The current post, #3 on Countdown, offers teachers practical tips for using the toolkit to plan progress and help students overcome obstacles in their language learning journey. Using input and output information, it’s easy to quickly establish a learning trajectory and understand which skills to focus on and how to add tasks that each of our students will personally enjoy. Using the GSE Teacher Toolkit it’s easy to plan courses that help students overcome barriers to success. Progress can be difficult in the language classroom, especially when students reach a new level of proficiency with a significant increase in total time or hours of instruction. There are many ways to use ESA teacher guides to help students achieve their goals, to help teachers achieve their outcomes, and to help the educational community as a whole create high-quality courses that produce measurable learning outcomes. This information usually comes from the placement or placement test, which makes it relatively easy to determine a student’s current level of language proficiency. Using input and output data, you can now better plan your progress. We can use the input and output information to plan the overall progress of the class. Even better, combine overall planning with setting class learning goals to plan for individual student progress. The key to successful progress planning is a clear understanding of your students’ current language level and the goals you want to achieve at the end of your time with you. The learning path and skills needed to make progress will always be different for different groups and learning environments. Sara Davila, a specialist in language learning and acquisition, has experience as a teacher, researcher, teacher-instructor, and writer. See Countdown 5 for more information on setting learning goals; use the toolkit to help students set SMART goals. The beginning and end of each program will be different depending on your school, the native language of your students, and how you work on language development. The next article in the countdown will be about measuring progress, so stay tuned to the blog for more information. And you can find the rest of our top 10 articles here.