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.

19 Concepts on the Wall

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. After an uncomfortable conversation with an administrator about why there are HECKA students with F grades in my second year Spanish classes, I go to Think, Thank, Thunk. That's where I go lately when I feel like a baddy for trying to put the responsibility for student learning on *drum roll* my students.

I find this post on keeping it simple, which smarter people found a long time ago and think, "Boy oh boy did I mess this one up." I find this other post on how the grades might hit the floor and lie there in a pool of their own vomit for 15 weeks or so and think, "Okay, so we're right on target". I'm going through this checklist right now:

Worried? √
Determined to see it through? √
Gonna add more concepts before finals? NO WAY. Well, maybe, but I won't assess them.
Students with F who are within four concepts of a D counted? √
Students learning in my classes? Oh, please. Of course. Like never before.

What's going well?

Up front and center, I'm having this convo with students:

Me:  "Okay, so we have to consider how everyone is doing and develop a rubric together to determine what our 'A' looks like, what our 'B' looks like, what our 'C' looks like, what our 'D' looks like and what our 'F' looks like. I'm as worried about your grades as you are.
Student 1: (Completely ignoring the rubric suggestion) Well, maybe we could have another lesson on 'x'.
Student 2: I think we need to go over the warm-ups more.
Me (to students 3 and 4): So, how about as a way of showing proficiency on Standard 1A-3 and 4, you two do a mini-lesson (aka warm-up) on them? One of you could design each one, and the other could take a supportive role, checking with individual students, making sure everyone's on task, going over the answers, etc.
Students 3 and 4: Okay, so should we e-mail that to you by Monday?

or:

Me: So I looked at your other grades and I saw that you have straight A's and this F in here. What do you think is going on?
Student: You know, I took this in middle school, and I really don't think I gave it my all or studied very hard until I saw that my grade was actually an F. Now I'm working on it much harder.

instead of:

Student: Can I have some extra credit?
Me: Oh, sure. Copy the answers to twenty workbook pages from your buddies.

Next, if my student has an A, a B or a C in my class, that means that student can do the things my grade-book says they can do, at the level my grade-book says they can do it. If my grade-book says they can't do something, that means that they haven't shown me they can do it. They didn't get it right on one of my many assessments and they haven't stepped up yet. It does not necessarily mean that the student can't do that thing.

CONTINGENCY PLAN TIME - We're gonna turn that g-thang (my classroom) into a workshop for the next two weeks.
   

I've been having some intense conversations with parents about SBG. Some people are really upset. Some people are more curious. Some people seem to come in expecting to find some kind of really dismissive grammar and translation Nazi, and then seem surprised to find that I'm passionate about a communicative approach and that I don't just grade students on pencil and paper tests.

It's almost as if the idea of linking academics to real life means throwing out an expectation of excellence. At no time is this more apparent than when the student who has an "A" in his English class e-mails me and a good percentage of words are misspelled. Capitalization has been flung to the wayside as if needlessly pedantic. Punctuation is only for formal situations, and we're all friends here, so why bother?

I had a parent ask me to what extent this system was in beta. I hear that. I didn't have a better answer than, "Well, you know, in education we are always experimenting." I wish that people would question grade inflation at the university level the same way they question a content mastery system.

The conversations I'm having with students are really different. For the most part, I'm seeing a lot of pride in their knowledge, an enthusiasm for learning that is not related to candy OR grades, and work that in all my years of teaching I have only been able to imagine my students doing.

Day 2

I'm usually nervous for the first day of school. This year I was extra nervous. Five of my colleagues and I had just been to Canada for a three-day workshop on a teaching strategy (et cetera)known as AIM (Accelerative Integrated Method). I had gone with a fair degree of skepticism. AIM uses a truncated collection of vocabulary that presents and combines all parts of speech in stories, plays, songs and dance. I haven't actually seen the dance part yet. The creator of AIM apparently analyzed French, which is the original language of AIM, and now Spanish for the highest frequency words and phrases, subsequently matching every word to an "iconic" gesture which the teacher performs while the class speaks in unison. I believe that speaking in unison and the criterion for language selection are the accelerative part. The Integrated element may be the limitation of using only the highest frequency words and of couching them in a familiar context, such as a play or a story.

I don't mind sharing that I arrived in Canada almost choking on skepticism. High school students learning fluent Spanish by gesturing every single word? ¡Qué risa! They would think it too infantile. Alas, I'm a kinaesthetic sucker. As soon as I started doing the gestures myself and saw how, in contrast to TPRS (which is another method we've adapted here) there is a very lucid plan for teaching grammar, I was bound to try it. It seems to be going very well. The students really like it. The common thread of discussion amongst us teachers is that it is exhausting at the moment. However, it is my considered opinion that it is much less exhausting than talking to students who don't talk back.

A second feature of my curriculum this year (and one which also caused me to chew a little foil) is the fact that I'm trying to run a nearly paperless classroom. I hate paper. I hate how much of it is meaningless. I hate how it piles up. I hate fill in the blank worksheets, I hate figuring out where to put them, and most of all I hate how students ask "Are we getting points for this?" Last year was a big year for me in terms of finding out why they want points for everything. I'm done with it. I don't remember how or why it happened, but the end of the 2011-2012 school year saw me rifling through the internet every spare moment looking up Standards-Based Grading. I couldn't find much for Language Teaching so I've mostly scoured Jason Buell's (of Always Formative)narratives and adapted some of the tools that he's explained. Enyhoo, getting back to the paperless classroom, I've created a website for each class. I got alot of the design know-how from this tech-whiz Chemistry teacher known as Ms. Bethea. I also borrowed shamelessly from the ultra-spare arrangement of Shawn Cornally's physics site. Many, many thanks to them for getting me to think about documenting my practice in this way.