Writing_language_objectives_w__Dr_Jennifer_Himmel_AUDIOahtfw

This podcast episode features Dr. Jennifer Himmel discussing language objectives for multilingual learners. She shares a pivotal teaching story where engaging a student’s family transformed her approach, highlighting the importance of holistic, collaborative education. Himmel explains that effective implementation of SIOP model language objectives correlates with broader instructional success. Teachers who clearly define, share, and assess these objectives tend to excel in other areas, such as fostering productive interactions, whereas those struggling with objectives often face wider challenges in integrating content and language effectively. Welcome to episode 172. Today we learn about the ins and outs of writing language objectives. Welcome to the Teaching Multilingual Learners podcast. This podcast celebrates teachers who answer the calling to serve multilingual students and their families. Alternative teacher training felt like drinking from a fire hose. It was too much, all too fast. I was just trying to survive the next day. It all felt like a lot of theory and very little practical strategies. One of the theories shared was about the importance of writing objectives. It felt like one more thing I had to do for someone else, but not really for me or my students. Since I devalued objectives, my lessons were more activities than learning experiences. My relationship with writing objectives has morphed drastically. That's why I had to invite Jennifer Himmel, who wrote the most viewed article on Colorin Colorado's website, to the podcast to talk about how to write language objectives for MLs. Now, onto today's podcast. It's my great honor today to introduce Jennifer Himmel and welcome her to the podcast. She has an article about language objective that is the most read article. And when I heard that from Lydia Bryce from Colorin Colorado, I knew I had to have you on. Dr. Himmel, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Glad to be here. Would you briefly describe how you spend your days and where you spend your days and your proudest professional achievement? Sure. Well, so I spend most of my days in Vienna, Virginia. And I spend, I would say most of my time helping to run a national clearinghouse for English language acquisition. So we create products and resources, things that will help English learner stakeholders like practitioners, administrators, coaches, families of English learners, you know, have access to the best resources available to them that are research informed, relevant. So that's what I spend most of my time doing. I also spend a lot of time with family as I can. So I have two teenage sons. And so when I'm not with them or at work, then it's running or watching like TV. Can you share a story about teaching that has really influenced your practice to this day? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot, right? But I think the ones that stick out are the ones where you are able to learn something from it and that you were ready to learn from. And so I think one moment where I really realized that I needed a better approach to whole child instruction, like I wasn't seeing my student in all of his or her like complex dimensions and really bringing in their family and engaging them, that was a time where when I was a high school teacher in an ESL classroom that I realized like, wow, you need to do better. So I had a student who I would at the time characterize as disruptive. And I had tried all the tricks that I knew of. You know, I had gone back to my classroom management textbooks and like, okay, proximity, you know, kind of be near him so that I can like attend to off-task behavior. Or then I tried, you know, the carrot approach, like let's do incentives, we'll give, you know, fake money for good behavior and you get a prize, you know, at the end of the week or whatever. And then at one point I got so frustrated I was like, you just have to leave my classroom for a second so I don't really get upset. And so not working, not working for me, not working for the student. And so I engaged my peers, my colleagues at the time, and I fortunately had wonderful colleagues. And one of my colleagues had a lot more experience than I did in the classroom, was also bilingual, and also had teaching experience in both Peru and the United States. So she was just, she was like my sherpa and said, you know, let's get the family in and let's just have a conversation and see like what's going on. Like maybe there's something there. And so we did that and it was the most eye-opening experience I'd ever had. I learned so much about this student. I learned about, you know, there were some stressors going on in the family's life and that was understandably coming into the classroom. They shared a lot about their son. And I now as a parent was like, wow, that was a really good move because I was able to see like, oh, they were trying to connect me to see him beyond what I was seeing as a problem, but this was their kid who they loved. And so that really enabled me to be like, okay, so this is what's happening. I can take a different approach to the classroom. I can also convey to the parents through this very, you know, proficient translator that I had, that I'm on your son's side. You know, let's start over. Let's hit a reset. Like this is a new day. I am here to help. We have the same goals. We want him to be successful. We want him to get through high school. So let's do this together. And so that did, that reset it. It wasn't like magical. It wasn't like the next day like, you know, we didn't have any issues, but there really was a change in the tenor. Like my attitude changed, his attitude changed, and we were able to more productively move forward to a place where learning happened, right? And that was the whole point. So really I think that experience helped me see that, you know, because at the time I was maybe four years teaching. So I had enough experience where I could see this was not good and that I could fix it, but I didn't know how to fix it quite yet. So enabling, you know, bringing in my colleagues, talking to the family, I was able to come to a more holistic and a better solution overall for us. So that stuck with me. That sticks with me today as a parent. Like I love it when teachers call and say first like, hey, this is what's going well. And then they can complain later about like what's not going well. The story that I hear is that you were borrowing the belief that the parents had in that child and then you applied it to the way you saw that student. And so the way we see students, when the way we see students change, that's when our instruction and our approach to them changes as well. So what a great story. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's hard, right? Like it's hard as you've got a lot of students as a teacher, especially in high school. I think I probably had, you know, 70 or so. But really taking that time to get to know families, because we think sometimes high school students, oh, like they're almost adults, right? No. They have families. Their families are there to support them. They still need a lot of help. So. Well, and that story also talks about partnering with families and colleagues. It's all about collaboration. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, teaching is very complex. Multiple people are involved in making that work. When I started teaching, I thought it was just, oh, just me and my students. But then I realized as I grew into the profession, oh, it's no, it's no silos, it's all webs and systems. Let's move to your article. Every article has a seed. What was the seed for this article? So I had the wonderful experience of working with doctors Deborah Short and Janice Chavarria, who are creators of the SIOP model. And so for those who are not familiar with it, we would call it the 8-30 model. So it's eight components, 30 features, all intertwined, designed to support teachers provide instruction where you're integrating content and language. And so one of the things I was realizing in working with them on research around it, as well as just providing professional development, you know, across the country to different teachers, is there was, I want to first, well, maybe like a correlation, that might be a little bit too, that might be beyond my data. But maybe it was more like anecdotally I was noticing that teachers who understood and implemented language objectives very well did a lot of other things in the SIOP model really well. And teachers who struggled to identify a worthy objective, develop it, share it with students, and then assess it at the end of the lesson, those teachers also struggled in other aspects of the SIOP model. So they might have trouble setting up productive interactions between them and then within the peer group. they might have, you know, struggles with identifying academic language or functions of language that are worthy to teach in a lesson. They also might struggle with incorporating all four language skills. And so I really saw over time language objectives be kind of like that canary in the coal mine. Like there's there's a problem if you're if you're not getting that. It's also kind of a complex issue to understand, I realized over time. And I also knew that too from my own experience teaching and trying to use those in my classroom. There was a period of time when I I was pretty good about it and then I dropped off. Um, and you know, there's lots of reasons why that happened and I I see it happen today. I was the only teacher that was really using them, so I didn't have that support system. Um, I didn't have like sometimes I wouldn't I didn't have a repeatable routine. So I would have it up, but I didn't always remember to have like, oh yeah, I should have shared these with the students, right? And so these these sort of things over time really coalesced into this idea of like, well, so if you can get if you understand language objectives, you can understand a lot of other things about teaching English learners. Like you're just you're just more on point, right? You're able to say, okay, so this is my lesson. These are the linguistic demands in it. I've only got 30 minutes, 40 minutes. Like what can I realistically teach from a language perspective within that lesson? And then how do I convey that in a way that my students, whatever, you know, whatever age they are, whatever language proficiency they are, how can they understand that that is their job for today? And then they understand that I'm going to also at the end assess them and I'm going to assess myself too. That was the other aspect I think of language objectives that I always found helpful as a teacher and then also later as a coach is at the end you could say, well, did we did we meet our objectives? Like maybe I had two objectives and I was able to get the students to, you know, orally do like a five finger retell of a story, but we ran out of time and we didn't get to the summary sentence. So then I could, you know, let the students know like, yeah, this is what I planned, we didn't get to it, that's okay. Um, but this is going to be your job for tomorrow, for example. And so it held me accountable and it held them accountable. So I really think seeing teachers, um, kind of my own reflection, seeing them also struggle with it helped me think, okay, like this could be a good resource. Like, you know, dust it off and be like, oh yeah, that's right. I should be thinking about language functions or I should be thinking about, um, academic vocabulary when I'm thinking about how to create an objective. So that was kind of the impetus for that. You already said several things there. You said, uh, language functions and, um, academic vocabulary. So can we can we look at a non-example of a language objective and then an example and then you can break down, you can analyze each the parts of that. Okay. So a non-example would be if we're thinking about this from a language perspective, it could be it would be an objective that, um, so I just saw this the other night in the class that I was teaching. Uh, so I have a little feedback for my student. But it's a an objective that you can't measure. So her objective, I think they were, okay, so they were, um, having their classmates learn about centers, literacy centers. And so they said the students will be able to understand, um, you know, I think it was different ideas for literacy centers. And I was like, well, I can't, like, I can't measure if you understand. I can't get in your head and and figure out did you understand that? So one of the the hallmarks is like, at the end of the day, can I assess this? Like I can assess a five finger retell, right? I can assess a summary sentence. I can assess were you able to use transition words in your paragraph, right? I can, you know, assess if you were able to, um, relate to your partner, you know, two interesting ideas that you read from that article. I can't assess if you understand ecosystems. Like it's too big, it's not measurable. So that's a non-example. Um, I think another non-example of an objective, and this is a little bit about from my own experience as well, um, you can have a beautiful objective, but if it's in your lesson plan, if it's not shared with the students, then it's not also a language objective because you need the students to be able, uh, to understand what their role is in the in the lesson that day. So that's another non-example. Um, I guess another non-example could be if it's written in a way or presented in a way that's also like not comprehensible to your students, right? So if your students are, uh, English learners and they are maybe a level one or two, um, or you're teaching English as a foreign language, if you have something like students will be able to, you know, identify and retell, you know, characterization or something, that if I'm six, you know, that that's difficult. So I might have something, um, like an icon, right? Like so I'm gonna have a mouth on the board and because that's we're gonna talk today. Um, or I might have an ear because I'm gonna listen to what my buddy said and then repeat what he said back to him, right? So you a language objective has to be something that the students can access. So those would be non-examples. Um, so on the flip side, your examples would be, uh, objectives that are shared with the students. So they're posted somewhere. Uh, you can have the students read them out loud, read them to a buddy. Uh, you can have them look at them and maybe kind of what I sometimes had students do is retell it, like in your own words. Like I have like this very formal objective, but how would like at the end of the day, what are you doing, right? Or what what's the goal today? So sharing it with the students in an age-appropriate, developmentally appropriate way. Um, measurable. Can I at the end of the day, at this lesson, can we, can I assess like, yes, this was great, we did a good job. Or yes, we're almost there, let's work on it tomorrow. Or no, like I didn't I I as a teacher did not teach this. Um, maybe it was too too much, too hard, right, whatever it is. Um, so it's something that's measurable. And then from a language objective perspective, because a lot of teachers do have experience writing like more content objectives, right? They take their standards and then they try and chunk from there. So if one of my standards is to ensure that I can do key details, what can I do in 15 minutes with that, right? Um, so from a linguistic side, we want to make sure that we're thinking about how does your instruction in language help your students with that content objective. So if you're comparing and contrasting two characters for like English language arts, let's say, um, maybe it's contrastive language. Maybe we need to teach students how to compare and contrast. Maybe it's superlatives, right? And so you kind of look at your lesson and from a the it always comes from the content. You have to look at the content and say, at the end of the day, this is my standard, this is what my content objective is, but how is my language objective going to help my kids, uh, get to the content as well as develop their academic language. So we would also have, you know, teachers and I would do this myself as well, think about language functions, right? What is the task today? Is it, you know, to write a summary? Is our task to share new ideas? Is it to listen, right? That's a difficult thing for a lot of people, not just students. Um, but to, you know, really listen to what my buddy said and then be able to build on that. That's a that's a language task, right? To be able to add ideas. Um, so that I think that probably gives a little bit of a sense of a an appropriate language objective. Um, you're really looking at what is the language from a linguistic perspective, what's my job today as a learner, right? I've got two jobs. I'm going to learn photosynthesis, but I'm also going to learn the language of science, right, to help me get there. So now let's talk about, let's give examples of, let's, can you take a language objective and then break out the different parts of it? Yeah. So if we have a language objective for, let's say, like, um, a science, uh, science infused language lesson. Um, so if my content objective for that was students will be able to compare and contrast different biomes, um, then I'm looking at my task. So what are we doing today? Are we reading? Did we read the text text yesterday? So maybe today we're doing more of like, um, just a quick review and then a a group discussion. Or are we writing today, right? So maybe I already had the reading, maybe the students had already, um, in small groups shared their thinking about different biomes and now we're time it's time to write. So you have to think about what you can get done in that lesson, what's the focus. But if my content objective is to compare and contrast different biomes, then my language objective might be something like, um, it might be related to the task. So, um, you know, I will, students will Be able to, you know, write a paragraph that compares and contrasts, you know, the tundra and deciduous forest, or, you know, two of their choice. And so at the end of the lesson, that's what I'm looking at. I'm seeing, were students able to do that? I would also then have a rubric, obviously, to, you know, assess their paragraph. But as, you know, from a high level, they're understanding, okay, we've been working on biomes, I've spoken about biomes, I've read about biomes, now I'm expected to write a paragraph that compares and contrasts. And so my instruction, then necessarily, if students are already pretty good at paragraph construction, that's not going to be the focus. But what maybe they're not good at, or they're not as proficient yet at comparative language, right? Or comparing two things. So we might have a paragraph, we might have a mini lesson on, you know, how do you start your paragraph if you're comparing two different ideas, right? What are some transition words? That could also be a focus of my lesson. So I might have students will be able, you know, to select and use appropriate transition words in their paragraph. So from that perspective, we're looking at how do I write as a scientist might write in this sense. So I'm going to stick to the facts. I'm going to, you know, try to be clear. And so those would be, you know, perhaps ways that we would look at that language objective. You talked about academic language. So can you talk more about that? Like, what's the academic vocabulary that students are doing in the language objective? Yes, yeah. So, you know, one of the things I kind of got over the years is, you know, as a teacher, you're doing a lot in your lesson. So hopefully, if you are following, you know, some sort of instructional framework like SIOP or QTEL or all the ones that are out there, right? They all have embedded in them this idea of like, you know, four language skills, academic language, authentic tasks, interaction. So those should all be in your lesson. They don't always have to be the focus of that lesson, right? You are, as a teacher, probably assessing all of that. So, you know, if that is my lesson today is to teach paragraph structure for comparison purposes, I also may have other objectives that I didn't list for the students, but I am also looking for. But I don't want to overwhelm students, right? I'm thinking like, at the end of the day, I want you to feel successful, right? So I want you to walk out of my classroom feeling like you did a good job in this area. Doesn't mean that there's not other things we're going to be working on, but this is your highlight today. And so that's what I would focus on. I would have one or two objectives. I wouldn't have every-- because sometimes what I would see, and this is where I think teachers stop doing objectives because it becomes too much, is they would have like eight things listed. And it's like, well, that's great. Like, I know you're going to do those things, but it's hard to put eight things up every day and to have students talk about them and then to assess them at the end. You don't have a lot of time. So let's just narrow this down to like two things that you feel are non-negotiables. Like, if my students walk out of this classroom and they don't understand how to use a transition word and they don't understand how to have a topic sentence, then I didn't succeed today, right? Whatever your non-negotiables are, that feeds your objectives. And so if our task is a summary, a comparative summary, then maybe my objectives might be two. And one of those could be related to academic language or academic functions. So in this case, it might be the language of comparison, right? Something is bigger than, something is hotter than, right? That's something that I might teach as a language objective for that lesson, in addition to the more macro level, like being able to, you know, create a cohesive or coherent structure. So I think the academic language piece is huge. You always want to have that in your lesson. It's not always maybe a focus for the language objective. It just kind of depends on, you know, what you want to assess. But I guess my one caveat there is-- and I did this as a teacher and I see it because I think it's tough. It's also really tough if your educational background is not linguistics or teaching English as a second language, because academic language is pretty big, right? And it depends on the domain, depends on the genre, and it's a really tough concept sometimes for teachers to get. So they might default to like, oh, well, I'm just going to-- it's vocabulary, right? Like, if I'm talking about biomes, then biome is my academic word. Well, yeah, it's an academic word, but it's also not a tricky academic word. Like, it only really means one thing in this one area, and I can show you a picture and you're like, oh yeah, I got it. Whereas other words, like consequently, that's a good word to know, right? And it's tricky to teach. Like, there's not always a good visual for consequently, but you're going to see it in all your different content areas and you're going to see it on tests. And so that's where I would say, if you're going to have a language objective related to academic vocabulary, go, you know, bang for your buck, pick those tier two words, those words that cut across all content areas, words that are really hard to show with pictures or with visuals or gestures. And those are great language objectives if that's what you want to do for a lesson. If you're like, this is a vocabulary day, you know, go for those words. Do you have a formula for writing a language objective? So what I try to do when I write a language objective is backwards design. So I think, okay, like, what would be the ideal, like, outcome here? And so if it's a comparative paragraph, then I'm going to put details into my objectives that would capture that. So if-- I usually would start with, because with a lot of my times, students might-- they're a little bit older, so students will be able to-- but you can also say students will or I will. And then I would have a verb, measurable verb. So it's something to the effect related to language. And I'm very specific. So, you know, sometimes you might say, well, students will summarize. Well, how are they going to summarize? Are they going to do it orally with their buddy? Are they going to do it in small groups? Are they going to write it down? Are they going to think it first and then pair share? So what is-- how-- you know, get specific. That's what I try to do. And so I think about what language skill that they're working on for that. And if it's a receptive one, then I think about how I can actually assess that, because that's tricky sometimes. So for example, if you really want students to focus on listening, like listening for-- so students will be able to listen to five key details from the video, right? So that's very specific. Like, I don't tell you which ones, but I'm telling you, okay, you're going to have at least five and you're going to listen for them and it's from a video. So I try and keep it specific as well. So specific, doable, like what can you do at the end of the day of that lesson, and then something that you can assess, something measurable. So that's usually my key there. And we do, you know, often have teachers think about verbs. Like, that's a helpful way to think about it first. And I would have a list by my computer back in the day of like all these measurable verbs. And making kids-- and again, developmentally appropriate. We don't-- synthesize is a great, like, high level skill, but that's tricky to get students to understand and also tricky to kind of assess. So what in that synthesis is it that you want students to get? Is it that they were able to take two different texts and come up with a new ending, you know, to that book, perhaps? Or is it that they took two different points of view and were able to come up with a theme that's related to those two different points of view from those characters? So, yeah, I try to also stay away from like high, big, like create, right? Well, you can't do-- I mean, there's very few things you can create in 30 minutes. Like, you can get, you know, some steps in that process, but yeah, let's take it down to like what is possible and what you can measure at the end. I like that you started with, to write a language objective, we think about backwards planning. What do we want students to do by the end of this period? So instead of saying students will be able to, we say by the end of this period, students will-- and you give a very clear academic word such as describe, identify, classify, arrange, summarize. And then you-- and I hear you, the last one you said is like by. How are we going to do that? How are we going to compare and contrast? We're going to compare, contrast. Biomes by using it by a Venn diagram. So adding those into moving, filling in a Venn diagram, right? Yeah. So it makes it really clear and it's so intentional. Let's talk about what makes a language objective effective. Yeah, so it's effective if you're using it in a meaningful way. So if it's just because perhaps your administrator might be walking by that day, your students know that. Like, you know, they know, that's weird, we don't usually talk about this, right? So make it part of your instructional routine. It's meaningful if the students know why you do it and that it's something that they're expected to participate in. So if I am a kindergarten teacher, it might be part of my morning meeting where we're sitting on the rug together and we go over, we've got jobs today, right? We've got content jobs. We also have language jobs. We're going to listen. We're going to show that our buddy that we're listening because we're going to, you know, repeat back what they said or we're going to add two new ideas to one idea that our buddy shared, right? So it's, you know, it's going to be effective if the students know why they're doing it, they can expect it. And that's also helpful for English learners, right? There's a lot of unknowns when you're new to a language or new to a country. So if there's always a very structured way of running processes in your classroom, that makes your learners feel more comfortable. They also feel like empowered, right? Like they're not like, what's going on today? What am I supposed to do? It's like, oh, I know what I'm supposed to do today. We're writing today. You know, one of our focuses is writing. We're going to write four sentences today. Or we're going to, you know, orally retell a story today. Like I feel in control now because I know what's expected of me as a learner. So I think objectives, if they're written well, if they're specific, they can really empower your students. It just makes them feel more comfortable. But I think that's an effective objective as well. So really, I think the key points to think about is making it not just one more thing, right? Because teachers have lots of one more things. So, you know, how do you make it so that it works in your classroom? So going back to the experience that I had, it was just one more thing. Like I didn't initially make it part of an instructional routine. It wasn't part of my bell ringer, right? It wasn't part of my formative assessment at the end. But if I had worked it into, you know, when I started to work it into like, this is how I teach, and I convey that to the student, it became much more effective. And I did it. And the students expected it, right? Like at the end, they're like, well, but we didn't go over like our objectives today, right? Because sometimes you forget as a teacher. And so if your students are empowered, then they can be like, well, yeah, like go back to that, please. So I think effective objectives are ones that really bring in students' sense of knowledge, students, they empower the students, and that they have some control over their environment. That's good for everyone. Yeah, when students feel a sense of control or they feel like there's a routine that they can hang themselves on, that sounds weird. When there are routines where students can say, okay, I'm familiar with this, this is what happens, this is the sequence of the day, of the class, they're ready to learn and add new ideas to their routine. It's really helpful. It lowers the filter, particularly for students who are learning another language. They want to be... Yeah, there's a lot they have to worry about. Let's not have them worry about how they're going to, you know, how they're going to learn today. Let's help them see this is, you know, this is how I'm going to assess you at the end. There's no surprises here. Like this is what we're doing. Can we talk about how we align language objectives to our standards? Yeah, so you really, I think that's the other piece that's key is, and it was really helpful as a teacher myself and teaching other teachers is let's go back to whatever, if it's Common Core, whatever drives your curricular standards. Go back there. That's where we start. So if it's a math lesson, right, and we have students are working on fractions, you know, for example, being able to multiply fractions. If they're able to show that they're capable of doing that, that's a big standard, right? Like so much goes in. You've got probably two weeks of lessons in something like that. So a helpful thing that we used to do is like guided lesson design. We would start with the standard. So if it is fractions, it's multiplication of fractions. Like think about your lesson sequence. You've got maybe five lessons. Think about where you want to be at the tenth lesson, right, before the test, right? And so that really helps you think like, okay, from a content perspective, what am I doing each day? And then once you know that, then you can go in, you can think, okay, from a language perspective, how am I, how is that, what can I do with my students to help them get more familiar with that content? Do they need vocabulary, right? That might be something that I have as a language objective in the first couple days because maybe my students are not familiar with all the terms related to multiplying fractions. Well, that's one thing. Then I might think, okay, so now we've got more practice. We're working on showing the process and we're doing more guided practice. Maybe I want to show my students how to use a graphic organizer to help them with that. And maybe I want them to tell their buddy how they got their answer because it's not just did I solve it correctly, but how did I solve it? And if I made a mistake, maybe we can find out how I made that mistake together. So that could also be a language objective there. So really looking at that high level standard helps you think what is it from a content language perspective that all my students have to do to get to the very end. And those, that's the, it really should be an integrated process. And so I think what language objectives, because language is there. Like it's there. It's not as if you're adding language. What you're doing is you're helping your students see, oh yeah, like this is language that I'm going to need to access fractions or multiplication or whatever content it is. And so you just, you bring it to the surface and you have students see that, that that's embedded into the content standards. They don't see that. Teachers sometimes don't even, until they're taught, sometimes don't even see that. So language objectives is a really helpful tool in helping us like unpack what's going on there. But you always have to start with standards. It's a standard, standards give us the destination and I feel like language objectives are the, is the vehicle that gets us to that destination. How do we make it student friendly? Yeah, so think about just who's in front of you, right? What is their literacy level? What's their language level? What's their first language? You know, if you're teaching in a foreign language, like a ESL type setting, your language objectives might be in the student's home language with icons. As they get more proficient, you might, you know, put some English words in there. It really just depends on who's in front of you. If you have older students, right, high school students, so my students, you know, they were proficient, for the most part proficient readers. So that was not an issue. Sometimes I would have newcomers though, and we could always translate, right? So if the language objective today was to, you know, students will be able to like use a Venn diagram, you know, to compare the two characters' actions, I might have the student who's more proficient in my newcomer's language translate it for them. Because I don't want them to not know what's going on today, right? And maybe they're not able to show me in English quite yet that they're able to do that, but they could still participate in the activity and do what they could in that language at that time. So I think just thinking about how students are able to access your content and what works with your situation. I know I was a trans, like one of those itinerant type teachers for a while, and so I didn't have a smart board, right? So that I could just automatically put stuff on. So I had like a little poster, you know, that I would bring around. So you really have to make it work for you. Obviously with technology, we have a lot more options than we used to. And so, you know, you can have the objectives fly up in different animation. You can always have it set if you want students to have a constant reminder. So think about what your students need. Think about how you do instruction. If you're a reading coach, right, you're doing a lot of small group instruction. They have like just a little whiteboard and they just have the students really quickly look at like, okay, so from language arts perspective, this is what we're doing today. So it doesn't have to be this big production, but you want to make sure that students are able just to see it, read it, and get the gist of it, right, in whatever language that's, you know, resources are available to them at the time. I know that Dr. Jose Medina has. has little icons for students. And so he's able to point to today, like kids will look in the board, like, okay, we know that we're going to be doing a lot of reading today for this objective here. Or I know that we're going to have to speak for this objective here. And so it just makes it visual for kids. That's really helpful. They know. Yeah. Mostly today we're going to be reading, writing, speaking, or listening. It's one of those. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. Pictures are great. So you really gave us a master class into what language objectives are. You gave us the what, you gave us the features, you gave us the how to write it, you gave us how to make it effective. So now I know that you teach beginning teachers or new teachers to the field. What would you say, why do we need to write language objectives? Yeah, the why. So the why behind objectives is for you and for your students. It keeps you accountable. If you can identify from that lesson the non-negotiable, right, the linguistic demands that you know your students will need to access, and you can translate that into a kid-friendly but also measurable objective, your lesson is like great, right? Now, you know, things fall apart, right? Like, you know, but the bones are there. So you've got that house built. Now, things will happen, right? There might be like maybe the AC goes out in your house and so you have to, you know, do something else during that day. But if you have a objective that is measurable, that is aligned to your standards, that is doable in the time period that you have, and that is worth doing, right? So sometimes we have tasks and I think the other thing that objectives and language objectives can help teachers really, it really what helps crystallize for them is like what is important here. Like, is that activity where they're cutting out the butterflies important? Like, do I really have time for that? Oh, okay, if I really want them to be able to identify the parts of the butterfly and I've only got 20 minutes, maybe we shouldn't be doing any cutting out of butterflies today. Maybe we should just be taking our existing diagram and labeling it using the word wall that I provided, right? So it really helps you think, you know, as a teacher, what can I get done and what is worth doing for my students with that particular lesson, with that particular language. So it, you know, there's so many decisions you have to make, right, like as an instructor. So a language objective really helps you like get focused on what is it that's most important for your learners in that day. Well, this brings us to the end of our podcast. I've learned so much and it was so affirming what you've shared. Can you tell us what teachers should stop doing, red light, in terms of writing objectives, language objectives? Yellow light, keep doing, in terms of writing language objectives? And start doing, green light, in terms of language objectives? All right. Well, stop, don't do them because someone told you to and you don't understand. Like, if, you know, I at one time had like a half day on language objectives and that led to not great implementation of language objectives. I wish I had asked for more help there. So, you know, if you are doing it as a sense of compliance, then yes, I guess you have to do it, but think about it more from a perspective of like, what can you get out of it? What can your students get out of it? If it's just one more thing and it's like, yeah, because they expect to see it in my lesson plan, that's not helping you and it's not helping your students. So if you can find something within there, like, well, it will help, you know, that can make your life easier and make your students' life easier, then that's what, you know, that's what you need to do. So I wouldn't look at it from a compliance perspective. Think about like, you know, because there is a ton of research on setting, you know, goals and objectives for students that that helps them. So think about how you could make it work in your scenario. Something that like a yellow light, so those are things that you should keep that you're doing already, is that right? Yeah. Yeah, so if you're already sharing objectives with students, if you're already assessing at the end of your lesson, like how your progress on it, keep doing that. That's great. That's, you know, that's the main thing, right? Get started with that. The other parts will come. The precise objective that you use, I would tell, you know, teachers, just try it, right? Like, it doesn't have to be perfect. You're going to learn from it, you're going to make mistakes, kids are going to let you know if they don't understand something, but just try it out. Your verb selection, the way that you present it, that's going to change over time, it's going to become more refined. But just do it, right? Try it out. Try it this way. If that works, great. If you need to adjust and introduce them in a different way, that's cool too. But just keep going there. And then, if you haven't tried from a, I guess from a green light perspective, but things that you should be doing, you know, I think if you're pretty comfortable with objectives and you feel pretty good about being able to identify like the task demands from a content perspective, really think about those linguistic demands. And think about it from the different content areas because each content area has really specific language demands to it. We don't talk about math in the same way that we talk about social studies, for example. So I would push yourself a little bit there. There's a lot of good resources on academic language. The article itself has some good examples there. Groups like WIDA, right, have lots of good resources for, you know, academic language. So I would do a little like self-study on that and see if you can incorporate more of that knowledge into your lesson planning. Well, no wonder this is the most read article in Colorin Colorado. You have given us a master class in writing objectives, so clear and practical. You have taken the research and there's a ton of it, and you made it applicable for teachers. So, Dr. Jennifer Hammett, thank you so much for having me on the podcast and for sharing your wisdom. Before we recap this episode, I have a favor and an invitation. My favor is to ask you to please review this podcast. My invitation is to check out my three courses on English Learner Portal. One is on creating the conditions for ELs to thrive, one on teacher collaboration, and one based on my co-authored book with Beth Skelton called Long-Term Success for Experienced Multilinguals. Now, onto our recap. Around the 10-minute mark of the podcast, Jennifer said that teachers who would be most successful at implementing the SIOP model were usually the ones who were the most proficient at writing language objectives. This is why language objectives are so important. They anchor the lesson on a specific goal and direct our attention to how that goal is achieved through English. I still remember during teacher preparation that I was told again and again to move away from activities to focus on the standards. Reflecting on my own practice, the day I switched seeing writing objectives as something I had to do for my district to something I did intentionally for my students, that was the day I moved from activities to meaningful instruction. Now I see writing language objectives not as one more thing I had to do, but the thing that drives their success. Thank you for listening. Be safe and be rooted in peace. It's your turn to play traffic light teaching. Tweet at me either your red, yellow, or green light from this particular episode.