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I get it—the school isn’t testing students for proficiency to see if they’ve met the state standards, unless students do a test such as AP, STAMP, or another seal of biliteracy test—but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t get to do anything for proficiency until the year that they’re going to take that test!

One thing you can try is having the textbook open on your desk and following the scope and sequence of what’s in each unit, but trying to keep the focus of your activities on input, interaction, and output. If you have a goal of meaningful communication to build proficiency, you can keep your focus on that while you include the language material that's in the unit, rather than just explaining and drilling on grammatical forms. As long as you’re including the unit themes in your activities and following all of your school’s requirements such as how objectives are presented, if your admin walks in, you should be able to tell them what page you’re on in the book that’s open on your desk, without sacrificing student language acquisition.

Another thing you can do is see if your school or district would agree to have a training on the Science of Languages or one of its component parts, such as Comprehensible Input. If your school hosts a training with an external expert, they will hopefully be more on board with evidence-based practices and less likely to directly contradict that training when they observe you in the future—especially if the administrators are also willing to attend the training.

Have you had success getting your school on board with letting you teach for proficiency? Let us know! We’d love to publish your blog post about it.

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