Recently, I subbed at one of our schools.  It was the perfect arrangement.  I solo-taught one half of a homeroom and Jason — the teacher I wasn’t subbing for — taught the other half.

The teacher team at this school has been very good about putting their Action Buckets in Workflowy, using HipChat to stay in touch with each other and with me, and documenting each contact hour in Smartsheet, so I am able to be very clear about the curriculum decisions that they are making.  I felt ready to step in and cover for the absent teacher.  Jason and I taught five Junior High School second-year classes less than twenty yards apart from each other, which meant that in between each period, Jason and I could consult in the hallway about how the ActionBucket for that lesson was working.

Based on what we worked out with James (the teacher that I was covering for) we wanted the lesson to end with the students composing and performing something about what they did during Golden Week (here’s the Action Bucket — https://workflowy.com/s/GtJ3cXVprt).  But we wanted them to have a model to work from.  So Jason, James, and I each recorded accounts of our respective Golden Weeks, and Jason burned those onto two CDs.  In the earlier part of the lesson, we had the students listen to those three different examples.  We imagined that that would provide a scaffold that the students could build on top of.

Jason, my partner for the day, also happened to be very open to critiquing the plan with me, as the day progressed, and open to digging deeper and deeper into the question of how we could be doing this better.  In our hallway consultations, I kept coming back to two problems….

1)   The students weren’t “misbehaving,” but at the same time, they weren’t putting a lot of effort into understanding the listening examples.  It's always hard to tell for sure, but while maybe this was a genuine proficiency problem, Jason and I were both pretty sure that the underlying problem was not aptitude.  There seemed to be a pervasive sense amongst the kids that aural comprehension was not particularly important.  ("Wait politely while the foreign teacher does this listening-comprehension thing.")

2)   Making sure that they really understood the listening activity took almost the entire lesson.  We could either breeze past the listening activity and be content with their kind-of getting it, thereby creating time for them to compose something meaningful about their own Golden Weeks.  Or we could dig down and really make sure that they got all the details in the listening activity, and end up only flirting with the now-lets-bring-the-focus-back-to-the-students activity.

Both Jason and I, as the day’s lessons progressed, became more involved with finding ways to break this large slab of listening content into manageable chunks, and by the last lesson of the day, both of us were satisfied with our having motivated the students to understand the three Golden Week stories more deeply, and with having given the kids a chance create a little something about themselves.

The class was definitely hard work for the kids.  So was the work worthwhile?

It depends.

LOOKING BACK.  Does this lesson relate to something that they had to master in their previous lesson? 

I myself prefer to make sure that there is a nice clear target language that we are isolating.  Talking about Golden Week is a past-tense challenge.  Did they do something that focused them on the past tense in a previous lesson? 

Another way to connect back is to have some consistency of theme between one lesson and the next.  In the case of James and Jason’s classes, they used the future tense in a previous lesson, talking about Golden Week, as something that at that time was a future-tense event.

LOOKING FORWARD.  Is there any language in the listening activity that they are going to be tested on later?  Are future class activities going to resonate meaningfully with today’s listening, writing, and speaking activities?  What’s going to happen to the small bit of work that we had them do composing and practicing their own stories about Golden Week?  Is it a first draft of something that will be more polished in future iterations?  In other words, were the day’s activities just a one-day thing?

THINK DEEPLY ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS FOR SOMETHING TO BE WORTHWHILE.  It’s easy to criticize and activity as "too difficult" -- where you pushed the kids hard on a particular language point, and perhaps did not play any “games” — where the students finished the lesson and say, “ah, tsukaretta!”  An activity that isolates a fundamental language challenge is by definition out of context, and it’s easy to think of things that are out of context has “having no point,” but while, for example, a lesson where the students cut out magazine pictures and make a collage can be fun and feel very meaningful, we can also agree that such a lesson has no point — if our job is to move the kids forward in terms of English proficiency. 

Similarly, coming back to the work that I did with Jason and James’s kids, if the next day, Jason and James came to school, and noticed sheets of paper kicking around the floor containing unfinished scribbles — present-tense sentence fragments that seem to relate to the subject of peoples’ Golden Week activities, there to, they would likely have felt put out.  And the kids would have slid further into that mentality where Oral Communication class is this single hour of nonsense that happens once per week, and need not be taken particularly seriously.

The further forwards in time and backwards in time your actions today reverberate, ipso facto, the more consequential they are.

SUGGESTIONS …

So here are some simple ways to make today matter more by making yesterday and tomorrow matter more.

1) ESTABLISH A BREAKPOINT.  MAKE IT CLEAR WHAT YOU WANT THE STUDENTS TO MASTER.  It depends on (a) the proficiency level of the kids, (b) how many contact hours they get with them over the course of the semester, and (c) how much cooperation you can get from your Japanese colleagues, but you should have at least one, what I like to call, a “BREAKPOINT” — one discretely defined thing that a student needs to be able to do in order for the student to get score higher than a zero.  This needs to be challenging.  It needs to be something that at least all of them struggle with at the beginning of the semester, and it needs to be something that you can communicate again and again as the thing that you want them to learn.  In reflecting on the class that I taught for James and Jason, here are some possible BREAKPOINT candidates:

* If I ask you a question, can you respond to me in four complete clauses?

* If I say a past tense sentence to you (like, “James played tennis during Golden Week.”), can you — without reading or writing — turn that into a yes/no interrogative (“Did James play tennis during Golden Week?”)?

* If I say a slightly more challenging past-tense sentence (like, “I didn’t play tennis, but I went to a movie with my family.”) can you shadow it back to me with Authentic Rhythm Melody and Pronunciation?

No … the above would not constitute the fullest expression of what you are trying to accomplish this semester, let alone what you want the kids to get out of life. But to take your class seriously, these kids need to have a nice clear picture of what “taking your class seriously” looks like.

2) REVISIT WHAT HAS COME BEFORE, and FLIRT WITH WHAT IS TO COME.  MAKE THE CONNECTION WITH WHERE WE HAVE COME FROM AND WHERE WE ARE GOING AS EXPLICIT AS POSSIBLE.  DON’T ASSUME THAT THE KIDS SEE THE CONNECTION. 

In every lesson, make sure you do at least one thing that references back to something you did in a previous lesson.  Better yet, make sure you give the kids the opportunity to exhibit mastery over something you introduced in a previous lesson.  This is especially important in the case of a BREAKPOINT that proved particularly hard for some of the kids.  In the case of kids that really struggle, keep giving them chances to succeed.  “Backing off” may be a really appealing option, but it’s less compassionate than might seem to be the case.  Don’t write anybody off as hopeless.

In the case of flirting with what’s to come, that’s a slightly more subtle craft. 

Many of you have had this experience, when co-teaching with a Japanese teacher.  You throw a question out at the class like, for example, “has anybody been to America?”  You get silence.  Then your colleague leans over and says something like, “psst! they don’t know the present perfect yet.”  Useful information, but do not take that to mean that you therefore must NEVER use the present perfect.  It CERTAINLY doesn’t mean that you should bastardize the language by saying, “did anybody go to America.”

What it means is that you are now in what Lev Vygotsky refers to as the “Zone of Proximal Development.”  You have other strategies available to you besides simply dropping the whole thing.  Examples …

a) SEMANTICS FIRST.  If you say “has anybody ever been to America?” to a room full of 40 human beings over the age of 8.  One of them will correctly guess what you are asking — even if he or she isn’t comfortable with the present perfect.  When one of them grunts “no,” see if you can pull a full sentence out of that student — “no I have never been to America.”  If one of them grunts, “yes-su,” say “oh really, where did you go?” … “New York” … “When did you go to New York?”  “ra-su-to yeah.”  Push it as far as you can.  See if you can get the student to say “I went to New York last year.”

b) SCAFFOLD WITH THE BLACKBOARD.  Write your question up on the board.  Get somebody to read it off the board.  Erase parts of it.  Get somebody else to read it.  Erase more until the whole class is able to say it from memory.  If formulating an answer in the present perfect is hard, try putting it up on the board as a scramble “No, have/I/been/never/New York/to”

Take it as far as you can for now, THEN move on.

In Hollywood, they talk about screen characters having “a narrative arc.”  Whatever is happening in a given scene, the actor needs to be aware of how this scene fits within that narrative arc.  The art of movie-making is like that because human beings are like that.  To be human is to be living inside your own TV mini-series.  Respecting your students’ humanity means respecting their arc.