TO TEXTBOOK WAS THE FRAMEWORK, NOT THE CURRICULUM part 2
How I Structured a High School Spanish Unit for Functional Language, Culture, and Connection
A unit was never just vocabulary, grammar, and a test for me.
Even when the textbook chapter gave me those pieces, I was always trying to figure out how they connected and what students could actually do with them.
What did this language allow students to say?
What cultural or historical context would make it make more sense?
What did geography have to do with it?
Where might students actually encounter this vocabulary outside of my classroom?
And how could I structure the unit so that by the end, they were not just recognizing what we had studied, but actually using at least some of it?
That was really the heart of how I planned.
BEFORE I PLANNED A UNIT, I PLANNED THE YEAR
I usually knew I needed to complete four major textbook-based units, with a stretch goal of five when pacing allowed. The school used a specific textbook program, so each unit was anchored in a chapter with vocabulary, grammar, workbook materials, online exercises, and assessments that we were expected to cover.
I did not throw that structure out. Actually, it helped a lot.
The vocabulary and grammar sequence were already there, which meant I did not have to invent the whole course from scratch. That gave me more room to think about what I wanted to add around it.
Alongside those textbook units, I planned cultural studies that started at the beginning of the year and continued throughout. Students developed ongoing knowledge of Spanish-speaking countries and completed projects tied to what we were studying. They explored traditions and cultural practices connected to different seasons, holidays, and moments in the year.
If something significant was happening in the world and it connected naturally to what we were studying, I brought that in too.
I was trying to avoid culture becoming a collection of random facts.
Here is a food from one country.
Here is a flag from another.
Here is a holiday.
Here is a famous person.
Now turn the page.
I wanted students to come back to countries and ideas again and again so their understanding had somewhere to grow.
That was my first layer of backward design: thinking about the whole year before zooming into one chapter.¹
GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY GAVE EVERYTHING SOMEWHERE TO LAND
At the beginning of every year, I also went back to basic geography.
Every year.
Even with students who had taken Spanish with me before.
I found that students often forgot where countries were located, which countries bordered one another, which countries shared the Caribbean Sea, where major mountain ranges and rainforest regions were, and how those geographic relationships shaped culture.
That mattered much more than it might seem.
If students did not have a basic geographic picture in their heads, history and culture could start to feel like a pile of disconnected information.
Why do similar foods show up across several countries?
Why do musical traditions overlap?
Why do certain dances, words, religious traditions, Indigenous influences, or ingredients keep appearing in different places?
Once students could actually see where countries were in relation to one another, those patterns made more sense.
Countries connected through the Caribbean, for example, have long histories of migration, trade, colonization, movement, and cultural exchange. Geography does not explain everything, obviously, but it gives students a framework for understanding why similarities and differences might exist.
Historical context did the same thing.
That is why I intentionally taught geography and foundational history every year instead of assuming students remembered it from a previous course.
What changed was how much I expected them to retain and what I expected them to do with it.
A Spanish I student might need to identify Spanish-speaking countries, recognize major regions, locate capitals, and make some basic connections.
At an intermediate level, I could expect them to remember more and start connecting geography to migration, food, language variation, colonization, or cultural practices.
By the upper levels, the questions could become much more analytical.
And when I had taught most of those students myself the year before, I could reasonably expect more because I knew what I had already taught them.
They had seen the map before.
Now I could ask better questions about it.
That was part of the spiraling for me.
THE FIVE Cs HELPED ME KEEP THE PIECES CONNECTED
I also introduced students to the Five Cs in the World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities.²
I did not expect students to memorize those words as standard language.
I used them because they were a helpful way to explain what I thought language learning was supposed to involve.
Communication meant understanding and using Spanish.
Cultures meant looking at the products, practices, histories, and perspectives connected to the language.
Connections meant using Spanish to think about history, geography, music, religion, art, and current events.
Comparisons meant looking at other cultures and languages alongside our own.
Communities meant remembering that Spanish existed outside my classroom.
Those ideas helped me keep from teaching vocabulary, grammar, history, culture, and speaking as if they were unrelated.
I wanted them constantly overlapping.
EVERY STUDENT HAD A FOCUS COUNTRY
At the beginning of the year, each student chose a Spanish-speaking country that became their focus country.
I turned the selection itself into a game because I wanted it to feel like the beginning of something, not just another form to fill out during the first week of school.
Once students had their countries, we started with the basics.
Where is it?
What is the capital?
What are some major geographic features?
What languages are spoken there?
What are a few historical or cultural facts we need to know before we can understand more specific topics?
Then students came back to that country throughout the year.
During a clothing unit, they might research traditional or contemporary clothing, climate, materials, Indigenous influences, or regional vocabulary.
During a food unit, they might look at agriculture, ingredients, migration, markets, or regional dishes.
During a unit on school or community, they might compare educational structures, transportation, schedules, or public spaces.
They were not becoming experts on an entire country from a few projects.
That was never the point.
The point was that they were building some continuity instead of starting from zero every time we changed topics.
I WANTED LANGUAGE TO DO SOMETHING
One of the biggest principles underneath all of this was that I did not want to teach anything in a vacuum.
Vocabulary, grammar, culture, history, traditions, pronunciation, all of it needed to connect eventually to something functional.
Spanish I was probably the hardest place to do this because students did not have much language yet.
At the very beginning, they needed memorized phrases.
They needed specific sentence structures.
They needed vocabulary lists they could reference because they did not yet have enough language to create very much on their own.
But even then, I still wanted every piece to have a purpose.
We learned these four words.
These four words can make this sentence.
This sentence is useful in this situation.
Now what happens when someone responds differently?
What can you change?
What stays the same?
What changes if the person you are talking to is older or the situation is more formal?
Students were learning small, usable blocks of language and then practicing what those blocks could actually do.
As they became more proficient, they had more language to pull from, and I could loosen the structure more.
But the underlying question stayed the same:
What does this language help you do?
That emphasis on meaningful communication and grammar in context aligns closely with ACTFL’s current guidance for language instruction.³
SPANISH I: GREETINGS WERE MORE THAN “HOLA”
The first Spanish I unit was usually centered around introductions.
Students learned how to introduce themselves, respond when someone else introduced themselves, ask and answer basic personal questions, introduce another person, and use common greetings and polite expressions.
That connected really naturally with the focus-country work.
We looked at how greeting practices differed across Spanish-speaking countries and communities.
In some settings, a cheek kiss might be common. In others, two cheek kisses might be more familiar. Depending on the country, region, age, relationship, setting, and the people involved, a greeting might instead be a handshake, a hug, a verbal greeting, or something else entirely.
I did not want students leaving with a chart that basically said, “Everyone in this country does this.”
People are more complicated than that.
So we talked about patterns and context, and then we practiced them.
Students were not just standing across from each other saying:
Hola. ¿Cómo te llamas?
Me llamo…
Mucho gusto.
They were imagining who they were talking to.
Where are you?
Do you know this person?
Is this another teenager?
A teacher?
Someone’s grandparent?
The head of the school?
What level of formality makes sense?
What physical greeting might fit the situation you are studying?
Those activities gave students a reason to repeat the same introductory language over and over without every repetition feeling the same.
The games themselves deserve another post because there were a lot of them.
But this is where the more typical rhythm of the unit started.
VOCABULARY, GRAMMAR, AND PRACTICE ALL BUILT TOWARD THE SAME THING
Once we had established the cultural and communicative context, I introduced the major vocabulary.
Then we started moving through grammar.
Most textbook units had around four major grammar lessons. Some had three. Some had five.
One thing I appreciated about the textbook sequence was that the grammar usually supported the larger communicative theme of the chapter.
So I used that.
Students still did appropriate textbook, workbook, and online practice.
I just did not want those to be the only places where they used the language.
I added conversations, projects, realia, authentic materials, movement, research, and practical scenarios that used the same vocabulary and grammar.
If vocabulary was the main thing I wanted them practicing, I might control the sentence structure and let them choose among different nouns, verbs, subjects, or adjectives.
If the grammar structure itself was the focus, I might do the opposite and give them familiar vocabulary so they were not trying to juggle too many unfamiliar things at once.
The amount of choice changed with the level.
Spanish I students might work mostly with sentence frames and memorized chunks.
By Spanish III, students could build more of the language themselves.
By advanced and AP levels, I could expect much more independence and spontaneous communication.
ACTFL’s Can-Do framework similarly describes growth from supported performance toward increasing independence across interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational communication.⁴
REGIONAL LANGUAGE MADE ALL OF THIS MORE INTERESTING
The focus-country work also gave us an easy way to talk about lexical variation.
What does the textbook teach?
What might someone in your country actually say?
Is there a more casual expression?
Is this word common everywhere?
Would a teenager say it the same way as an adult in a more formal situation?
How do tú, vos, usted, vosotros, and ustedes vary across different regions and contexts?
I wanted students to know the standardized academic Spanish they needed for school.
But I did not want them leaving class thinking that the vocabulary list in one textbook was the only legitimate way Spanish could sound.
Living languages do not work that neatly.
That was part of what made them interesting.
SPANISH III: THE FOOD UNIT
Spanish III is a good example of how the same structure looked once students had a much larger language bank.
The first unit was typically about food.
The textbook’s communicative goals included talking about food and preferences, making comparisons, using superlatives, reading menus, ordering at restaurants, and eventually evaluating a dining experience.
The framework was already there.
I just wanted to make more of the materials authentic.
Instead of relying only on textbook-created menus, we looked at actual restaurant menus from Spanish-speaking countries, especially restaurants connected to students’ focus countries.
Now they were reading something that had not been made for a language learner.
They had to figure things out.
What do you recognize?
What can you infer?
Can you use the headings, prices, ingredients, photos, or familiar roots to help you?
Which vocabulary matches the book?
Which words are completely different?
Again, lexical variation showed up naturally.
The same ingredient might have different names in different countries.
Similar dishes might be fried in one place and baked in another.
Something could be savory in one region and sweet somewhere else.
An ingredient could show up across several countries but have a completely different role depending on the local food traditions.
That gave us much more to talk about than just memorizing food vocabulary.
RESTAURANT REVIEWS GAVE US THE LANGUAGE PEOPLE ACTUALLY USE
Restaurant reviews were another great source.
There is no shortage of them online.
Students could look at reviews connected to restaurants in their focus countries and immediately see that the language people used in real life did not always sound like the polished Spanish in the textbook.
How did someone say something was amazing without just saying bueno?
How did people describe something as overpriced, disappointing, delicious, worth the money, or better than expected?
What expressions kept appearing?
Which ones sounded more casual?
Which were regional?
How did the slang used by young people there compare with the slang students themselves used in English?
Those conversations were fun because lexical variation stopped being an abstract concept.
They could actually see it.
ACTFL encourages the use of authentic cultural texts while also emphasizing that students need appropriate scaffolding and follow-up.⁵
That mattered in practice.
Authentic did not automatically mean useful.
Sometimes something was too hard.
Sometimes a clip was too fast.
Sometimes a source assumed students had cultural knowledge they did not have yet.
So I shortened things, added context, previewed vocabulary, replayed parts, or picked something else.
The point was not to prove that I was using authentic materials.
The material still had to help students learn.
ACCENTS BECAME AN OPTIONAL CHALLENGE
As students got more advanced, we could also pay closer attention to regional pronunciation and accent.
Spanish I and II students could hear that speakers sounded different. They could notice cadence, rhythm, tone, and obvious pronunciation differences.
Older students often had enough language and metalinguistic awareness to start paying attention to more specific patterns.
We could listen for how speakers from different regions pronounced certain sounds, reduced syllables, connected words, or used colloquial expressions.
Then sometimes I would offer an optional presentation challenge.
Could you add a few appropriate casual expressions from your focus country?
Could you try one pronunciation feature you have been studying?
Some students loved this.
It almost gave them a little performance mask, and they became much more willing to take risks speaking Spanish.
Other students became more self-conscious.
So I kept it optional.
The exact same challenge could lower the pressure for one student and raise it for someone else.
FOODWAYS GAVE US A WAY INTO HISTORY
The food unit also made it easy to connect language, geography, migration, ecology, and history.
What grows well in this climate?
Which ingredients are Indigenous to the region?
What arrived through colonization?
What came through trade, forced movement, or later immigration?
How did migration change what people ate?
What foods were already there long before European conquest?
Which dishes developed through cultural mixing over time?
This is where the geography work from the beginning of the year became useful again.
Food stopped looking random.
Students could start seeing that what was on a plate had something to do with where people lived, who moved there, what grew there, and what happened historically.
By Spanish III, many students were also taking or had already taken more advanced history courses.
So sometimes something they had learned in world history suddenly showed up in a food lesson.
That made those connections much easier to see.
One of the things I loved about the unit was that food is immediately accessible and fun to talk about, but underneath it are geography, agriculture, migration, conquest, trade, religion, class, family, memory, and identity.
There was always another direction we could go.
THEN THEY BECAME THE CHEF
Eventually, I asked students to move from interpreting food language to using it themselves.
What would it sound like if you had to teach someone how to prepare a dish in Spanish?
Not translate a recipe.
Actually teach it.
We looked at the language used in recipes and cooking demonstrations.
What verbs keep appearing?
How do people give instructions?
How do they explain sequence, quantity, texture, temperature, or preparation?
What does someone hosting a cooking show say that would never appear in a formal written recipe?
Then students planned their own cooking-show-style presentation.
They could choose a dish connected to their own family or cultural traditions or something connected to their focus country.
At home, they made a video of themselves preparing it.
Ideally, they did that with someone else in their family.
We had already been talking about food as something tied to culture, memory, family history, health, and intergenerational connection, so I invited students to cook with parents, grandparents, or other family members when that made sense.
But the family component was always an invitation.
Students needed another option if family circumstances, food restrictions, finances, schedules, religion, disability, or comfort made that version of the project unrealistic.
The point was connection, not creating another obstacle.
Before COVID, students could also bring the dishes they had made to school on the final day of the unit.
After the test, when presentations were due, we shared food.
That was another lesson in itself.
Why did rice show up across so many countries but look different everywhere?
Why were plantains prepared one way here and another way somewhere else?
Why did similar foods have different names?
What could beans, potatoes, rice, breads, meats, sauces, or seasonings tell us about geography and history?
After COVID, school rules around homemade food became much stricter, so that part changed.
The presentations could continue, and sometimes I brought in catered foods instead so we could still compare ingredients and preparation styles.
It was not the same, but we could preserve some of the discussion and connection.
THE FINAL PROJECT WASN’T REALLY JUST A FINAL PROJECT
The cooking presentation did not suddenly appear in the last week as one huge new assignment.
Students had already been doing pieces of it.
They had researched common foods.
They had read menus.
They had read reviews.
They had practiced comparisons and superlatives.
They had learned cooking vocabulary.
They had talked about foodways and history.
They had already done smaller pieces of research and writing in class and at home.
By the time the final presentation came together, much of the work had already happened.
I tried to structure projects like that whenever possible.
The Spanish I introduction project worked the same way.
Students had already researched greeting practices, written introductions, practiced sentence structures, compared formal and informal situations, and rehearsed exchanges.
The final performance was really those pieces being put together.
ASSESSMENT WAS SPIRALED THROUGH THE UNIT TOO
Formal assessment followed the same rhythm.
There were smaller quizzes throughout the unit.
A culture and history quiz.
A vocabulary quiz.
Usually a quiz on each grammar lesson.
Then there was the culminating exam.
But that exam was not the first moment I found out whether students understood something.
If a vocabulary quiz showed that they were struggling, I knew we needed more vocabulary practice.
If a grammar quiz showed that a structure was not landing, I could stop and reteach it before asking them to use it independently.
The projects gave me information.
Their conversations gave me information.
Their writing gave me information.
Their listening work gave me information.
The final project and the final exam told me different things.
One showed more discrete understanding.
The other showed how well students could pull the pieces together.
I needed both.
FEEDBACK HAPPENED WHILE THEY WERE STILL LEARNING
A lot of feedback happened during the lesson, not afterward.
Students might do a short listening activity, a two-minute writing check, a speaking exchange, or a quick reading task.
Sometimes I would stop the lesson for a very short written check.
The prompt was already on the slide, usually with a countdown timer.
Students could use their notes.
That was intentional.
I wanted them practicing how to find and apply information, not just proving that they could remember every rule without looking.
After they finished their first attempt, I would have them change the color they were writing with.
Then we checked the answers together.
Their original work stayed visible.
Their corrections stayed visible too.
Sometimes a student came up with an answer that was not on my slide but was still grammatically correct.
Those were some of the best conversations.
Why does this work?
Would people normally say it this way?
Is there another answer?
Did I miss one when I made the slide?
Language is complicated enough that sometimes students found things I had not planned for.
I liked that.
When we used Seesaw, students could photograph the original work and then the corrected version, so I could go back and review it later.
But the most useful correction had already happened in the moment.
ACTFL’s guidance includes formative, summative, and self-assessment as important parts of feedback and language development.⁶
SPEAKING FEEDBACK LOOKED DIFFERENT
Speaking practice had its own rhythm.
In Spanish I, we might begin with a completely written exchange using vocabulary and structures students had already learned.
I modeled it.
They repeated it.
We said it together.
Then they practiced with one another.
Eventually, I removed more of the support.
While students practiced, I listened.
If I heard the same pronunciation issue happening around the room, I could stop everyone briefly and work on it.
Sometimes pronunciation instruction became very physical.
Where is your tongue?
What shape is your mouth making?
Can you use your phone camera as a mirror and look at what your mouth is doing?
If a word was long, we broke it into syllables.
We said it slowly.
Then faster.
Then faster again until it started to sound like one word instead of six separate noises.
The same thing happened with sentences and exchanges.
We built them up.
WALKING AROUND THE ROOM WAS ALSO ASSESSMENT
Those practice periods gave me time to circulate.
I knew which students could probably wait until we corrected something together and which students needed me to stop by and quietly say, “Check the agreement here.”
A quiz told me something.
So did the student who always forgot adjective agreement.
So did the student who could do the written version perfectly but struggled to say the same thing aloud.
So did the student who could hear that something sounded wrong even if they could not explain the grammar rule yet.
All of that helped me decide what to do next.
I could write a whole separate post about giving useful feedback without spending every evening drowning in corrections.
For this post, the important thing is that feedback was happening all the way through the learning, not just after an assignment was turned in.
DESIGNING FOR ACCESS FROM THE BEGINNING
Differentiation was also part of the design from the start.
I have long leaned on principles that align with Universal Design for Learning.
At the beginning of the year, I reviewed students’ 504 plans and IEPs carefully and thought about what those needs would mean for how I structured the class.
I also talked openly with students about learning needs in general.
I wanted them to know that if something about the structure of the class was creating an unnecessary barrier, I wanted them to tell me.
That did not mean anyone needed to disclose private information in front of the class.
It meant establishing early that different people need different kinds of support, and that was normal.
Whenever possible, I wanted access built into the course before a student had to ask for it.
CAST’s UDL framework similarly emphasizes learner variability and multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression.⁷
PREDICTABILITY WAS A BIG PART OF THAT
At the beginning of every unit, I mapped the whole unit onto the calendar.
Homework.
Quizzes.
Assessments.
Project deadlines.
The culminating exam.
The final project rubric.
Students could see where we were going.
And I made them a promise:
I would not move something earlier.
Dates could move back.
We could pause.
I could decide something needed to be broken into smaller parts.
I could reteach something and change the calendar.
But something that had been due Friday was not suddenly becoming due Tuesday.
I also did not do surprise pop quizzes.
The calendar was only one place where students could find the information.
At the beginning of class, I reviewed what was due and what was coming.
The board showed the same thing.
It was in the learning management system.
It was in the slides.
I talked about it.
I never assumed that because I said something once at 9:17 on a Tuesday morning, thirty teenagers had permanently stored it in their brains.
There were lots of ways to find the things.
STUDENTS HAD MULTIPLE WAYS INTO THE CONTENT
I also kept unit resources online.
My slides and notes were there.
So were textbook pages, images, examples, videos, and outside explanations of the same grammar or vocabulary.
My explanation was not going to be the perfect explanation for every student.
Someone might need to hear it.
Someone else needed to read it.
Someone needed a diagram.
Someone needed another teacher on YouTube explaining it in a completely different way.
Someone needed to see the same concept several times before it made sense.
So I tried to give them multiple ways in.
Whenever possible, those resources were available before the formal lesson too.
Homework often gave students some exposure before we worked with something deeply in class.
Copy and illustrate the vocabulary.
Preview a grammar concept.
Read something short.
Watch a brief video.
Research one cultural question.
Start one small piece of the project.
They were not expected to master it at home.
I just did not want the first time they ever saw something to be the exact moment I expected them to understand and use it in front of other people.
AN EIGHTY-MINUTE CLASS NEEDED ITS OWN RHYTHM
The structure of an individual class period mattered too.
I did not want students sitting through eighty minutes of me talking while they copied notes.
There were definitely times when I lectured.
There were notes.
There were grammar explanations.
There was quiet reading and writing.
But those were parts of the period, not the whole thing.
A class might start with quiet writing.
Then we might move into a communication activity where students stood up and spoke with several classmates.
Then maybe a short listening activity.
Then a quiet reflection.
Then a grammar explanation.
Then partner practice.
Then an authentic example.
Then another application.
The order changed depending on the lesson, but I tried to change the kind of thinking students were doing throughout the period.
If something was very cognitively heavy, I did not want the next thirty minutes to be more of the same.
If something was playful, I still wanted a moment afterward where we stopped and made sure students understood what they had actually practiced.
Movement was not separate from learning.
Games were not separate from learning either.
If a game was fun, great.
But what language were students using while they played?
What were they retrieving from memory?
What mistakes could I hear?
What skill was being practiced?
I never thought fun and rigor were opposites.
I just wanted the fun to be doing some work.
THE LESSON KEPT CHANGING TOO
Teaching multiple sections of the same course gave me another advantage.
If my directions confused first period, I could fix them before teaching the same activity again later that day.
Maybe a prompt needed another example.
Maybe the timer was too short.
Maybe a sentence frame I thought was obvious was not obvious at all.
I could tweak it quickly and the next class got a slightly better version.
Then I taught the course again the next year and adjusted things again.
A lot of what eventually looked like a very intentional system was built through hundreds of small corrections over time.
I WAS NOT BUILDING THIS ALONE
I also want to be very clear about something when I talk about this work.
I stand on the shoulders of giants.
I entered a school where experienced teachers had already been doing this work for years, sometimes decades.
They knew the rhythms of the school, the department expectations, the strengths and weaknesses of the textbook, and what language teaching looked like inside that particular schedule and system.
Two colleagues especially shaped the way I developed my own approach: Mr. Douclose and Ms. Paula Apolinaris.
Mr. Douclose was the department chair when I first started.
He helped me understand pacing, consistency, academic rigor, and why teachers teaching the same course needed to stay reasonably aligned.
He showed me how the different textbook components fit together and why having shared assessments across sections could be useful.
Then, during my first year, he went on paternity leave and I became one of his long-term substitutes.
That was an incredible learning experience because I did not just hear him explain how he structured things.
I taught his lesson plans.
I followed his pacing.
I used his assessments.
I worked within the standards he expected.
We also shared a classroom, so I got to observe him a lot too.
I learned that structure by actually using it.
Ms. Apolinaris, who became department chair soon after and held that role for much of my time at the school, influenced another side of my teaching.
She was very strong at the communicative side of language learning.
How do you assess listening and speaking?
How do you conduct an individual speaking test?
How do you give feedback in the target language?
How do you get students actually talking instead of just completing exercises about talking?
I watched her do that in both Spanish and French.
I also substituted for her, worked from her lesson plans, and saw how she brought in authentic readings and resources that focused on functional language alongside the textbook.
Watching both of them helped me realize that I did not have to choose between structure and communication.
I could use the textbook and still bring in real language.
I could maintain rigor and still make room for authentic reading, speaking, and listening.
THIS TOOK YEARS
I definitely did not walk into my first year at that school with this entire structure figured out.
The first couple of years were spent learning the school, learning the curriculum, figuring out pacing, experimenting, getting things wrong, and seeing what worked.
I probably had the basic structure after the first two years.
The more complicated pieces, especially the multi-year spiraling and the connections across levels, came much later, around my fifth and sixth years there.
Longevity mattered a lot.
I taught many different levels, which meant I often taught the same students again.
That gave me a really useful view of my own teaching.
I could see what they remembered.
I could see what they forgot.
I could see where the textbook had given them a strong foundation and where there were gaps.
I could also see whether the things I had added actually helped.
Sometimes they did.
Sometimes I would teach a student again later and realize that something I thought I had taught really well had not stuck nearly as much as I thought.
That was useful information too.
Having students over multiple years let me keep asking what they were actually retaining, what they could use, where they were still struggling, and which activities were memorable versus which ones actually improved their language.
The curriculum got better because I had enough time to watch students grow through it.
THE WORKING CONDITIONS MATTERED
I also had something many teachers do not have enough of:
planning time.
The school generally operated on a block schedule. The exact schedule changed over the years, but I typically had an approximately eighty-minute planning block built into the school day, separate from lunch.
That time was not magically protected from every other responsibility.
There were meetings.
Student support.
Make-up work.
Hall duty.
All the things that quietly eat a planning period.
But the time existed.
There was also planning and meeting time before and after the students’ instructional day.
That mattered because this kind of teaching took a lot of time.
Finding authentic materials took time.
Checking sources took time.
Creating projects and rubrics took time.
Differentiating materials took time.
Grading speaking and writing took time.
Figuring out how to take a required grammar lesson and make it engaging, culturally connected, rigorous, and accessible took time.
I had more space to do that than many teachers have.
I think that matters when sharing teaching practices.
It would be unfair to show someone a carefully built six-week unit and imply that every teacher should be able to reproduce it regardless of their course load, schedule, class size, resources, or planning time.
THE CONSTRAINTS HELPED TOO
At the same time, the strict parts of the curriculum made some of this experimentation easier.
I was not inventing everything.
The vocabulary was already selected.
The grammar sequence existed.
The chapters gave us pacing.
The department had common expectations.
That removed a lot of the decision-making.
The question was not usually:
What am I going to teach?
It was more often:
How am I going to make what I have to teach meaningful?
What authentic resource fits here?
What history helps explain this?
What cultural comparison makes this vocabulary more useful?
What needs more scaffolding?
Where can students move?
Where can they investigate something?
What can they actually do with this language?
I had enough structure that I was not rebuilding the course every night, and enough freedom to experiment inside it.
Over several years, with strong colleagues, repeated opportunities to teach many of the same students, and enough planning time to keep revising, those experiments slowly became a system.
Not a perfect one.
Just one that became much more intentional over time.
WHAT I WAS ULTIMATELY TRYING TO BUILD
When I look back at all of this, the basic idea was actually pretty simple.
I wanted students to have a reason to use the language.
I wanted them to have enough cultural, geographic, and historical context to understand what they were saying and why.
I wanted them to learn the vocabulary and grammar they needed, then encounter those things through reading, writing, listening, speaking, movement, research, and actual materials from the Spanish-speaking world.
I wanted to give them support when they needed it and then slowly take some of that support away.
I wanted to know what they understood before the final exam.
And I wanted room to stop, reteach, adjust, and try again when something was not working.
I was not trying to make every single lesson fun.
I was trying to make it connected and useful.
I knew students were not going to remember every vocabulary word I taught them.
They definitely were not going to remember every worksheet.
But I wanted them to leave with enough language, enough cultural awareness, enough curiosity, and enough confidence that when Spanish showed up somewhere outside my classroom, they did not feel like they had no idea where to start.
They had somewhere to begin.
That was the goal.
NOTES
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, “Plan with Backward Design,” accessed August 8, 2026. ACTFL describes backward design as identifying desired results, determining acceptable evidence, and then planning instructional experiences toward those outcomes.
National Standards Collaborative Board, World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages, 4th ed. (Alexandria, VA: American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 2015). The five goal areas are Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, “Design Communicative Tasks” and “Teach Grammar as a Concept in Context,” accessed August 8, 2026.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and National Council of State Supervisors for Languages, “NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements,” accessed August 8, 2026. The statements organize communication around interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational modes and describe increasing independence across proficiency levels.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, “Use Authentic Texts,” accessed August 8, 2026. ACTFL recommends authentic cultural texts accompanied by appropriate scaffolding and follow-up tasks.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, “Provide Effective Feedback,” accessed August 8, 2026. ACTFL identifies formative, summative, and self-assessment as important forms of feedback supporting language proficiency.
CAST, CAST Universal Design for Learning Guidelines, version 3.0 (2024). The framework organizes UDL around multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression and emphasizes learner variability, choice, graduated support, multiple forms of communication, and access to meaningful learning.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. “Design Communicative Tasks.” Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.actfl.org/educator-resources/guiding-principles-for-language-learning/design-communicative-tasks.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. “NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements.” Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.actfl.org/educator-resources/ncssfl-actfl-can-do-statements.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. “Plan with Backward Design.” Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.actfl.org/educator-resources/guiding-principles-for-language-learning/plan-with-backward-design.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. “Provide Effective Feedback.” Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.actfl.org/educator-resources/guiding-principles-for-language-learning/provide-effective-feedback.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. “Teach Grammar as a Concept in Context.” Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.actfl.org/educator-resources/guiding-principles-for-language-learning/teach-grammar-as-a-concept-in-context.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. “Use Authentic Texts.” Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.actfl.org/educator-resources/guiding-principles-for-language-learning/use-authentic-texts.
CAST. CAST Universal Design for Learning Guidelines. Version 3.0. 2024. https://udlguidelines.cast.org.
National Standards Collaborative Board. World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages. 4th ed. Alexandria, VA: American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 2015. https://www.actfl.org/educator-resources/world-readiness-standards-for-learning-languages.
