After 10 years of teaching, I retired from the classroom and am working on my Ph.D. in Teacher Education, researching grading and assessment. Here are my most up-to-date practices—frozen in time like Pompeii or Herculaneum right up to my last day in the classroom—that were fundamental to my teaching, making all the daily activities possible:

Core Practices
CI
Grammar
Textbooks
Curriculum
Grading/Scoring
Look, Listen, Ask
Course Grade
Assessments
Speaking & Writing

Continue reading for explanations of each…

Core Practices
You’ve seen the umbrella, right? Here’s my CI shield.

CI
Here’s my 2020 attempt to clarify what CI is and isn’t. It all starts here; comprehension is step ZERO.

Grammar
I didn’t explicitly teach grammar. Students were already exposed to a LOT of grammar in my classes. Grammar was always found in context, like all language and communication. The most convincing reasons for not teaching grammar are probably the studies showing how the effects of instruction drop after a few months, and disappear after 8+. These basically show how most teachers are wasting their time, even if it appears to be effective in the moment, or over one’s career. But we don’t need studies to show this. Instead, consider how beginning of year/unit “review” reflects that students don’t actually KNOW the content—they only knew it enough to pass a previous unit, etc. Furthermore, even when I did address grammar on the rare occasion that a student notices and asks about the language, I still didn’t test or grade that knowledge. In fact, in a different world I would sooner teach grammar explicitly than I would grade it.

Textbooks
I didn’t use them. Aside from a focus on explicit grammar, textbooks overload students with vocabulary in a way that lowers confidence for all but the those with the spongiest memory. Textbook chapters typically have at least 20 different words used just once or twice in a text passage. Very few of these new words recur. As a result, students are exposed to a LOT of meanings, yet only a few grammatical structures at a time according to the chapter grammar focus. This has not been shown to aid comprehension—the sine qua non of language acquisition—and inhibits the student from creating mental representation of the language. Instead, I sheltered (i.e. limited) vocabulary to few meanings, recycled them often, and unleashed grammatical structures as needed. Thus, students were exposed to a wide net without the cognitive demand of new meanings, and built mental representation more effectively. This was a major reason for writing texts that beginning students understand.

Curriculum
As flexible as possible, never stale. The Universal Language Curriculum (ULC) combined features from various successful curricula I’ve implemented, and observed. It was designed to be the most student-centered, collaboration-ready, Second Language Acquisition (SLA)-aligned, and school-friendly representation of what to actually teach. We had Class Days learning about familiar topics like oneself, school, community, and Culture Days exploring a topic from target-language-speaking cultures. This was my last Latin 1 curriculum.

I planned a genre-based curriculum for third and fourth year Latin, with one genre being studied each quarter (i.e., poetry/satire, horror/thriller, myth/speculative fiction, action/adventure). The content was to be sourced mostly from reading novellas from several authors, plus one or two short Catullus poems. Classes were to explore the features of each genre, as well as familiar examples, such as what students watch on Netflix or read in their free time. Discussions were to be typed up in Latin to create class texts (i.e., the content other than novellas).

Grading/Scoring
I didn’t do this. Grading/scoring doesn’t cause learning, or acquisition, so why spend time on it? No learning evidence students choose had any numbers/grades/scores on it. Just a check mark in the LMS, which for me was PowerTeacher. Instead, students self-assessed & graded (see Course Grade below).

Look & Listen, Respond/Show/Ask
Originally my classroom rules, they were the main factors contributing to how much input students received, and how comprehensible the target language was. Looking & Listening is the only way to receive input, so that was the main process during class. It appeared as the primary graded standard (see Course Grade below). The 2021-22 update clarified when students should Ask. That is, they were expected to Respond or Show their understanding non-verbally, and if they couldn’t do either one because of incomprehension, then it was time to Ask for clarification.

Course Grade
As of 2022-23, I had two standards, Process & Growth, in somewhat of an ungraded approach (see this most-recent post on that). Students self-assessed & graded once at each progress report, then at the end of the quarter using criteria (vs. rubric) in the blog post above. If students lacked evidence, or couldn’t support the grade they gave themselves, I updated the grade accordingly and let them know why.

Assessments
I didn’t spend any time whatsoever creating these. Like grading, testing doesn’t cause learning, or acquisition, so there’s very little need to spend time on it. Instead, my assessments were authentic, and in real time. When a teacher recognizes that a student doesn’t understand, they’ve made an assessment. The adjustment is making the language more comprehensible. The response is providing more input. Anything else is unnecessary. In fact, the response is always providing more input, so additional analysis beyond incomprehension recognition might lead to the teacher thinking they need an explicit lesson to improve a perceived deficiency (which we know the effects of disappear). For maintaining expectations of teaching language in certain schools, short, no-prep quizzes that are input-based do the trick. I did these in notebooks. These were 4-question comprehension checks we used to score together in class and turn in. Most recently, they weren’t scored or collected, just discussed as a class (i.e., immediate feedback). Any student could put them into their portfolio as evidence (i.e., digital for most of the year, then physical folders in the last quarter to get away from ab use of tech). This was a well-oiled machine. Of course, we could also schoolify CI and create a learning experience out of certain tests when they were not graded. I also found success in just monitoring the room.

Speaking & Writing
I didn’t test these. Speaking & writing are forms of output, which is a result of input. Since listening & reading causes speaking & writing, there’s no need to focus on the latter. Also, there’s no need to speak or write Latin, so let’s stop there. While modern language teachers might feel pressure to get students speaking (often mistaking the ends with the means), there’s no logical rationale for Latin. Instead, I used student writing as one more step away from becoming more input, and I expected no verbal responses in the target language. 1-2 word responses were encouraged, but even responses in English showed comprehension. Still, students did begin speaking Latin, eventually. This showed me that all I needed to do was provide opportunities for students to speak, and anything that came of it was welcomed. If students didn’t speak, I providing input no matter what, anyways. This is interaction, which sometimes is misunderstood as paired speaking activities, yet interaction can be non-verbal. As such, if I were to teach a modern language, I would have the exact same outlook; expect no output, but welcome it when the time comes for students to produce it naturally.