:46.100
There's gonna be a first stage where you're like, well, this is hard.
00:31:46.180 --> 00:31:58.819
I need to learn and figure out how this works and like adapt to this new style of I'm gonna go with the flow of conversation in class instead of following a textbook bulleted list of topics I need to cover.
00:31:58.900 --> 00:32:00.339
Like, that's gonna be different.
00:32:00.579 --> 00:32:03.140
Also, you can definitely bridge those two ideas.
00:32:03.380 --> 00:32:06.019
Jump into the PPN if you're interested in that.
00:32:06.339 --> 00:32:10.420
And a lot of people do fall into this overnight extreme trap.
00:32:10.579 --> 00:32:11.860
That happens a lot.
00:32:12.180 --> 00:32:13.380
Ask me how I know.
00:32:13.539 --> 00:32:15.299
I was definitely guilty of this.
00:32:15.380 --> 00:32:17.460
I 100% did this.
00:32:18.019 --> 00:32:39.299
If you think that you have to do high-energy, a lot of song and dance CI stuff every day, or if you are so tired of how ineffective your legacy methods are working and not really reaching your students that you have right now, that you're like, I don't mind putting in the extra work in order to do proficiency, because like that's the reason I'm here.
00:32:39.380 --> 00:32:42.019
Like, my kids are not responding to this outdated stuff.
00:32:42.339 --> 00:32:52.819
So, how can I connect them to the real purpose of a language class, which is to connect to themselves, connect to each other, learn more about the world, and learn more about themselves through language?
00:32:53.059 --> 00:33:04.579
Well, of course, conversation and proficiency-based instruction and focus on acquisition will get you there because it's so much more real world-based, but not a lot of your materials are set up for that.
00:33:04.660 --> 00:33:09.460
So it's not really possible to do that in a sustainable way without burning out.
00:33:09.700 --> 00:33:11.059
Ask me how I know.
00:33:11.299 --> 00:33:21.779
I used to spend so many hours outside of school prepping proficiency-oriented lessons because I was just addicted to the magic of it.
00:33:21.940 --> 00:33:31.140
Like it was amazing to watch my classroom go from like a humdum, felt a little bit like an enforcement zone for a while.
00:33:31.220 --> 00:33:35.380
Like I was just enforcing behaviors and being like, hey, pay attention, pay attention.
00:33:35.460 --> 00:33:36.420
Why aren't you paying attention?
00:33:36.579 --> 00:33:40.660
This is important, pay attention, to, hey, what are you doing today?
00:33:40.819 --> 00:33:42.180
What are you wearing?
00:33:42.339 --> 00:33:44.980
Um, what's music are you listening to?
00:33:45.220 --> 00:33:51.460
It's like everything about proficiency is so much more student focused that everything shifted for me.
00:33:51.620 --> 00:33:56.980
And so I didn't mind putting in a lot of work at the beginning, but I quickly burned out from it.
00:33:57.140 --> 00:34:04.579
Like you cannot spend three to four extra hours of prep in order to make this transition happen overnight.
00:34:04.740 --> 00:34:07.539
It's such a recipe for burnout.
00:34:07.860 --> 00:34:44.099
So if you want to try this a different way, check out some more of these ideas and this podcast, we focus exclusively on low prep solutions and low-ask ideas first, which means that, like, even though high-energy stuff is really cool and it's definitely a guidepost for us to get to eventually, the stuff that doesn't ask that much of you or your students, where you're just having fun, casual conversations and using simple questions to dissect uh and to interpret descriptions of things in the target language.
00:34:44.259 --> 00:34:46.980
That's a very low prep, low-ask thing.
00:34:47.699 --> 00:35:02.740
If you're looking for like where do I start first, start with presenting your vocabulary differently instead of doing, you know, the usual thing that you would do of like, hey, open the textbook, look at this, or doing a really long PowerPoint or something like that.
00:35:03.140 --> 00:35:12.260
Change your delivery of I'm gonna teach school supplies by bringing in a backpack and exploring everything that's in this backpack and talking about it a lot with high frequency verbs.
00:35:12.420 --> 00:35:14.579
It's an easy thing that you can start doing tomorrow.
00:35:14.740 --> 00:35:20.579
That's not gonna overwhelm your students, or you're not gonna have any of the issues that we talked about earlier.
00:35:20.980 --> 00:35:25.780
Which leads us into mistake number eight, which is the prep time explosion.
00:35:26.019 --> 00:35:27.300
Oh my gosh.
00:35:27.620 --> 00:35:39.380
So when you're focused on proficiency, it really can add hours of extra prep, especially if your curriculum is not set up for a conversation and communication-based class.
00:35:39.700 --> 00:35:42.100
So here's a quick reality check for you.
00:35:42.420 --> 00:35:46.740
Transitioning to this is a lot like exercise, it's a lot like working out.
00:35:46.900 --> 00:35:52.260
If you go really hard on the gym on day one, you're not going back on day two.
00:35:52.340 --> 00:35:53.540
You will be too sore.
00:35:53.700 --> 00:35:56.100
And your brain is exactly like that.
00:35:56.260 --> 00:36:04.900
If you go too hard on this, if you prep a lot for the first few days, like you're gonna dread just being in your classroom.
00:36:04.980 --> 00:36:06.660
It's gonna be really hard for you.
00:36:06.980 --> 00:36:10.180
So here's something that we need to do.
00:36:10.500 --> 00:36:14.580
Try accepting the idea that this is a transition.
00:36:15.300 --> 00:36:17.780
Proficiency does not happen overnight.
00:36:18.100 --> 00:36:19.380
It's a transition.
00:36:19.700 --> 00:36:22.580
Every day you can work on adding more language.
00:36:22.740 --> 00:36:26.340
Every day you can work on adding a little bit more conversation.
00:36:26.580 --> 00:36:36.100
Every day you can practice and acquire the skills, just like your students are, of being more comprehensible so that they can in turn acquire more language.
00:36:36.420 --> 00:36:44.260
So move slowly through this at a pace that fills your cup instead of taking away from it.
00:36:44.500 --> 00:36:50.980
And finally, the very last thing that I have for you, mistake number nine, is don't be your own worst critic.
00:36:51.620 --> 00:36:57.140
Taking this on is such a joy, it's such a journey, and it's really fun.
00:36:57.940 --> 00:37:05.940
But you, if you're transitioning, you're probably just like your students with Actful, you're a novice at teaching for proficiency.
00:37:06.100 --> 00:37:07.700
And that's a great space to be in.
00:37:07.780 --> 00:37:14.180
It means that you have some freedom to make mistakes, everything's new and exciting, which might be why you get into that long prep trap.
00:37:14.340 --> 00:37:22.420
But this teaching style is something to get used to and to acquire over sometimes like a two-year period.
00:37:22.580 --> 00:37:23.780
And that's okay.
00:37:24.020 --> 00:37:35.540
And once you hit that like one to two year mark, depending on how you choose to progress, then you can start to get into like, wow, I want to become a master facilitator, a master communicator.
00:37:35.620 --> 00:37:39.940
And you start getting into some more advanced skills, and that's really cool.
00:37:40.020 --> 00:37:41.700
It's part of the process.
00:37:42.420 --> 00:37:52.180
All right, so I have a bonus tip for you, which is the previous podcast, um, the one right before this, just scroll down and you'll see it.
00:37:52.260 --> 00:37:59.780
But a way to make your transition a lot easier is that you can use AI as your comprehensible input-based classroom assistant.
00:37:59.940 --> 00:38:05.460
So check that out to give you some tools and ideas to help make a lot of this transition easier on you.
00:38:05.620 --> 00:38:09.700
It can bridge a lot of the gap for you during this learning curve period.
00:38:09.860 --> 00:38:16.020
Let the AI do a lot of the heavy lifting for you so that you can focus on community, the thing that only you can really do.
00:38:17.140 --> 00:38:17.620
Woo!
00:38:17.940 --> 00:38:20.980
That's a lot of stuff to talk about with transitioning to proficiency.
00:38:21.140 --> 00:38:29.060
I hope this helps reframe this idea for you that this is not like an overnight mandate, like some of the other ridiculous things you have to work with in your school environment.
00:38:29.380 --> 00:38:44.420
This is a choice and a journey to go on that is really fun and rewarding and will also make a lot of your work easier in class because you won't have to work as hard to get engagement, to build community.
00:38:44.580 --> 00:38:46.500
It's already baked into the system.
00:38:46.740 --> 00:38:50.900
But while you're on this transition, protect your peace.
00:38:51.220 --> 00:38:55.700
Pour into the moments that make your class come alive and ditch the rest.
00:38:56.580 --> 00:38:58.580
And I have a solution for you.
00:38:58.820 --> 00:39:07.060
If you are in the thick of your transition and you're really resonating with a lot of these issues that we're talking about here, you're not alone in this journey.
00:39:07.300 --> 00:39:18.100
I invite you to come hang out with us in the PPN, the Practical Proficiency Network, because you'll be able to get steady support through this transition period.
00:39:18.340 --> 00:39:26.020
The program is designed for you to spend your transition period to proficiency in here and then be ready to graduate when you're done.
00:39:26.180 --> 00:39:30.980
For most teachers, it's between 12 to 24 months.
00:39:31.060 --> 00:39:32.980
So we have a program designed for that.
00:39:33.220 --> 00:39:41.780
And if you're looking for something that you can jump into right away for free, I have the Joyful CI Classroom Systems free audio training for you.
00:39:41.940 --> 00:39:44.020
That is linked in the description below.
00:39:44.180 --> 00:39:55.940
Check that out to get some really great, detailed, in-depth systems for how you can transition to proficiency in a way that feels really joyful, feels really light, and works for you and your students.
00:39:56.580 --> 00:40:03.140
Thank you guys so much for hanging out with me and talking about how to transition for proficiency with me today.
00:40:03.220 --> 00:40:06.100
I look forward to seeing you in another episode.
00:40:06.260 --> 00:40:19.620
And for now, remember to go easy on yourself, give yourself grace, and to make sure that you are focusing in on the parts of proficiency that bring you joy instead of what is draining you.
00:40:19.860 --> 00:40:20.420
All right.
00:40:20.660 --> 00:40:21.220
Ciao.
00:40:21.380 --> 00:40:22.340
Bye for now.