When teaching with comprehensible input, you don’t have to stay an island for long. You can make your support team grow as you will want to have like minded people to learn from as well with whom to share your success and challenges.

This is the story of how we grew our CI support team from 4 to 60 plus counting

The photo slide above was inspired by a blog post on The Educator’s Room.

I am filled with excitement for these last couple weeks of the semester and the upcoming summer! Summer will be here before we all know it, but what has me feeling the most excited is looking at all of the people in my district’s CI community, and how it has grown specifically this past year. There is so much to celebrate! It is hard to remember that one year ago, there were only four teachers ready to commit to using comprehensible input activities and ditch the textbook. Currently, our district and surrounding counties have about 60 teachers hungry for more CI and counting!!! Reflecting on this increase, I am going to share how we have grown in such a little amount of time, and how you too can create the same for your district or school. Set it up during the summer, execute next school year, and watch your labor blossom.

To give you a general snapshot of where I am coming from, my school district has over 94 world language teachers, so we may not be the biggest district nor the smallest. However, if you are the only teacher in a tiny district, then you can still use some of the following action steps by teaming and plugging up with people from surrounding small districts.

Particularly, my school has three world language teachers; two for Spanish and one for French. When I first stumbled upon all the possibilities of teaching with comprehensible input, I thought I was the only one in my district, but thank goodness that I attended a conference in Atlanta (four hours away from my town, Savannah) to see Tina and Ben present on One Word Images. There, I was surprised to see a familiar face from Savannah, my now dear friend Sarah Downey. Our connection was natural. She then introduced me to Angela Williams. Together, Sarah, Angela, my wonderful partner in crime Maribel Gomez, and I decided that we wanted to share all things CI with all foreign language teachers in our district, and we have been doing just that ever since.

Step 1 – It is all about the mindset, the why, and goal setting

If the CI expansion is to happen and you are on your own, you must be intentional and you must recognize that this will be totally up to you or your small group. It may take a little bit of extra hard work, but it will be worthwhile as it is just so much sweeter to have people to celebrate successes with you as well as to talk to about challenges faced in the everyday CI classroom. Your group must know that the change won’t happen overnight, but with the set plan, it will happen. For this reason, it is important to sit down, whether by yourself or with your super small group, and determine why do you want to expand, and what are some attainable goals for your possible plan of action. For example, in our case, our group goals were to promote true language acquisition, to instill more passion into our beautiful teaching  practice, and to help the world language teaching profession in every way that we could. The attainable goals were to create a CI local teacher community that would support one another and meet once a month to share ideas and frustrations.

Step 2 – Set up monthly INFORMAL meetings to talk all things CI

Let me emphasize on the word INFORMAL because the chances are that all of the teachers in your group have other commitments already. When we started on this step, we didn’t want to add another thing to their plate, but we did want to have continuity to what the vision that had gotten started.

So, we came up with CI activities or related topics that we were either good at or wanted to learn more about, and we established once a month dates to meet after school to discuss each one of these. This was super informal and required as little or as much preparation as each person who wanted to share an idea desired. Sometimes we had four people show up, sometimes it was just us two or four, but we did not give up.

Step 2 – Connect digitally, push your comfort zone if you must

Digitally connect everywhere. If you are the only one tapping into CI, the cyber world will be your inspiration (and sometimes refuge) on the daily. I have connected with most CI groups known on Facebook, and Twitter. As a matter of fact, I have been pondering on eliminating my personal Twitter account and just keep my educator one as the personal one gets neglected all of the time. So not kidding. So many great ideas are shared on Twitter, and so many great full conferences happen on the daily on Facebook CI pages. I highly suggest that you connect, watch, learn, and interact. We are all at different parts of this journey and there is always a way everyone can contribute. Plus, you never know who you will be connecting with and for what purpose. The CI community is so giving and willing to contribute.

Step 3 – Attend at least one nearby workshop or two and make it a point to establish a face to face connections

Had I not been part of a specific CI Facebook page, I would have never known that Tina and Ben were going to be in Atlanta, and I would have missed out on connecting with Sarah. To  be honest, I probably would not have been able to write this because I would not have a story to tell if it were not for that connection that day. Never underestimate the power of digital connections, much less the power of actual face to face connections. While it is great to go to conferences and workshops to learn, make it a point to talk to people and look for key connections. Maybe your district is too small, but you can find someone from a nearby district, unite, and grow a small CI regional group. In the future, you will be going to these conferences with the people from your local CI group, and it will be exponentially more enjoyable in so many levels.

So these last steps I have mentioned,  you have probably already completed even before reading this newsletter. The real work happens from this point forward:

Step 4 – Create  a Closed Facebook Group Page for your local CI peeps a.k.a. #CIsquad

So, even if you are on your own, or maybe there are two of you, it is suggested that you create a closed Facebook group page. In this page, you will share the same things other CI pages are sharing that may catch your eye, but it will be more personalized to your district/region because you will also share videos/pictures of activities you are currently doing in your classes or reflections. As a matter of fact, there will be a lot more of your own contributions in this page. Through this, even if it is just your small group, you will have an ongoing exchange of ideas, and open communication almost daily or weekly with your CI crew. It will foster an even stronger connection with minimal effort. This is setting up for the next big step.

Step 5 – Reach out to your district world languages specialist or curriculum and instruction specialist

It is advised that this gets done prior to the school year closing. The reality is that more than likely they will be super excited to hear from you. Talk to your district specialist about the CI driven activities and how these have been working for you, show them the results you have been getting from your students. Volunteer to host a one hour session, preferably during pre planning week (so that all world language teachers are there) at the beginning of the school year about your best CI practices. Set a date for it. I guarantee you that the teachers will be thrilled to have an actual teacher presenting about something they can actually use in their classroom. If you have friends, you don’t have to do this alone, you can present with your CI buds. Sarah, Angela, and I actually did this and this is truly where our local CI group first took off.

What will happen is that you will have a handful or two of teachers who will be willing to learn more about CI after your workshop. You will connect with them, and they will begin their CI journey at this point through some CI activity. It will create a ripple effect, and it will be amazing to see. Don’t forget to direct them to join your closed Facebook group page right away. Soon enough, they will begin adding their own videos, ideas, and seek feedback on this page.

Step 6 – Continue to take the lead as a group, private message CI gurus, and bring them to your town

In this day and age, it is so easy to connect with the gurus. Don’t hesitate to send them a private message inquiring how to make a workshop happen in your area. Don’t wait on your district specialist to do so, you can be the person/group who takes the initiative to make this happen.

In our case, our district could only sponsor the location, and a professional day, but they couldn’t pay for the actual workshop. However, both of our workshops were super reasonably priced. For this reason, it is a good idea to find gurus who are close to your area so that the workshop price can stay reasonable, specially if it is coming out of the teacher’s own money. This year, we were able to host two amazing CI presenters at our school district without putting any money forward, people just signed up and paid very little. Each workshop generated more people who were interested in more aspects of CI. Additionally, on one of these workshops, we had people who drove from Florida and from South Carolina to join us. These people also were added to our Facebook closed group and we maintain open communication and support one another to this day.

Where We Are Now

As I mentioned before, I am beyond excited because as we close this year. First, I get to present with my best friend at SCOLT on the power of comprehensible input. Then, in the summer I get to attend iFLT19, except that this year I won’t be going alone, I will go with a small group of people from my district, so we actually get to grow together and share even more experiences. All of this would not be happening had Sarah and I not decided to connect and grow in numbers. Together, our growing group is expanding and looking forward to contribute on our own way even more.

We are also getting ready to make some adaptations to our monthly meetings. We might just host our informal meetings via our closed Facebook group for everyone’s comfort instead of meeting after school just so that we can refer back to our discussion, and more people within our group can have the opportunity interact. Every situation is different and we just learn and make changes as we go. Our goal remains the same. We want to continue to be intentional with growing our CI community.

It has been happening for us. We went from four to sixty plus people in our local CI network. This growth can happen for you too. Do you have a local CI support team? If so, how did you make it grow? What are your plans for the future as a CI teacher squad?