Information for Administrators

Curriculum Club

Support, Coaching, and Materials to support standards-aligned, literacy-focused, communicative language teaching

 

Many teachers who transition away from a grammar-based teaching paradigm struggle to find materials, instructional strategies, and assessment tools that can replace the structure of the textbook.

There are a lot of resources available out there for educators.  Maybe too many, to be honest.

All too often, educators who want to focus on implementing and refining their instruction, assessment, and programming are instead drowning in information overload.  

This often results in lessons, units, courses, and entire programs that feel piecemeal or hastily-thrown-together.

That's how World Language teaching was for Tina Hargaden, the founding director of Curriculum Club, too.  Lots of fun, lots of smiles...but no cohesive pathway that showed students their growth in tangible, meaningful, measurable ways.

Perhaps she would have never looked up and realized something was amiss if she wasn't also an English Language Arts, Reading Intervention, and ESOL teacher.

See, in English Language Arts, she had the Units of Study from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project to provide this structure.  

And in ESOL, she had Project GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Design) to provide the structure.

And in Reading Intervention, she had Fountas and Pinnell and Lexiles to provide the structure.

But in Spanish and French, oh là là là là là LÀ!

It was, to put it into educational jargon, a hot mess.

Fun, yes.

Engaging, yes.

Communication-based, but of course!

But, a rigorous, structured learning pathway it was not.

 

So, she set about to pull together structure and strategies and leveling systems and assessment tools from these three great streams of literacy and language leadership.

And that's how the Stepping Stones curricular framework was born.

It provides lesson-by-lesson structure using a guided release of responsibility model and incorporating daily reading mini-workshop and daily modeled writing aligned to real-world communicative purposes (and also to World Language standards and literacy skills with wider application across the curriculum).

It provides unit-by-unit structure using six major cycles of instruction each year - Description, Narration, Going Deeper with Narration, Information, Opinion, and Argumentation.  Within each of the cycles there are four phases aligned to deepening communicative purpose.

For example, within Information, the four phases are:

(1)  Organizing Informational Writing on Topic One
(2)  Incorporating Content-Specific Vocabulary onTopic One
(3)  Organization and Content-Specific Vocabulary for Topic Two
(4)  Comparing and Contrasting Topics One and Two

And it provides year-over-year structure as the genre-based cycles and phases spiral deeper and deeper, to boost students up the literacy and proficiency ladder with every repeated focus on these literacy skills, with fresh content and topics, but building upon and extending students' communicative skills.

The Stepping Stones curricular framework thus provides the standards-aligned, literacy-focused pathway to proficiency and literacy in World Language that Tina had always been missing in her French and Spanish courses.

In order to support teachers in implementing this framework, she launched Curriculum Club in 2019, so she could work directly with teachers transitioning to this structure.

And since then, she and the team have created a complete set of materials in Spanish, French, German, and English (and a semester in Italian and Latin) that align to the framework.

In 2022-2023, Curriculum Club members will have access to all our previously-released materials, plus our leveled extension resources that are designed to support students as they return to Description, Narration, and the other instructional cycles in their second year, third year, and beyond.

 

There truly is nothing else out there like Stepping Stones for teaching next-generation World Language.

 (Want to know more about how Stepping Stones and Curriculum Club came to be?  Read more here.)

In 2022-2023, Curriculum Club members will have access to all our previously-released materials, plus our leveled extension resources that are designed to support students as they return to Description, Narration, and the other instructional cycles in their second year, third year, and beyond.

What is included in Curriculum Club?

 

> The full set of our existing materials, plus the updated materials as they are released through the year

>  The full set of our leveled e-readers in Spanish, French, German, and English  - over 120 titles in each language!

> Tina Hargaden's latest 650-page book, Foundations, in e-reader format:  a detailed, illustrated, step-by-step guide to Stepping Stones in action, plus lesson scripts that teachers can use to guide them in class as they teach (and the option to purchase hard copies at our printing and handling costs - $62)

> Online self-paced professional development throughout the summer of 2022, including:
(1)  Foundations Book Study Course to work step by step, lesson by lesson, through Foundations and the materials that align to the model lessons in the book
(2)  Summer Literacy Institute to learn how to use the leveled e-readers as a lever to turn up students' language proficiency and general level of literacy
(3)  Planning Intensives - two-hour meetings that our members can repeat as many times as they need to all summer long (there are over 30 time slots to choose from) so that our members are all planned up and ready to roll with the materials and resources when the students arrive this fall

DRAFT of selected sections of the Member Planner:

 

> Drop-in coaching three times per week, at least, starting in June 2022 and continuing through May 2023