Here is my response to the data turd that I wrote to the vertical team:
Some thoughts after our meeting:
Since confidence in students is so important, when we ask them to produce writing or speech to align with some kind of desired outcome written in a document somewhere, in the form of either an observable skill or a measurable content task, it results in the student feeling not as good as others in the class, or better than others. Potential language learning communities are replaced by those who can and those who can’t. This gives the students who don’t care enough to do the required task – because they are bored – the idea that they are “not so good at languages” and they say that throughout their lives, but it is not true.
The teacher’s expressed desire to “gather data” on how the student is doing may be honestly stated to the class, but it carries a subtext message to all but the few in the class that they don’t measure up. Yet anyone can learn a language, so, where collecting data on students in, say, a physics class makes a lot of sense, collecting data on children who are taking a language doesn’t make so much sense. Not everyone can eventually, given enough exposure, learn physics, but given enough time and the will (no shaming, no veiled judging while they are learning) to do it, anyone really can learn a language.
Besides seeing data collection of output skills by teachers in language classes as bad, I also feel that when we backwards plan from a content objective (i.e. we want the students to know how to use si clauses so we give them the pattern and ask them to produce some – we often do this sooner than the students feel comfortable) then the result has a stilted and memorized quality that does not address acquisition but provides the instructional service of mere learning, learning that is forgotten after the test. And it’s really boring to learn that way, when you are trying to demonstrate to the teacher that you can do a certain task, when you are learning because you have to for a grade and not because you want to.
Teaching should not be a cookie cutter experience driven merely by the delivery and collection of data – it should be a fun and expansive personalized journey for both teacher and student, one that is different in each class on each day. Teaching the same thing all day is a proven ingredient in teacher and student burnout. I would like the curriculum documents from which I work with my students to invite me to teach and to invite my students to learn in a way that encourages the class to connect in ways that go beyond the mind and in the direction of the heart, so all can enjoy the class and not just the few, though fun and community.
Ben