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.
