We could say a lot about the move in support of ACTFL’s Three Modes of Communication by the College Board AP Exams.
We have actually already done so, in a far reaching discussion that has lasted since May, 2011 when Robert first brought it up. The intensity of the discussion over the ensuing months has revealed that many of us have been thinking along the same lines on this topic.
Then, recently, we ended up with an actual tool that allows us to tie our objectives and assessments to our students’ habits of learning, which happened when Annemarie came here to Denver from Maine for the Odyssey/TPRS training and when Jason was here.
The actual document does not include a rubric, and is not tied so much to assessment as it is to putting our students in the position of doing authentic self assessment of their listening and reading work in our classrooms.
I see the document as most important. For now I am calling it the Metacognition Poster (at least I intend to use it asf a poster in my own classroom and close each class with some discussion in L1 about how the kids did what is listed on the poster during that class period.
I believe that the Metacognition Poster will provide the wind to make the Classroom Rules fly. Clearly, the
metacognition piece has been sadly missing from our students’ daily palate of things to do in our classes for
some time. We know the results.
Yet, if one thinks about it, how could a child who has been asked to do little more than memorize for years be expected to do creative self introspection on how they are aligning with what ACTFL is calling for in its 2011 90% use position statement, as well as the three modes.
The Metacognition Poster will hopefully serve as a Metacog Railway that each day goes up Taxonomy Mountain at the end of each class, a trip up the taxonomy that will hopefully serve to de-condition the kids from the frightening effects that memorization classes in school and social networking and texting at school and at home have had on them in recent years. Self reflection by the kids is necessary to make comprehensible input work in our classes.
That teachers never seemed to be able to create a defined foreign language articulation path from 7th to 12th grade is no accident. Previously attributed to the variety of personal teaching preferences available in conjunction with the book and now with the computer, it is becoming more and clear that those teachers have not been able to articulate anything because none of them were doing anything of substance – there was nothing there to articulate except memorization of discrete grammar, which has no soul.
There is now an absolute need within school buildings to create a clear pathway from the lower to the higher levels based on a common theme, the theme of communication written up in the 5 C’s, the three modes, and the 90% use statement of ACTFL. That all means comprehensible input, which alone has the substance necessary to make a real articulation path in schools actually happen.
It is possible that the only reason that those teachers were able to get away with what they were doing, which most of them labeled as an “eclectic” approach, was that the smart kids in the room made them look like they are doing good teaching. Take away those smart kids, that 4% of their student populations, and no students in their schools pass the AP Exam and immediately they are emporors and empresses sans clothes.
The only problem, the key point of this article, is that the AP exam no longer caters to this kind of sham. It’s over. The new design of the AP exam takes the manipulation of the language by smart kids who haven’t really acquired much about the language at all and throws that old format of manipulation of dicrete information (far from fluency) out the window, as per the previous post referencing some of the comments Robert has made here recently.
Many jobs will be lost when this happens, as it is starting to happen as chill wrote here a few weeks ago about her “furious” colleague (furious at the College Board, for changing the AP exam to align, finally fully, with ACTFL).
