So I'm taking these two college-level courses...

Today in our PD meeting I was given the opportunity to share with some of my colleagues the scoring system that I use with my classes. In general the reception seemed positive, and I really appreciated how open they were to trying proficiency whaaaa? (Proficiency scales.) Other teachers are half of what I think about when I think about teaching, so I was tickled pink that they tried it.

Then I started teaching my students. I one class a breakdown of their class grades. Probably not one of my stronger "we-are-doing-criteria-referenced-not-norm-referenced" decisions. Someone decided to defend the helpless. "I'm taking two college-level classes right now and the average grade in those classes is a B. So this data suggests that there is something wrong with the teaching in this class."  I said, "So what do you think that is?" He said, "Well, I don't know, but that's what the data suggests."

Other students pointed out the multiple opportunities they have on every standard. They pointed out that they do have choices around whether they accept their grades as they stand or work up to something better. They said that they'd rather meet the performance criteria than have me change it. Bless them, they know that learning can be better. (We still have too much in the curriculum, but I'll cry about it another day.)

About that data...

Some of my students told me last week that they have no opportunity to take statistics at our school because colleges value calculus more. These particular students all wanted to take statistics. I'm with them.

It just so happens that our class grades follow a pretty beautifully modeled normal distribution, with most of the grades clustered around "C". This is at least partially due to the fact that we usually massage a concept until the class average is around a 2.3-2.4, which, mixed with other factors, yields a large number of C grades. That's not the end of the road. Students then have the opportunity to reassess, as many times as they want or need to, to reach the grade that they want. Somewhere along this process they have to take an honest look at their current progress and develop a plan for getting what they want. Choice. That precious, dangerous freedom.

But that's not important right now. I came here to bust some myths.

Myth #1 - A college-level course is a rigorous course. Not really. They come in all flavors. More to the point, I've taken upper-division and graduate-level courses that never came close to kicking my ass the way that the online intro to stats course I took last summer did. I battled that course. I'm no math whiz, and I had to work hard. For a long time. For what I thought was going to be a C. I was really happy to get an A, but I was ready to work for a C.

Myth #2 - A typical high-school grade reflects the performance of the student. Not really. They're terrifically inflated. Categories like "Homework" and "Participation" that are generally marked for completion are inflation instruments. See the ASCD's seven reasons to change here.

Myth #3 - If you don't have an A or a B, the teacher is doing something wrong.  Reminds me of:

Doing something wrong like, using clearly defined performance criteria and being really stubborn about you meeting the objectives of this class? Yeah, okay, I am doing that.

So we had a look at the quiz. The big issue was pretty obvious. Students couldn't identify the inexplicit subject of a sentence when we threw in object pronouns. So we reviewed how to find that and how to execute a game plan when looking at that type of task. The rematch is Friday.

The Accelerated Integrative Method - Year One

At the end of the summer of 2012, I went with a group of my colleagues to Victoria, BC, to learn about the Accelerated Integrative method. I was not enthused, as I'd seen demonstrations of the method and to me it seemed rather infantile, controlling and difficult to orchestrate.

By way of description, the AIM utilizes what it describes as "pared-down language", "pleasant repetition" (the sound of that still smacks of mind-control to me) and inductive gestural markers for parts of speech. Students will learn around 400 words during the first quarter, each of which has a gesture that is marked as a part of speech. 

I made these videos for my students so that they could practice, but most of their practice occurs in the classroom. Some of them got really gung-ho about practicing, and they have consistently had amazing results. I don't know if you can see the advantage of this, but just imagine having a kinesthetic prompt that enables you to elicit the desired language from a student without explaining what it is that he/she is doing. All of a sudden, you're able to teach a student to say all kinds of things. My students are often making jokes in the class, and catching the punchlines only as they're finishing their sentences. 

Giving instructions in the target language is also much easier, because instead of just listening to the instructions, all of the students are, in some sense, giving them. The same thing can be done through reading, of course, but the sticky bit is that students already have a logic for pronouncing the roman alphabet, and re-coding that is not a simple thing. However, once students have learned the language orally, they are able to map it onto the written words without much difficulty.

These are some of the strengths of this method. It also has its weaknesses, especially articulated in the current educational climate. Next up: an argument for teaching all students grammar in their native language.

Teaching things that don't occur in English

In the third year of Spanish study at Berkeley High, students are meant to learn the present tense of the subjunctive mode. That is a particular verb conjugation that is [often] used as part of a subordinate clause to express wants, wishes desires, emotions, requests, suggestions, advice and pretty much any other situation that has its basis in the mind of the speaker. (The listener responds as he or she will.)

This is tricky, because the subjunctive is no longer in common use in English. It hasn't been for awhile, though you can still hear it implied. (If you were to take a live performance of any of Shakespeare's plays, or to see a rendition of Fiddler on the Roof, for example, you'd definitely catch some subjunctive.) The bottom line is that the concept is highly abstract, that it is basically a mental event and that students have a terrifically difficult time understanding what it is.

We use an acronym called WEIRDO with a variety of sentence frames to teach it. I have basically defined my content this way:

2.0 (Basic) You can conjugate the subjunctive verbs with 80% accuracy. You know what direct and indirect object pronouns are and mean.
3.0 (Proficient) You can also use the subjunctive in the context of commands or with the WEIRDO sentence frames. You can use direct and indirect object pronouns with them appropriately.
4.0 (Advanced) You can also turn all these moving parts into a presentation about a Latin-American country.

The tough part is getting to the end of a project and having a really nice kid who has straight A's in all of his or her other (non-SBG) classes not be able to use the pronouns and getting a lower score for it. I know this student tried really hard. And here, if I'm being honest, I have to say, "No, you didn't really get this. You're going to have to find another way to show this to me." That is the difficult part of scoring assessments.

Developmentally Appropriate Goals

Maybe SBG is too complicated for a language class. That is one of the complaints I've heard. When I went back to the drawing board last summer and thought about how to redesign my standards so that they would make more sense, I was working with a brain full of Robert Marzano's Formative Assessments and Standards Based Grading. I was also reading a lot of blogs on how science teachers were implementing SBG all over the nation. I'll tell you one thing about science teachers, they sure do like to blog. And I thank them for it.

A critical question is how to make it work in a language classroom. And as Robyn Jackson says in Never Work Harder Than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching, that often means figuring out what to stop doing. In my case this year, this has meant a change in focus. I've had to stop spending so much time on vocabulary and indeed to stop testing it directly. No more vocabulary tests in the advanced course. I still include a vocabulary component in my beginner course.

Why? Well, one thing is, I don't really care how many words my students know at the advanced level. By then they have (or *should* have) a practice around studying vocabulary. Besides, with 60+ vocabulary items per unit of study, if I am asking students to demonstrate context-specific knowledge of all 60 words I'm violating a lot of best practices around vocabulary teaching. At the beginning level, vocabulary is the most important thing, and I'm exposing them to from 15 to 20 words per unit of study.

Vocabulary Goal: Students recognize most or all of the 60 words and are able to use the ones that are most relevant to themselves or a specific topic.

What's left? I've given this a lot of thought. I know that people divide it up into reading comprehension, and all kinds of other stuff, and I'm okay with that. But my conclusion is that it all boils down to oral production, and what students need is functional chunks of stuff they can say. This goes back to something I learned while getting my teaching credential about a "notional-functional" syllabus. What I want students to say determines the structure of what I am teaching.

Language Function Goal: Students can use a specific grammar point (e.g. the present tense of the subjunctive mode) to complete a sentence and communicate with a friend about a topic.

At Berkeley High where I work there is a school-wide initiative called "Constructing Meaning", which boils down to having students use sentence frames. I've seen a lot of success this year with this in both first and third year Spanish classes, and I'm probably using it a little differently than teachers in other disciplines. The reason is that in any other class a teacher can presume a level of oral fluency that I have to create or at least scaffold towards in my class.

I use dry-erase boards to have students prep their responses, and then they have conversations. Whether they see the question or the answer first depends on the context, type of interaction, etc. At a subtle unquantified level, I believe I have seen an improvement in my students' inferences around question-answer relationships.

This offers a lot of time for one-to-one intervention. It also offers a risk-free environment for focusing on details that I will insist they incorporate in their scored assignments. You need an accent there. Yes, spelling matters. It matters if I can't read your writing just as it matters if I can't hear your voice. As a colleague of mine says, "Is it a potato, the pope or your dad? I need to know." Minute feedback regarding syntax can easily be given in this environment without interrupting the flow of the class or putting the student "on blast". The best thing about it? They're speaking Spanish. To each other. This is what the CM guys call "the gradual release of responsibility".

Here's an example from my basic Spanish (year 1) class.
Here's an exam I have used to test this material.

Here's an example from my advanced Spanish (year 3) class.
Here's an exam I have used to test this material.

In each of these exams, there is a section in which there is only the possibility of a right or wrong answer. I call this section 2.0.  This is followed by a section in which there are many ways to answer, and that section I call 3.0. The last section (absent in the level 3 exam because I used a project to assess it) is called 4.0. To reach for the 4.0, students need to synthesize previous knowledge, create something new, or solve a problem using the 2.0 and 3.0 skills. In the basic Spanish test, students were asked to create a dialogue.

I first learned about this type of "proficiency scale" by reading Jason Buell's blog Always Formative, and later by taking a course from the Marzano Institute. It will be the subject of my next post.