The work-in-progress of the Chevalier de L’Ouest (Robert) addresses formative assessment. He wants to be able to bring into the daily grading process the critical yet ignored element of how students interact in a reciprocal way (or not) with the teacher. He wants that piece to count for something.
Such interaction is, after all, what language is – a human non robotic (Krashen) interplay, a magical give and take, alternatingly lovely and scary thing that occurs between human beings. Think music, not equations, which can be beautiful or incongruous but ultimatlely lack heart. Think Bach.
As Robert pushes the formative testing pieces closer towards the far end of the chessboard, where the game of Accurately Assessing Acquisition (the AAA game) is won, I would like to address here the idea of summative assessment.
How can we assess our kids at the end of the year in a way that we could say is honest and accurate in terms of the standards and in terms that we know reflect our best (because Krashen based) instruction? How can we tell what the kids really learned that year?
One way to do it would be would be to interview the kid to find out how much speech output she has acquired. Another would be to ask her to read to us, translating some text from L2 to L1, to find out how she reads. Or we could ask her to listen to something and then tell us using L1 what she just heard. Or we could ask her to just write about something in L2. Of course, the AAA game of (summative) assessment is logistically unattainable in schools – there are too many kids and not enough money.
However, accurate summative assessment is being done in writing in some school districts. Paul Kirschling and Diana Noonan set it up in Denver Public Schools about four years ago and it has been getting better every year when our CTI (Teaching with Comprehensible Input) team meets in June for two weeks to evaluate what we did that year and rewrite for next year.
This DPS writing assessment requires that every single of our 93 DPS teachers show up for an all day team grading assessment process of writing prompts done by every language student in DenverPublic Schools – a pre-test in the fall and a post-test in the spring. It is very accurate as long as the teacher has the proper training in how to assess. We’ll leave that last sentence alone for now.
It pisses off principals – echoing Robert’s statement here:
…the people “in authority” got all defensive. If it sounds familiar it’s because people in positions of authority usually get more concerned about maintaining their supposed authority than about doing what is right. Definite parallels to World Language instruction today. We are threatening the power structure. I got an oblique warning from my principal just today about letting things “come down from the district” rather than doing grassroots work….
That some principals don’t like their boats rocked, even if it means better alignment with current research, is an amazing thing. But Diana knows that it is the only way to keep teachers from teaching to their fill-in-the-blank realities and bring them into alignment with actual current state and national standards in writing.
But what about other areas of summative assessment? How can they be set up to align with what we know now is best for the kids and for us? One area worth discussing is listening. Our DPS instrument covers not just writing as mentioned above but the other three skills.
Principals rely heavily on that data and the CI teachers, especially the young ones, get by far the highest results. This has caused anyone not using CI in their classrooms in this district to get very nervous lately. So don’t give up – all you need heading up your district is a Diana Noonan, who really is fearless.
Anyway, Mark Mallaney, one of these young superstarteachers, said last week – referring to the listening portion of the test which is currently in the New Yorkstate model – that he “just wanted the listening test to reflect what he does in his classroom – CI. [ital. mine].
This was a brilliant statement and got us all thinking. A group of us went into another room and hammered out something based on pictures and sound with no words written. It happened in Mark’s room too. There was an energy there, a real excitement.
Instead of the New York model, which is multiple choice where the kids listens to a passage and choose the response (those are so very very hard to write – it drove us nuts), Annick Chen at Lincoln High and Paul just sat there and came up in a matter of minutes with an idea that honored Mark’s request.
I won’t go into it now, because we are going to try to knock it out in final form in the next week or so, but that is an update on what we are doing in DPS to get the best pre and post test data we can.
A related link:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/04/13/dps-speaking-assessment/saying