About CI Liftoff

CI Liftoff was founded in 2016, but its origin story dates back to 1994, when Tina Hargaden, freshly graduated from high school, participated in a homestay in Mâcon, France — the sister city of her hometown, Macon, Georgia. After three years of straight As in a traditional textbook-based program, she was ready to take on France. With all those high marks on her French tests and good scores on the Grand Concours behind her, she fully expected that when it was needed, the French language would just flow forth and she would have a grand time making all kinds of nouveaux amis – new BFFs – in France. Makes sense, right?

But when she went to talk to these potential nouveaux amis…

she was quite chagrined to discover that the grammar and vocab that she had so assiduously lain away in her brain really did not help when it was time to actually use the language. She was taken aback by the disconnect between what she KNEW and what she could DO.

She already knew she wanted to be a teacher, and she still loved French, despite her lack of success at taking France by storm, so she set out to learn how to teach her future students what she had somehow missed in her high school career…true communicative competence, and the ability to actually use the language for what languages are meant to do — bring people together, communicate, and make the wide, wide world a friendlier and more interconnected place.

She went on to major in French, and through the conversation, culture, cinema, and other courses that comprise a French major, she began to sense that her abilities were developing, through interacting in the language. In her graduate teacher prep program, her Methods professor gave a demonstration of “comprehensible input,” and a light turned on in her head. She left class that evening, headed to the campus library, and cleared off the shelf where Dr. Stephen Krashen’s and Dr. James Asher’s books lived. After devouring everything she could lay her hands on, she was firmly committed to the “natural approach,” or communicative language teaching.

When she began her teaching career, she immediately began implementing the strategies and methods that she had studied, and ran headlong into a learning journey that has lasted for over 18 years now. She taught English Language Arts, Social Studies, Reading Intervention, English Language Development, French, and Spanish in public schools for 15 years, until her coaching, writing, and training schedule got so full that she reluctantly bid farewell to her beloved classroom in 2018, to devote herself full-time to supporting language teachers.

Tina started CI Liftoff as a Facebook group in September, 2016, with 70 members. It has since grown through word of mouth to an engaged community of over 10,000 teachers who are interested in this way of teaching. By working with this community, she learned a lot about what teachers need as they make the transition to communicative language teaching. She began to write and share her discoveries and the fruits of her incessant tinkering and rethinking, because she came to discover that the same questions and issues kept popping up from so many teachers. She developed systems and frameworks, instructional strategies and assessment tools, to get to the bottom of what wasn’t working for her colleagues, and eventually she began to rummage around in the methods and strategies that she had learned from teaching reading and writing workshop, ESOL, and Social Studies. She fitted strategies from many disciplines and many dedicated and creative minds that came before her into the Stepping Stones curricular framework, and then she began teaching it to others. It was an absolute joy to begin to discover that Stepping Stones solved so many of the all-too-common issues that plague teachers in transitioning to a more communicative teaching style.

She developed Summer Institutes and founded the World Language Proficiency Project in 2018 to teach the Stepping Stones approach to others. She wrote a long book, Stepping Stones, in 2019, to explain the approach. However, she knew that a more “hand-holding” step-by-step guide was needed to support teachers in making this transition. She founded Curriculum Club in 2019 to provide coaching and step-by-step support to teachers using Stepping Stones.

During the pandemic crises in 2020, Tina was incredibly fortunate to find Alana Kubeczka, a tireless, dedicated, and incredibly talented colleague, to help her develop materials for the Free Year of Curriculum. If Alana and Tina had known then what they know now, maybe they would never have set off on the journey to create an entire year of free curriculum materials…but they were so heartbroken by the stress that teachers were under during that challenging-to-say-the-least year that they rushed in where angels fear to tread and, by crum, they produced that year of free curriculum. But what was missing was a clear guidebook to talk teachers through the year of using the materials and the Stepping Stones frameworks.

During the early summer of 2020, Adam Giedd, a talented author of comprehensible readers, approached Tina with an engaging text he had written for language learners. Tina quickly realized that Adam truly got her vision of building a collection of leveled readers that would fill the gap for early language learners and students for whom literacy – in any language – has been a challenge.  He provided massive support to help Tina launch the E-Lit app, and in the fall of 2020, with the support of many teachers and authors of language learner texts, E-Lit was born. E-Lit has grown since then into a colorful, beautiful smorgasbord of lip-smacking, comprehensible leveled texts that begin at a very, very low level of textual difficulty, but are written to engage older readers in their new languages.

In 2021, as the Free Year of Curriculum was finally getting wrapped up, Tina rewrote her first book, “Year One: A Natural Approach to the Year,” which she had written in collaboration with Ben Slavic in 2017, to bring it up to date and into alignment with the Stepping Stones curricular framework. That book is called “Foundations: A Natural Approach to the (Transition) Year.” Foundations is the hand-holding, coach-on-the-side book that Tina knew teachers need when they take the plunge into transitioning to this way of teaching.

Heading into the 2021 – 2022 school year, CI Liftoff and the World Language Proficiency Project have a set of resources that have never before existed: a seamless pathway for teachers who want to get right on the fast track to transforming their programs. Those resources are:

(1) the Free Year of Curriculum, in Spanish, English, French, and German (and a semester in Latin and Italian): Multi-leveled materials that are beautiful to look at and easily engage students in class discussions and activities with very carefully-designed graphics that visually support the conversation so that teachers can focus on the communication, instead of the endless hunt for comprehensible, interesting resources.

(2) Foundations: A Natural Approach to the (Transition) Year: A hand-holding guidebook that walks the reader step by step, lesson by lesson, through a year of instruction aligned to the Stepping Stones curricular framework and that uses the materials from the Free Year of Curriculum to train the reader how to use them, with pages and pages of very detailed graphics that show exactly what the strategies and materials look like in action.

(3) Summer Institutes: Week-long teacher training aligned to the Stepping Stones curricular framework and the materials from the Free Year of Curriculum, that provide morning demonstration lessons so that participants can experience the lessons from the student perspective, and afternoon “Nuts and Bolts” sessions to explain the strategies and frameworks for instruction and assessment that teachers experienced in their morning classes. Unlike other conferences and workshops, Summer Institutes are a streamlined on-ramp to ONE destination: implementing Stepping Stones and the Free Year of Curriculum, and knowing with confidence how to modify, add, subtract, and embellish the materials to fit your particular teaching context…including how to teach grammar in a brain-friendly way that leads with comprehensible input and guides students in a constructivist approach to grammar study that aligns with the ACTFL Core Practice of “teaching grammar as a concept in context.”

(4) Curriculum Club: A boots-on-the-ground, day-by-day, for-richer-or-poorer, till-June-do-us-part community of coaches and Stepping Stones teachers that supports and guides language educators to implement the frameworks and materials and hit the ground running at the beginning of the year.

(5) E-Lit: A very engaging, very visual, very varied collection of leveled texts unlike anything ever produced for language learners — the easiest, most comprehensible, most visually-supported collection of texts in existence for beginners through intermediate readers…on a wide array of topics, to help teachers develop a robust free-choice reading program without all the guesswork and the “too-hard” texts that so many of us have struggled with in our classes.

We are so happy that you are here learning alongside us. We have come so far, but there is so far yet to go. However, we are feeling more hopeful than ever before — thanks to this collection of resources that are unparallelled in their down-to-the-foundations alignment with the revolutionary Stepping Stones curricular framework — that our vision for language education will become reality: that communicative, proficiency-oriented language teaching becomes the “default setting” for language educators worldwide.

Thank you for reading, for growing, for learning, and — of course — for all you do for kids and for our society each and every day. Thank you, dear, dear colleagues. Welcome to the movement.

Now let’s get shakin’!

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