Using STEP: An ontario esl/eld resource

Having used STEP in the context of teaching ESL, I am definitely thankful for the framework's simplicity and thoroughness. As my colleagues have already mentioned, the rubric-style observable language behaviours makes it very easy to assess the oral, reading, and writing progress a student is making. The User Guide also lists a number of strategies teachers can use to support students at the different levels, making it a truly valuable resource to have on had when planning lessons and assessments. Having these strategies available while planning can allow for really affective Universal Design and Differentiated Instruction implementation right from the start. The addition of example continua, which indicate when a student would or wouldn't be moved to the next step, makes it easy to see how we will need to revise our plans to help students meet all the criteria for successful language learning.
If teachers utilize this resource in its entirety, I think the document is a great tool for promoting positive change in classrooms to support ELLs because that is the document's purpose. It incorporates diagnostics, Growing Success assessment structures, and observable behaviours that act as touchstones for student progress in their language development. Using the word 'continua' for the observable behaviours even suggests that teachers should reflect and revise their understanding of a student's progress. Student success is build into the document's language, which I think is a powerful start to changing approaches to ELL support.
The OLB and OLLB are specific and scaffolded skills that teachers can observe and record to monitor a student's progress in literacy and language development. Besides being straightforward for teachers to use, they support student growth because the behaviours can be observed in any number of activities. This gives students the ability to demonstrate their learning outside of formal tests or assessments. For example, one of the criteria for Step 3 on the Oral OLB is to "Self-correct or seek confirmation that a word or expression is used correctly" and students can demonstrate this behaviour informally with classmates or as an aside question to the teacher. That is a very specific criteria that demonstrates a certain level of metacognitive activity, but is interestingly separated from a similar one: "Ask follow-up questions to seek additional information". The latter criteria could be a question regarding content, instructions, or curiosity, but is specifically separated from questions about language use. In ways like this, STEP supports students because it recognizes the different contexts students learn language in and the importance of language-specific criteria blended with general learning criteria. I think this helps guide ELL instruction quite seamlessly because, as we have read, learning a second language doesn't happen in isolation but as students learn academic, cultural, and social "content" that makes up a school environment. STEP gives teachers a way to create lessons and a classroom environment that will elicit these behaviours from students, therefore allowing them to observe the behaviours often and help support students moving through the continua.
The OLB and OLLB also have very similar criteria. The OLB is divided into six steps but the OLLB is divided into four. The criteria mentioned about about self-correction is a component in Step 3 in both the OLB and the OLLB. However, the criteria in listening for following multi-step instructions is in Step 3 in the OLB but Step 4 in the OLLB. These similarities and differences suggest to me that STEP is trying to reflect the complex and nuanced layers of literacy and language development, and that when students demonstrate an observable behaviour or skill it should be taken in context and observed over time.

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