📖 Estimated read time: 7 minutes
It’s the end of the school year, and if you are anything like most language teachers I know, your brain is running a highlight reel of everything you didn’t do.
Maybe you are thinking:
- I should have used more target language.
- I should have tried free voluntary reading.
- My Level 1 students should be writing more by now.
- That strategy worked for everyone else — why didn’t it work for me?
I know that feeling. And I think it’s time we talked about why it happens — and why it doesn’t mean what you think it means.
In a recent episode of Growing With Proficiency: The Podcast, I sat down with my friend and colleague Dahiana Castro to say something our professional community doesn’t say out loud nearly enough:
Context changes everything.
Not as a disclaimer. Not as an excuse. As a fundamental truth about teaching that we keep ignoring.
Let’s Be Clear About What We Are — and Are NOT — Saying
Before we go further, I want to be very intentional here, because this conversation is easy to misread.
We are NOT saying:
- Teachers should stop trying new strategies
- Teachers should lower their expectations for students
- Students cannot grow or accomplish great things regardless of context
- Any strategy is inherently bad
We ARE saying:
- A theoretical strategy almost always needs significant adaptation to work in different contexts — and that is completely okay
- A teacher making the professional decision not to use a strategy that isn’t working in their classroom is not failing — that is good teaching
- The growth a student can achieve may look very different depending on their reality, and that difference deserves acknowledgment, not judgment
- Blanket statements — “never use a worksheet,” “never use the common language,” “if you do X your students will do Y, and if they don’t, you’re doing it wrong” — are harmful when they ignore context entirely
Our students can and do grow. Tremendously. But what that growth looks like, and the path to get there, will not be identical across every classroom, school, or community. And pretending otherwise is not helpful — it’s devastating for teachers who are already giving everything they have.
The Post That Started It All
A few days before we recorded, Dahiana shared something on social media that stopped me mid-scroll. She wrote:
She almost didn’t post it. She was tired. A little upset. She had spent the week watching a flood of posts telling teachers what they should and shouldn’t be doing — with zero mention of context.
Something finally gave way. And I’m glad it did.
Dahiana Has Been in the Rooms
Dahiana isn’t speaking theoretically. She has taught across four or five different school districts in Southern California:
- Charter schools
- IB programs with highly motivated students
- Regular public schools
- More affluent school communities
- High-poverty, overcrowded public high schools
The strategies that thrived at her IB school — reading whole-class novels with Level 1 students in the second semester — had to be completely rethought when her context changed.
“I don’t comment on how to teach in contexts I’ve never been in,” she told me.
That kind of humility is exactly what’s missing from so much of the advice that circulates online.
What Actually Shapes Our Strategies
When I asked Dahiana to name the factors that can affect the way we implement strategies in the classes, she didn’t hesitate. The list included:
- Class size — PQA with 15 students is not the same as PQA with 37
- Student motivation — and what’s competing for their attention and energy
- Parental support and community involvement
- Behavior challenges and classroom dynamics
- Chronic absenteeism (she has had a student she saw only twice in a semester)
- Housing instability — students who didn’t sleep the night before
- Available resources — maybe you only have 5 whiteboards when you need 25
- Economic realities of the school and district
- Number of preps the teacher carries
- The teacher’s own life outside school
That last one matters more than we admit.
Dahiana acknowledged her own privilege: she lives alone and can sometimes spend three or four hours on a slideshow. Many teachers go home to families, second jobs, and their own exhaustion. That is part of the context too.
During a Teacher Appreciation Week event at my school, I asked who had the most preps in the room. Two teachers had six. Six different courses to plan, teach, and assess — sometimes without a single planning period. Layering a new strategy onto that reality is not the same as introducing it in a well-resourced environment with a light load.
The Energy of the Class Is Part of the Context Too
Here’s something we rarely talk about: some classes just have a different energy.
I have classes where calendar talk flows for twenty minutes. I have others where I cut it to ninety seconds because the room simply isn’t there that day.
That’s not failure. That’s reading the room. That is teaching.
Dahiana noticed the same thing with Discussion Thursdays — an activity she picked up from Carrie Toth at a conference. It worked beautifully with her Level 3 students, but barely landed with her Level 4 seniors, who were already mentally checked out for the year.
Same strategy. Same teacher. Different context. Different outcome.
And that is perfectly normal.
What Adaptation Actually Looks Like
Dahiana didn’t abandon Discussion Thursdays — she adapted it.
Here’s what that looked like in practice:
- She knew it wouldn’t work for Level 1 or Level 2 — too much output required — so she only tried it with Level 3 and Level 4
- She layered in sentence frames (I agree because… I disagree because… As my classmate said…) inspired by a presentation I gave on output
- She gave students time to write their ideas first before speaking, because she knows her students — if she just says “discuss,” silence follows
- She moved from individual writing → partner sharing → whole class volunteers
It worked. And it worked because she knew her context, not despite it.
That is not a teacher failing to implement a strategy correctly. That is a skilled professional making it work for real students in a real classroom.
“Comparison Is the Thief of Joy”
Dahiana shared a line from a keynote by Annabelle Williamson (aka La Maestra Loca) that has stayed with her: comparison is the thief of joy.
We hear that phrase a lot. But applied to teaching, it hits differently.
We are not just comparing ourselves to other teachers. We are comparing our students to other teachers’ students — students who exist in completely different realities.
- The students in that beautiful Target Language video may have had years of strong literacy instruction
- The students in that seamless storytelling clip may have parents who speak the language at home
- The class producing incredible writing in Level 1 may have 15 students, strong administrative support, and no significant behavior challenges
You don’t know the full picture. And without that context, comparison isn’t just unhelpful — it’s unfair.
The Literacy Crisis Walks Into Your Classroom Every Day
We spent part of our conversation on reading and listening, because this is where so many teachers feel the most inadequate.
Dahiana was direct: there is a literacy crisis in this country, and it affects your language class whether you acknowledge it or not.
What this looks like in her classroom:
- Some students are reading at a third-grade level in their first language
- Cognate recognition — something many of us assume is automatic — is not
- Free voluntary reading with Level 1 is not realistic for her current students
- She no longer does a whole-class novel in Level 1 (something she did regularly at her IB school)
Instead, she spends Level 1 building foundations:
- Word recognition
- Simple sentence construction
- Co-created short stories
- Lots of repetition, scaffolding, and patience
She doesn’t start a whole-class novel until the second semester of Level 2.
Is that different from what she did before? Yes. Is it the right call for her current students? Absolutely.
And here’s the flip side: I tried free voluntary reading with my Spanish 1 this year — skipping the class novel — because I could see my students were ready for independent reading even if they weren’t ready for a shared text. It worked. But I went in with a clear exit plan: if this is a disaster in week two, I stop.
There is no universal right answer. There is only what works for your students, in your classroom, right now.
Acquisition Is Slow. Trust the Process.
One of the most reassuring things Dahiana shared: she has students who said absolutely nothing in Level 1. Not a word. And now, in Level 3, they are producing spontaneous sentences in French, sometimes even reaching for the subjunctive because they heard it modeled and it stuck.
The silent period is real. Some students stay in it for a year or two. That is not a reflection of how well you taught them.
Dahiana’s own measure of progress? A student who wrote 5 sentences in the first quarter and 7 in the second.
That’s two more sentences. That’s growth. Celebrate it and move on.
How to Reflect at Year’s End Without Spiraling
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Dahiana how teachers can reflect without falling into I’m such a bad teacher.
Her answer came in two parts.
- Survey your students — and actually read it.
She surveys students at the end of every semester:
- What helped you learn this semester?
- What activities didn’t work for you?
- What would you like me to do differently?
- Do you feel respected in this class?
She reads the results and acts on them. One year, students said they hated a game where one person got put on the spot in front of the class. She stopped doing it.
If you want to start doing this year, access a reflection tool that I created a few years ago and it includes a copy of my original end-of-the-year survey. Click here.
- Compare your students to themselves — not to other classes.
She saves writing samples from the beginning and end of each semester and shows students their own growth. Not to grade, not to judge — just to see.
A Different Question to End the Year With
Instead of: Why doesn’t my classroom look like theirs?
Try asking: What do my students need in this context?
Not next year’s imaginary students. Not the class from that conference video. Your students. In your room. With your resources, your class size, your schedule, your community.
That question makes you more creative, more responsive, and — eventually — more at peace.
Resources Mentioned
🎙️ Listen to the full episode with Dahiana Castro on Growing With Proficiency: The Podcast — we go much deeper on comprehensible input, output, literacy, and real-classroom adaptation.
📋 Free reflection resource (including a student survey): growingwithproficiency.com/reflection
📚 Podcast recommendation from Dahiana: Sold a Story — on the literacy crisis in the U.S.
👩🏽💻 The Castro Code where Dahiana shares ideas and resources for World Language teachers.
You are not failing because your classroom looks different from someone else’s.
You might just be teaching in a completely different reality.
And that deserves to be said out loud.
