One Objective on the Wall. Five Levels in the Room.

AI-Generated Audio Summary

This fall, we keep hearing the same question from Texas campuses. The principal wants the ELPS posted in every classroom, but a single classroom holds students at several proficiency levels. How do you post one objective for all of them? And should teachers post one ELPS for each language domain?

It’s a great question, and this year it’s sharper than ever, because this is the year of implementation. Texas districts and charter schools began classroom implementation of the revised ELPS in 2026-2027, and the proficiency continuum now runs across five levels: Pre-Production, Beginning, Intermediate, High Intermediate, and Advanced. Five levels sit in the room. One objective fits on the wall.

We could have answered with a paragraph of advice. Instead, we wanted to give teachers something tangible, something they can print on Sunday and post on Monday. So we built it into the ELPS Online Helper.

The Objectives Card

The Objectives Card is live in the app and on its home page. It is free and needs no account. It puts one lesson on one page: a content objective from the TEKS, a language objective built from an ELPS student expectation, the one language domain the lesson develops, and a sentence stem. Underneath, a strip titled “What it looks like across the room” gives one observable line for each proficiency level.

Here is the first-grade science example built into the card, classifying objects by their physical properties (TEKS 1.6A), with Speaking as the domain. The language objective reads “I can describe an object’s properties out loud using property words and the frame This ___ is ___.” The strip reads:

• Pre-Production: points to the matching property picture or repeats the property word after the teacher
• Beginning: holds the object and names one property, such as “rough” or “red”
• Intermediate: says a short phrase with two properties, such as “small, smooth rock”
• High Intermediate: describes the object in a full sentence and tells which group it belongs in
• Advanced: compares two objects in connected sentences and justifies the sorting rule

Same lesson. Same objective. Same wall. The differentiation lives in how students meet the objective, not in how many objectives go up.

Here’s why that matters on a Tuesday morning. A wall with five objectives turns into wallpaper by October. One objective is something you can model, listen for while you circulate, and collect evidence on inside a single lesson. The strip tells you, and anyone who walks in, what success looks like at each level, so a newcomer pointing to the right picture and a fluent student justifying a sorting rule are both meeting the same objective. The scaffolds still belong in the lesson, which is why every card carries a sentence stem and a teacher note: the picture word bank, the partner pairing, the objects chosen so the contrast is obvious.

Two design choices protect students. No names and no individual levels go on the wall; the lines describe what students do, never who does it. And because children sort themselves onto a visible ladder faster than we would like, the strip belongs where adults read it, near the door or the small-group table, not on the anchor chart at the carpet.

What we added, and why

How teachers have been using the card told us what to build next. Cards were being made one lesson at a time, several in the same week, which is the domain rotation the card recommends, done by hand. So we added three things.

• Plan the whole week. Type the week’s topic once, and one card becomes five: by default, listening on Monday, speaking on Tuesday, reading on Wednesday, writing on Thursday, and a spoken retell on Friday, all on the same TEKS and the same content objective. Your own card stays in its day, and if it has its own sentence frame, the speaking and writing days reuse it, so students write on Thursday with the frame they said out loud on Tuesday. Skip a day for an assembly, switch any day to another domain, and print a card for each day or a one-page overview for your lesson plans.
• Examples for grades 4 through 12: fourth-grade math, fifth-grade science, seventh-grade Texas history, and Biology, each tied to a real TEKS with its citation.
• Cards for lessons taught in Spanish. These need their own section.

In a dual-language classroom

Picture a second-grade dual-language classroom. In a common model, math is taught in English and science and social studies in Spanish, and the same children cross between the two languages all day. What goes on the wall during Spanish time?

Here’s the honest answer, and it starts with a limit. The ELPS describe the development of English, and TEA has not adopted Spanish proficiency levels. A Spanish card that borrowed the ELPS level names would imply a standard that does not exist. In a two-way program it would also misfit the English-dominant partners, who are learning Spanish and were never the subject of the ELPS.

So when a lesson is taught in Spanish, the whole card is in Spanish. Objectives start with “Puedo,” and the five rows become a classroom scale that names how students show the learning: Con gestos e imágenes, Con palabras, Con frases, Con oraciones, and Con oraciones conectadas. The lines are written in Spanish rather than translated, modeled on the ELPS progression, and they use the terms we teach bilingual teacher candidates, such as cartel de anclaje. A footer on every Spanish card says what the scale is and what it is not.

In practice, three things keep it clean in the room:

• Post each card during its own language time. The Spanish card goes up for the science lesson taught in Spanish; the English card goes up for math. If your campus asks teachers to post the ELPS, that is the English card.
• Keep the languages separate on the wall. A side-by-side bilingual poster lets students read only their stronger language, which works against the model.
• Plan the week in the language the subject is taught in. The week planner works in Spanish too, with Spanish day names and a Spanish Friday retell.

What we want to be straight about

• Posting objectives and rotating domains are local practice, not TEA rules. The words “objective,” “post,” and “display” do not appear in Chapter 120. What we offer is a professional recommendation. If your campus requires a specific format, the card bends to it, because every line is editable.
• The lines come from TEA’s descriptors. On an English card, the five lines are plain-language versions of the proficiency level descriptors for the grade band and domain (19 TAC §120.20(e) for kindergarten through grade 3, §120.21(e) for grades 4 through 12), and a panel on the card shows the source text so you can check it yourself.
• The strip is for teaching, not for TELPAS. Instruction uses the five new levels this year, while TELPAS keeps its four rating levels for 2026-2027 and 2027-2028, and TEA plans a new assessment for 2028-2029. In kindergarten and grade 1, where the classroom teacher is usually the TELPAS rater, a week of one domain a day, taught and watched, is exactly the kind of evidence a holistic rating rests on.
• One objective on the wall does not mean less language instruction. Chapter 120 still requires content-based instruction, and intensive and ongoing foundational second language acquisition instruction for students at the pre-production, beginning, and intermediate levels.

Try it

Open the ELPS Online Helper home page, or go straight to the card builder. Load an example, edit any line, and print one card or a whole week. With a free account, the assistant will draft a card from a TEKS you choose, in English or in Spanish, draft the rest of the week from that card, and check each one against the descriptors before you see it. Read the lines anyway; the check is a filter, not a verdict. The rest of the helper is free as well, including the ELPS course and its continuing education credential.

If a line doesn’t sound right for your grade, or your classroom needs something the card doesn’t do yet, leave a comment. That’s how this tool started.