Big Goals and Scheduling

Teaching for Leadership's Big Goal

This graphic is meant to describe setting a Big Goal for an specific class, not an entire program, but the concept and basic rules remain the same. As a teacher, department head, or even a principal in a school system, you won't be used to the amount of freedom that little oversight gives you. Even great resources like Marzano's Designing & Teaching Learning Goals & Objectives doesn't cover this kind of acreage.

Just like a class or course, however, we need to start with the end in mind. It needs to be big, but reachable. In order to judge what is reachable, we need to know a little about the program's scope. 

We are at a disadvantage here. We don't know what country you are in, what level your students are coming  in at, what exposure they have to English outside of school, how long you periods are, or even how many you are going to devote to the program. We can generalize, though, if we make some assumptions, which is why we are focusing on bilingual schools in Asia.

To be called "bilingual" instead of "mini-English" or some other nomenclature, most countries require subjects to be taught twice -- once in L1 and once in L2 -- meaning that we can assume half of the hours are in English. How many are there? We still don't know, but we're going to make the following assumptions based on OECD's The Learning Environment and Organisation of Schools:

1. Students in grades 1-3 study relatively fewer hours than older ES students, with six or seven periods. OECD reports about 2000 40-minute periods in the first two years. That works out to 1000 per year, with a year being approximately 35 weeks. For the sake of sticking to natural numbers in the real world, we're going to call that six periods a day for a full program. We are going to allocate three 40-minute periods per day to English content, or fifteen per week.
2. Students in grade 4-6 will have longer school days with about 50% more classes scheduled. We'll give the later years of the program twenty periods per week, or about four a day.
3. The total number of periods in the six-year program will top out at 3500.

We have to assume that students have limited access to English outside of instruction time unless we provide that directly to them. The good news is that these 3500 periods of instruction give us plenty of time to develop strong, broad comprehension skills and even good production. 

• For students who come in with little to no previous English, we will expect students to complete a third-grade level reading program, putting them on fourth-grade level as they leave the program. Math and science content knowledge should be on grade level, though specific vocabulary and reading comprehension in those courses will not be on level. Productive skills will lag comprehension, of course, but the students should be able to move on to a full international MS program or even abroad study and stay on grade level without needing sheltered instruction or remedial classes.
• For students who come in having done the basics in kindergarten (legal in some countries, not in others), we can expect even better results, putting students near fifth-grade level. Again, productive skills will lag slightly, but not as much as the lower level.

So, there we go. We have our Big Goal:

"All students will complete the program with the ability to study abroad or in international programs on grade level, without needing sheltered instruction or remedial / intensive classes. Students will test in STEM subjects on level and test in reading at the fourth grade or better."