Teaching Down the Line and Lightening the Load

Being the only LOTE teacher at a P-12 school, I teach all year levels. Being reasonably new to the teaching profession (I’m starting my third year) I am still (and I know - always will be) on a massive learning curve. One of the bumps in this curve is how much work and planning that needs to be done. I found myself planning different units and themes for each year level and wondering why on earth I couldn’t really seem to make it all work quite the way I wanted it to, and why some days I’d give up and run the same lesson 5 times (at different ability levels of course) just because it was so much easier that way.

Then, I was at a conference in August last year and the presenter - Lesley Wing Jan - was talking about Project Based Learning and integrated curriculum. She got talking about a concept called the ‘through line’ which made me sit up and pay attention. In order to integrate units more effectively and be assured that all year levels can participate, schools could / should plan ‘through lines’ which means that ONE topic or theme is selected and studied at all year levels. While this make look different in English or Maths, what this meant for me as a LOTE teacher was that it was perfectly fine for me to be teaching the same thing to all my kids. This meant a lot less work for me, but also better quality work. I could have kissed the woman! I know I know, it may seem like a simple concept, and one that has been going on for years, but for us beginning teachers, sometimes we just need to be reassured.

So, what does teaching through down the line, or ‘through lines’ look like in my classroom? InTerm 4 last year (October - December) I taught a unit on demystifying Chinese characters. How to crack them apart and see what parts they are made of with the goal of making them much easier to read and seeing them as more than a bunch of black lines. Each year level from Prep-6 got the same grid with the same 45 characters on it. All primary year levels covered. One resource made. I designed it so that Prep/1 would do Column 1 (they did 1 AND 2 cause they are clever little munchkins) and Gr2 do Column 2 etc. It worked really really well and students in all year levels were keen to learn the next line to ‘beat’ the year level above them. I made instructional videos for each column which were used by all year levels (Years 7 & 8 had a different grid to the P-6 grades), and computer memory games with the Languages Online Memory Game Maker. Again, all year levels covered by the same resources.

Advantages of teaching down the line:

• It is much easier to create one resource/activity set at 5 different levels than it is to create 5 different resources/activity set
• This approach makes it very easy to see what VELS (Victorian Essential Learning Standards) level the students are up to and whether students are achieving at a higher or lower than expected level
• Extension and modification activities are already there for you! If a student in Gr 5 needs extending, then he or she can simply move on the activity you have already created for Gr 6 and vice versa if a student needs some extra support.
• It can provide the students with incentive to challenge themselves beyond their expected level if they know the next grade is doing a higher level of the same task.

I’d love to hear about lots of different approaches to teaching and what you do to make your planning load that little bit lighter.

For more on teaching methods and to join the discussion check out these posts: Talking It Through, What Language Teaching is All About, Touchy Feely Language - Literally!