A CI Writing Portfolio Plan

To view this content, you must be a member of Ben's Patreon at $10 or more
Already a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn

59 thoughts on “A CI Writing Portfolio Plan”

  1. If we have evidence of our kids’ writing at the end of the year, or there is a common writing exam, we can show that their writing develops without spending time writing. Then, maybe we can get rid of pressures of people who fear our kids aren’t going to be able to write. It’s possible, and I saw it was the result in a Warwick Elley study, that writing wasn’t significantly better than traditional classrooms after an FVR program until after 2 years in the program. BUT our year 1 kids at least equal traditional kids with little to no writing. Of course, not all of them. We’re talking about averages here. If the teacher that gets our kids next year can’t see any significant differences in writing, then go break all the pencils in your room 😉

  2. Thank you, Bob, for sharing this document. It’s going to help me a lot in figuring out how to track student writing better. I know they benefit from seeing their own progress; I hadn’t figured out how to organize it yet.

  3. Eric– good points.
    I make my kids keep their speedwrites and relaxed writes. At end of semester they are gonna “review” their work and write a short English piece about how they have progessed. Already I ask them weekly “ok check your wordcounts and re-read your old stuff” and they are always amazed at how much VISIBLE progress they are making.
    That Warwick Elly paper (which if mem serves looks mostly at the amazing Fijian Book Flood experiment) is awesome, a must-read: one of the best, and most thorough studies of FVR, c.i. etc, that I have ever seen. I hope Ben’s added it to the Primers.

  4. If this approach helps those with difficult admins, I am glad. That is not why I created it. I created it as a way to see, and for students to see, what they were increasingly capable of without the pressure of high stakes tests that demand more output than the input would allow.
    We all want to see what our students can do with the language they are acquiring. Most of us don’t have any experience in inviting this without slapping a stress producing test on it. This portfolio approach to Timed Writes allows for that.
    For the record, I have a really good relationship with my admins. This was never about sidestepping or fooling the admins for me.

  5. So timely. There is so much to putting this all together. For me it is a good time to bring in another tool to create a sense of continuity.
    A difficulty with TPRS is that acquisition is so subtle and gradual that we need mile markers to give evidence of having learned. This should be a real service to students.

    1. Yes, what still rings in my ears about these are comments by a barometer student in my first year aiming to teach with CI principles entirely (3 school years back). When his class did fluency writing once, he told me something like, “I’m writing about going on vacation, and she’s writing about being sick. There’s so much we can say! It really shows how much we’ve learned!”
      He was one to tell me that he didn’t “feel” like he was learning at first — ultimately because the words were going in unconsciously instead of consciously learned as before. So for some kids, this is an exercise that validates our approach to language instruction as well as shows them their progress.

  6. Thank you for this Bob. This is an excellent process for all. Like Nathaniel said a great “mile marker.” Not only for our purposes, but a great process to learn in general…reflection and observation. I love it!

  7. Thank you for sharing! I’m twiddling my thumbs over here with exams over and no students in the building, so I’m planning on what to implement for my new classes next semester. This is definitely going on the list!

  8. The real purpose of Bob’s portfolio plan, of giving the students a chance to self-reflect on their writing, is clearly well met in this strategy.
    Indeed, student self reflection really should drive our own assessment. We also have Diane’s speaking self reflection document, as well as the jGR self reflection questions used at the end of class.
    As Nathaniel said:
    …acquisition is so subtle and gradual that we need mile markers to give evidence of having learned….
    Self reflection questions can provide these mile markers. Pretty much all summative type of assessment in this work has a heavy sense of futility to it, which is mainly due to the fact that most high school students aren’t even motivated to learn the language – they are just taking the class. So the results will be skewed. So why develop the tests? It’s stupid. The results don’t mean much.
    Yes, I just blew away all of what we have done in DPS over the past six years to assess our kids, which effort cost tax payers at least half a million dollars over those six years.
    Look – we can’t measure what happens below the surface of the mind. Maybe we can measure something at the upper levels, but not at the lower levels. This is 100% true for output, and I believe that to a lesser extent it is true also for input. I just can’t understand why we would get so excited about measuring how much a child less than four years old (comparing students that old with their L1 to our L2 students) can read or understand. It’s way too early. Wait. Like eight years.
    And only measure motivated kids. Measuring unmotivated kids is like asking a bunch of random kids in the hallway to form a varsity basketball team and compete at that level. Those random kids will not do too well. They don’t care about basketball. But we do that with our own kids, gathering stats, making them practice every day. They don’t want to do it! What gains will they make? That aspect of what we do every day is nuts.
    Self reflection is the way to go to meet that built-in flaw (the motivation piece) in what we do. Diane’s self reflection document does the same as Bob’s writing portfolio for the speaking piece. And then we have the jGR self reflection document that many of us created on our own.
    Providing summative information (tests) to administrators is in my view an impossible task, no easier than convincing someone that a seed below the ground is indeed going to sprout one day. Where’s the trust?
    And so the idea of self reflection as a way to formatively and not summatively measure how much we are accomplishing with our students becomes perhaps something that we should take a closer look at, both for the kids, as Bob said, and for anyone for whom we work who wants some kind of evaluation, as Nathaniel implied.

    1. Even though you mentioned that providing summative information to administrators is impossible, what is the alternative to teaching grammar rules, conjugations etc…?
      What is as close as we can get to a summative assessment for a CI classroom? At my site, projects, posters and digital presentations are encouraged but what do we do come finals time?

      1. Steven we do have some discussion here in the Assessment category over the years re summative assessment. But thinking that we can assess summatively in languages is wrong, in my view. I am saying that summative assessment in fl acquisition is impossible. We summarize what was learned when enough input has occurred that we can see it as writing and hear it as speech. But that takes years to become authentic and to spend (in the case of DPS) tens of thousands of dollars or more and countless man hours to do the equivalent of how a 2 year old can speak vs. how a 3 year old can speak is to me folly. Why not wait until the 2 year old becomes an 8 year old and listen? Wow! Look at those gains! And then wait until the 10 year old becomes 15 to measure gains in writing? I guess I’m just old school. Teach input using CI. Measure what they learned in class that day, with quick quizzes so that people think you give tests and to force compliance from kids who have turned off to learning, but don’t try to do the impossible – measure language gains when the first four to five years are/should be all about input. So my summative assessment to fill the exam time each semester/year is a story. I make it look like a summative assessment, but it’s a story.

      2. The finals in my district are determined by the state. We give a listening, reading, writing and speaking final based on the former NYS Regents and Proficiency exams. We do not make our own exams, but must give exams made my regional groups of teachers. Despite that, the kids do very well. The benefit is that these exams may be “performance” based but students can show their proficiency! It is much hard to do when districts are required to give colleague’s finals which may include “What is the first person plural form of ____?” You can see (and use) the exams that can be found here:
        Level 1 http://www.nysedregents.org/loteslp/home.html
        Level 3 http://www.nysedregents.org/regents_lang.html
        The speaking tasks are not posted but they are pretty generic ie:
        You are living with a host family and want to talk about what is expected of you while livin there.
        You are in a restaurant and have a problem with your meal.
        Etc.
        with love,
        Laurie

        1. Oh, thank you all for this timely thread. I was just about to post / ask something along these lines.
          First of all, I am lucky not to be required to give a final exam. We don’t have separate “exam week.” But should this change, and/or if I need to make something look more “traditional” for whatever reason, I am happy that Laurie posted those links. Thank you! 🙂
          The big requirement for me is our school wide grading that must be 20% formative and 80% summative. I am lucky to know the curriculum director who is totally on board with me, and she has told me I can rewrite the Spanish competencies if I need to, and has also implied pretty directly that I can “do what I do” and fill things in the required boxes.
          So for the 20% / 80% I had an idea that I’d like to toss out there: am I crazy or could this work?
          Remember: 1) I am pretty lazy 2) I am in a brand new school so big learning curve 3) Will also need to work on my alternative certification, as I have never had a teaching certificate in my 26 years of teaching. This makes me nervous, not because I think I won’t “pass” or whatever, but because it potentially will add hours and hours of documentation and other hoop jumping. 4) I like to keep things simple, simple simple. 5) Did I mention simple?
          Question is, given the 20% / 80 % requirement I am thinking about designating the interpersonal skill assessment as the formative 20% and then the summative 80% will include all the other assessments (quick quizzes, essential sentences, dictations, writing and speaking activities, and any other assessments I come up with or steal from any of you).
          My rationale for this split is 1) simplicity and not having to try to argue for which assessments are actually summative (none!). 2) I can see one angle of this as “the interpersonal skills are more fluid from day to day, so eye contact, listening while others speak, responding to questions, offering ideas, etc are things kids “work on” each day, while the quick quiz “sums up” what the kid can do in that moment.???? I am clearly shooting in the dark.
          Would appreciate any advice. I have to state this stuff in my syllabus. I am not attached to the above. If I just try to designate which are formative and summative, maybe quick quiz and interpersonal skills are formative and everything else is summative???
          This is what it says on the syllabus form:
          “Grading Formulation:
          (Description of the types of activities that constitute summative and formative assessment, as well as how make up work is handled)
          50% Tests, Large Projects and Formal Labs (Summative)
          30% Quizzes (summative)
          __________________
          80% total summative assessment grade
          10% Classroom Activities (formative)
          10% bell work (formative)
          ____________________
          20% total formative activity grade”
          *I think the above breakdowns are just examples. Obviously not in the CI world, but I can work with it. I can clearly state the relevance and connection between my classroom rules, the school wide competencies and the interpersonal skills. They all line up pretty slick!
          I’m thinking “summative” = unannounced quizzes and tests of reading comprehension and listening comprehension; writing portfolio; speaking assessments
          then for formative:
          interpersonal skill assessment, dictation practice (? maybe that is formative for writing?)
          Make up work??? Oh boy! No idea. New territory for me. Not that I never had missing students, but I’ve never had students who may chronically skip school for whatever reason. I’m gleaning from things I’m hearing, that it’s really hard to reach some of the parents, some itinerant / homeless and other instability etc. Ideas on a make up policy? My old one which was “case by case” probably won’t cut it here.

          1. Jen I’m right there with you on this. The 80%/20% people aren’t. Now, if you take this requirement seriously, and you must not, in my opinion, on top of all the other stuff you are dealing with, they are asking you, because they don’t know how people acquire languages, to fit your assessment model into their model.
            But their assessment model is based on conscious retention over long periods of time (memorization) and ours is based on something much more fluid and hard to measure, unconscious retention of material that can’t even be measured at all in my view except one day they can’t speak and then over time they can and then finally with enough time they are fluent. To repeat, I don’t believe that language acquisition can be measured in a cognitive/summative way.
            We have been dancing around this subject here for years. I have always gone along with the DPS model and models like in NY have pulled us along, unwillingly, because we need to have jobs. Most of us knew full well that certain skills, like speaking, emerge along an organic continuum and most humans, apparently not teachers, are not content to just let that happen. They have to measure everything. But look at DPS, we just dropped trying to even assess speaking on our summative assessments.
            Enter SBGR. In my opinion, because of the nature of this new assessment beast, formative assessment should drive most of the assessment. Think of a target. There is mastery of the standard in the middle and we along with the kids are able to define the various levels of the target and where the child is on the continuum toward mastery. No summative testing, just a snapshot of where the kid is relative to the standard. And not a fake snapshot. SBGR – coming to your school one day!
            So you are jen and on this blog you have always been jen, our unique thinker who actually tries to connect teaching to life, to the social/emotional development of children more than just the academic piece, always wanting to connect your instruction to what kids are really experiencing in your classroom as people and not as little robot memorizers. So in this situation you can only decide for yourself what to do. Most of us are sheep and fear what “they” will do if we mess up with their little (outdated, failed) vision of testing as largely summative. (How dare they tell us how to assess? They are not the people who are devoting our lives to it!) Most of us go on trying to please them knowing full well that their model of low formative (pro-SBGR) and high summative (anti-SBGR) doesn’t really apply to what we do.
            So what will you do? I like your new sneaky definition of summative as including quizzes. Be careful on how you phrase that, though. Your effort to slip that by them may not work. But why get so detailed? We are dealing with that in our school. Linda just lays low on that. I need to learn how to do that because I want to rewrite the standards in this school immediately to ACTUALLY ALIGN WITH HOW PEOPLE LEARN LANGUAGES.
            Oh well. Good thread. Here’s hoping that Harrell and the other genius thinkers in our group weigh in on this. But jen, they have given you carte blanche on this. You could fool them or challenge them. If you challenge them it may go badly and drain your energy from your work, which is the real ultimate price we pay for being in schools. My advice is to fool them, as you intended. We just have to refine the idea. I am thinking you may not be alone on this deal and this good be an important thread here for this year. It certainly has the potential to be one. Calling Robert Harrell! Calling Nathaniel Hardt! Calling Judy Dubois! Calling Jody Noble! Calling Eric Herman! Calling for PLC help!

          2. jen, you wrote above that you’d put “tests” in the summative category. I bet you could easily sneak in a long story-asking session as part of the test and make jGR the major grade for this “test”. I’ve done a final exam in this way. I just kept calling it the final exam when it was really just an extended story for an extended final exam period. This “final exam” or “test” can count as double, triple, quadruple, or whatever the weight in the grading scale. Why not? I’ve fussed over giving students who were disruptive all semester a better grade if they perform well on the jGR during this final exam. Like all that disruption doesn’t mean anything then, right? Well, wrong. That’s my conclusion. Most of the time the disruptions these kids make are because of some sad issues in their personal lives and being the circumstances of school and classroom dynamics, there was little I could do. Why not end the semester on a good note with them. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll have them again another year and things will be better between us. Anyways…
            How about that “bell work” as 10% of the total grade. Are you sure you want bell work (aka busy work) to count for that much. I don’t even mention bell work as part of my assessment scheme. I end up grading bell work quite randomly.
            But yeah, I think there are ways you can sneak in jGR into summative category besides the idea of including it as a “test”.
            good luck!

  9. Bob this is brilliant. I am going to see if I can use it to solve the problem of advanced/fluent speakers but who need lots of training in writing in my classes here in India. Thank you! I will publish my plan based on your portolio plan when I get a chance. I think it will take care of the problem! Yea collaboration!

    1. Please do share it — I would really like to have an organized way to keep student writing. Preferably electronically, since that’s how they’ll be writing – from the computer lab. But I could print their writing and keep it on hand that way, too.

      1. Writing comes from hands using a pencil on paper, in my view, when it is by a student in a foreign language. It’s more authentic, as I see it. Closer to the brain where the sounds reside. Authentic? What does that mean? I don’t know. I just know. The one is truer, has more truth in it, than the other.
        I will use a composition book and they will count words and put them at the top of the page as Bob describes and they will do the metacognition piece as he says at the end of the year or semester.
        I will design a target, like an archery target, and they will write a dot to indicate how close they are in terms of the standards (the rings of the target) to the central ring, master in terms of however I design the standard for my middle school class.
        In the writing target, for example, numbers of words will provide the standard. Maybe for an 8th grade class in their second year of French the mastery standard will be to freely write 400 words over ten minutes
        For the other standards, I will make some ring targets up.

        1. It’s Chinese I’m talking about, though. Handwriting mechanics is entirely different from being able to type (which is phonetically based, using letters to type). I have them do some of both, but for composing, typing beats handwriting for Chinese any day, in my opinion.

  10. This is very helpful, and I will be implementing it when I return on the 25th. A big thank you to Bob for creating this, and a thank you to Ben for reprinting this at the start of the year!

  11. Thanks for posting this. My school admin wants us to address common core standards in writing. The writing plan is well thought out. I made a few tweaks because there is a school wide “argumentation” in writing for each of the content areas.

  12. I read Elley’s paper (not the book flood one) and agree that it’s a good one.
    What I’ve been doing the last few years is creating portfolios in my file cabinet of each classes’ writing samples (I can do this easier because our school is very small). At the end of each year they now do Bob’s portfolio reflection. When they graduate or leave the school I give them make copies of their writings and staple it. They appreciate this.
    Speaking of my school, the last 5 years I’ve only had a half-time position because the school is so small. I have been asked to go full-time as a school down the road lost their Spanish teacher this summer and so now I’ll travel each day, but it’s full time!

      1. Thanks Jen. The last time I taught at this school, under a similar contract (split between two districts), I was the half-time teacher supplementing another full-time teacher. Now 8 years later, I’ll be the only language teacher there at a little over half time. No more Spanish 3 or 4, for now.

  13. This summer in St. Paul I asked Diana if they had ever done a comparison study with writing/no writing in the first year. She said no but that it sounded like a good idea. I couldn’t do it at the time since I only had one section of each level. But now, I will have two level 1 and two level 2 classes at the new school (in addition to my half-time schedule at Spring Grove). Sorry kind of confusing. Anyway, I could do it now. But I’ve never done an action research project like this. Any ideas anyone? Is this something that others might want to consider?

    1. That’s great news, Jim! I’m glad you got the full-time gig. Like jen said, more lucky kids. I hope you’re not going to burn out teaching a full-time as well as a half-time job. I’m sure you can do it effortlessly, though.
      You ask about an action research project on writing/ no writing: Ben wrote, if I’m not mistaken, in one of the recent articles here about how Annick Chen in DPS was forced by her admin to implement more writing exercises with her kids one year. What happened, students’ writing output at the end of the year diminished.
      Sounds like if you do this action research project with any degree of research discipline your results could be powerfully influential.

      1. No, the entire thing adds up to full-time… that would be a Hosler schedule, and mere humans cannot handle such intensity.
        I had forgotten about that. Powerful anecdotal evidence.
        Yeah, it’s the “research discipline” that I’m not familiar with formulating yet, but expect I could execute decently enough. What would it look like?
        I’ve got ideas on what it would look like, and I’ll try to follow up with those when I have a minute. I’ve got a few more weeks til school starts so I’ve got a bit of time.

  14. This is exam week. Today I tried this self-assessment with a class which had finished their exam.
    1) They did not complain at all when I gave them something sort of school-like. Maybe because free writing is authentic communication.
    2) First, we did our final 5-minute TW (what with having a textbook to contend with there were only three TWs, but enough to do the analysis.) Then they logged the number of words on their bar graphs.
    3) They wanted to share what they had written with each other, so we took time for pair work, reading each other’s stories.
    4) Next they started the comparison of best/worst TWs. As they finished with the assessment, I walked over and read the comments they made.
    5) This was a positive relation building time as I was able to compliment their thoughtful analyses.
    6) There was a bit of awe as students thought about the gains they had made in writing. This led to some reflection on how much they had increased in oral comprehension (understanding me) and written comprehension (graded readers).
    One comment by a student (with very weak comprehension upon starting Spanish 3), was that writing did not help him learn Spanish, but reading did. I did a poll. Result: Student experience was that reading increases language. Chalk one up for CI as experienced by the students. By reading, I mean comprehensible graded readers, Blaine and Berto’s Big Ideas.
    I will see how it goes with the others tomorrow.
    I am also going to have my sophomores analyze their Dictados. For each I want them to record:
    a) total errors,
    b) errors corrected correctly, and
    c) errors missed (and counted against them).
    I am hypothesizing that there will be a decrease in all three counts when compared over the course of the year.

    1. 5) This was a positive relation building time as I was able to compliment their thoughtful analyses.
      6) There was a bit of awe as students thought about the gains they had made in writing. This led to some reflection on how much they had increased in oral comprehension (understanding me) and written comprehension (graded readers).
      Nathaniel, I am a sucker for positive relationships and awe. Just not enough of these in schools or the world today. So these two facts alone, to my way of thinking, make this idea something major to look into and try and probably will find its way into the Great Assessment Action of 2016-17.
      When Claire first brought portfolios up (I picture her typing “portfolios” into the search bar because she is a born researcher and would of course be jumping into authentic assessment upon her arrival in this PLC, getting the lay of the land), I had flashbacks to my days as an English Language Arts teacher with huge piles of portfolios and a huge paper load.
      But that is not what you are doing here, Nathaniel. What you are doing here is inviting kids to self-reflect, putting the ball in their court, and – most importantly – CELEBRATING THEIR GROWTH alongside them, NOT from above them, but kneeling by their desks or clipboards, reading over their shoulders, and listening to their own thoughts and feelings about their learning. This is an image I can get behind.

      1. So clearly one of the areas of inquiry for this fall will be in finding that sweet spot where assessment has value to the child in terms of her ability to self reflect and grow vs. shrink because she is being judged in terms of what she can outwardly do on some test or quiz or something that puts her into comparison with some other kid in the room. I defend her right to not be judged and measured and branded and labeled in terms of some set of awkwardly designed measurements*.
        I do feel that the two are mutually exclusive. We must see the light of wanting to learn return to our children’s faces and it is a narrow and precarious road once a child, like all in the U.S. right now, has been taught, even in language, art and music classes, that they can be wrong.
        *Seriously, what right does ACTFL have to ask us to label what are basically five month old and younger (!) CHILDREN in terms of their “language proficiency”? When will we finally accept that the affective filter is REAL in our kids? Do we need to label kids so early just because we “need grades”? Do we really expect that children equivalent to babies in terms of having heard enough language can perform certain language tasks that we spend thousands of dollars in our districts to develop all in the name of good teaching? All because we think we are “teachers of language” vs. what we really should be – SUPPLIERS OF COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT.
        Again, the ego trumps a process that is divinely engineered. When will it end? When will we finally give up trying to control the process of language acquisition and just let things flow in an intuitive way?

    2. “One comment by a student (with very weak comprehension upon starting Spanish 3), was that writing did not help him learn Spanish, but reading did. I did a poll. Result: Student experience was that reading increases language. Chalk one up for CI as experienced by the students. By reading, I mean comprehensible graded readers, Blaine and Berto’s Big Ideas.”
      SO AWESOME NATHANIEL! Wow. This is the real deal! And you did it even with the constraint of the textbook! Good on you!

  15. Oh no! I remember this post from my first week on the blog. I’m the writing portfolio queen so I was so scared by how differently you view the words “writing” and “portfolio.”
    If you happen to be in an elementary school or know an early literacy coach or good Kindergarten teacher you can take out for coffee, talk to them and you will be shocked at how different simple words you use and suppositions you make about “writing” are.
    Ask a Kindergarten teacher what “dictation” is–they will say it’s when the kid can’t write yet on their own, so you help them write. (That’s how I do dictation. But it’s different when your kids aren’t L2 dominant.)
    Ask an early literacy coach what “pre-literacy” means and what “emergent writers” are and about the stages of early writing. Ask them how they honor unconventional spelling (sometimes they say “inventive” spelling). It’s adorable how they read weird letters and they know exactly what it says. The paper has no vowels anywhere and seems to always start with the word “I” and looks like jibberish “I wrltz mi fgh whpg” but teachers know exactly what it means because they get so used to the same miscues and they know the kids. It’s super cute.
    Also ask how they analyze miscues for messages, not conventions, and rely on illustrations as a form of early writing. Granted, the closer your L2 and L1s are (English/Spanish is closer than Arabic/English), the less support they’ll need. Even so, some of the stages of writing production for L2 and L1 literacy are not all that different.
    Just ask someday; it will be as eye-opening for you as it was for me reading your comments above.
    I also remember being too scared at the time to answer Ben’s question:
    “Authentic? What does that mean? I don’t know.”
    The most authentic writing portfolios are those that focus on messages. Authentic assessment focuses on understanding messages first, and drawing or writing about what we understood to show off (not judge) what we understand… and maybe add a silly ending if we feel so inclined.

    1. “The most authentic writing portfolios are those that focus on messages. Authentic assessment focuses on understanding messages first, and drawing or writing about what we understood to show off (not judge) what we understand… and maybe add a silly ending if we feel so inclined.”
      Nice. And by extension, authentic resources are the sources of which yield messages in L2.

  16. I’m having a slow re-entry to the U.S. but again Claire has pulled the string on the authentic assessment light bulb for many of us, even here in the downtime of June. I consider my job as moderator here to make sure that what Claire says is fully understood by as many of us as possible by fall – I consider it that important not just for us but for the kids of course.
    We can’t blow this assessment piece. We can’t read what Claire has written over recent months, so fresh and new and important and perfectly framed for us, and act like an assessment bomb didn’t go off in the PLC town square for the first time ever. We have been in a deep and complex re-thinking of how we grade kids all last year, really. We are learning to align our assessment and curriculum design with how we teach. Claire is not going to let us go on that this year and I won’t either.
    We can’t take what we learned and chuck it. We can’t act like it’s business as usual. We WILL align assessment with instruction. The new year awaits. I feel a sense of urgency on the assessment piece. It is in fact the great leit motif of 2016-2017 for us in this community, second only to the mental health piece, and we must move our thinking up about ten levels so that by next summer we have turned the corner from the fairly dark item assessment consciousness that clouds our thinking now and changed how we assess in favor of the kids.
    For those who have been following this thread here regularly for the past five months we have learned so much from Claire on authentic assessment and I am so happy Carol gave us our own session this summer at iFLT – with Diana Noonan , Tina and I on it as well as Claire . (It’s the last afternoon session on Wednesday.)
    As I try to get over the jet lag from an entire year on the other side of the planet I am reminded how far we have to go in assessing writing and the still hidden language capabilities of our CI trained kids in general. For bears of foggy brain like me, I yearn to get this ESL based message as it applies to CI/TPRS instruction clear in my mind.
    So as none other than Robert said here about a month, “Preach it, Claire!” And don’t stop until we get it.

    1. I’m in! I’ve been looking forward to diving into this authentic assessment discussion as a summer focus. I will be going back to teaching 3 classes of non-heritage Spanish 1 students next year (yeah!) and our admin has already warned us that they are going to hammer hard on all of us (i.e., teachers at my school) with critiques on how we are using rubrics to assess student learning. I want to be sure I’m ready to explain my practice convincingly.
      I glanced at Bob Patrick’s writing portfolio reflection for students. I like how he set it up. As he is asking students to explain, in detail, why a certain writing piece is the best, I imagine he must have given students a bullet point list of what makes for quality writing production. On this bullet point list we could include 1) range of vocabulary, 2) complexity of ideas, 3) grammar accuracy, 4) spelling accuracy.
      I think it could be beneficial for students to identify passages in their writing samples that show growth in the 4 criteria I listed above. They could refer to a passage where they wrote a longer sentence using connecting words and reflect on how that passage shows greater complexity of ideas.
      The writing production is not as much of the assessment challenge we face, right? It’s this interpersonal and interactive communication skills; the negotiation of meaning that is a challenge for us to validate to our school communities. I gleaned from the authentic assessment discussion led by Claire over the past few months how sharing with students observations of their performance in regards to this interpersonal communication in narrative form is more ideal than in grade (A, B, C, D, F) form, like how kindergarten teachers do. I think that’s the direction we were headed in this authentic assessment discussion, right?

      1. “I imagine he must have given students a bullet point list of what makes for quality writing production. On this bullet point list we could include 1) range of vocabulary, 2) complexity of ideas, 3) grammar accuracy, 4) spelling accuracy.”
        Yes, as Tina pointed out, this writing portfolio needs rubrics: both for us to score, and for kids to self-score, and we have to explain the rubric carefully.
        I’m glad you brought up the important issue of the traits of writing (you listed some above 1-4 but there’s the classic 6 trait writing rubric). Writing traits are something English Language Arts (not ESL, we’re different) teachers go in-depth on and I see where there’s overlap with early language learners, but we need to talk about it carefully. Not all writing traits are appropriate for the method we use; instruction and assessment have to match. It’s complicated, so perhaps best to discuss on the forum.
        Also, I think there may be confusion about “narrative form” –although I love the idea of writing observational/anecdotal evidence and sharing it with kids. That’s time consuming, but awesome feedback. Most grading is done with rubrics, but we have to be careful to convert the raw score to a grade in a fair way. Should we perhaps start a thread to discuss grading with rubrics?
        Sean, excellent observations, and I’m glad you are excited about assessment and self-assessment. I’m diving in too.

  17. To recap the last five months for anyone new to this thread, the need is to redefine assessment completely. Item analysis and the weighing and measuring of what has been learned (that’s not how it works according to Krashen) is out because it damages or falsely inflates what is most important in all new language learners – their confidence. What is in is what Claire has been patiently repeating to fogged out set-in-their-ways teachers about in her idea of assessment portfolios and rubrics. I won’t stop talking about this, even in the middle of the summer. It’s that important.

  18. “Authentic assessment focuses on understanding messages first, and drawing or writing about what we understood to show off (not judge) what we understand… and maybe add a silly ending if we feel so inclined.”
    Exactly Claire. I remember designing my finals kept me up at night. How do I evaluate them? I asked myself. I gave them a text and had them draw 6 scenes from the story of their choice, all in bounds. Then I had them copy the sentence from the story.and had them translate directly into L1. If the message was clear, they earned all points. It’s probably not “Communicative” but it allowed all.my students to do what they are capable of. The second part was responding to an audio story with questions embedded right in. They had to listen for the cue “class” before each question. Single word responses only. I gave them the option to write more. Some students wrote in full sentences.

    1. Of course, they turned in a free write analysis based on their 5 10 minute freewrites. I did a lot of reading for my year ones. Many had fun with my odd stories. I might do less reading for level 1s next year.

      1. …I might do less reading for level 1s next year….
        Steven I think I have finally found my groove on reading and will share my own thoughts for what they are worth – since we all make our own decisions about what best practices means to each of us as individuals. I am very happy with FVR of the novels (they get to pick which novel they read) to start each class for at least ten minutes. (If they can contentedly keep reading for the entire period, I roll with that because I know of no better way to learn a language then by reading.
        Then the other reading thing that I do is my reading option sequence to read the stories and get SO MANY reps on items that came up in the story. Those two things represent sixteen years of experimentation, and are my idea of best practices in reading. And yes we read less in level 1 than in higher levels. Level 1 should primarily be a wonderful endless bavardage of auditory comprehensible input in the form of stories.

        1. I agree Ben. It was my lack of training that lead me to do more reading for lv 1. I would project a quick 1 minute read and have students either translate or answer a few questions with single word responses. I had them respond in full sentences for this warm up at one time but I dropped it after spring break.
          My plan is to engage my lv 1 students much more in endless bavardage and make it less school like. I would like to see ROA in action, at least the biggie activities. Finally, I plan on having my lv2 students free read from books.

          1. Maybe FVR would need an accountable piece to it. I had a warm-up as per my old training which looks good but may do only a little for acquisition. Many of my students love reading but im not sure if FVR or SSR would be better. Time to see what works in my classes.

          2. …maybe FVR would need an accountable piece to it….
            In my new thinking about reading and assessment, it is neither necessary nor advisable to do that.

          3. The reading piece for me in this community fell completely flat. Again, took me all year to understand why. Only a small percentage of kids enjoy reading. Everyone else HATES it with visceral passion. I’m fairly certain it stems from most of them growing up in chaotic households that were in survival mode.
            I will need to start over from scratch next year with reading, cultivating it from the seeds, which of course are reading aloud with them and reading together as a class what we created, and reading about things they are interested in. I feel like I need “reading” to sneak up on them so they are not even aware they are “reading,” but instead enjoying a story that happens to be on paper.

          4. What builds confidence in my first year readers, I have noticed, is a truly repeated story during the creation of the story and during the reading of the story using the reading options. In other words, they read the same thing (at first nice and simple stories) in different ways – but it’s the same words – so many times that they gain confidence, and they already have ownership because they created the story, and then once they have confidence it gets better each story. Many of us forget that they don’t read the language and need time and simplicity. It’s like landing a fish, we don’t jerk the line in too fast.

          5. Steven I am also in a school with a low poverty rate and a high reading rate. The kids’ bank of resources, their privilege, is astronomically-high. It makes me really upset just the inequities in the world, in our enormously prosperous country (so prosperous that we are basically eating up the whole planet and no one ever in the future ever again will be able to live as high on the hog as we are currently doing, but that is a whole ‘nother discussion!), affect our kids so much. So many of the bookworm students at my school have a huge linguistic bank. It is like they have this pegboard with more of those little hook thingies to hold thingies than students from less-advantaged backgrounds. So when they read a word like “avouer” they know the English word “vow”. Bad example but I cannot for the life of me think of another example. The issue in our schools Steven is that there are so many fast processors (due to their pegboards having so many thingies to hang new language on) that we have to remember SLOW SLOW SLOW. I am going to make sure sure sure to practice that a lot lot lot. Because I can’t let those kids make me set the pace to grueling mode or our group will never make it to the end of the Oregon Trail alive!

          6. “Many of my students love reading but im not sure if FVR or SSR would be better. Time to see what works in my classes.”
            The good news is you don’t have to choose. SSR is a form of FVR. Free Voluntary Reading is just a fancy way to say leisure reading, and there are multiple approaches to encouraging FVR, including self-selected reading, literary circles, and sustained silent reading.
            Sustained silent reading is a set required reading time: all kids have to pick any book or magazine they want, even if a small number just sit there. Most of them read. Krashen advises against accountability. He has researched this topic and found most accountability systems (like the Accelerated Reading program) are not affective.
            The purpose of SSR is to create more Free Voluntary Reading outside of class-that’s the goal, but giving foreign language students access to books is harder (compared to second language students).

          7. For me the only thing that works is to take FVR and make it easy by using the novels and calling FVR by the name SSR, still free, still voluntary, but not using complex texts as are found in L2 children’s books. Easy novels, but free, no accountability, each kid reads at the level they feel comfortable.

          8. Sorry, you explained that a while back and I forgot. I know you have terms that are used differently in foreign language, and I want to honor that and not impede the discussion.
            I agree reading text designed for read-aloud (as opposed to decodable, Lexiled books) would be above their reading level.
            FVR/SSR in foreign language doesn’t seem to work for me because the only texts I can find are low-interest. It may be okay for more traditionally academic “A” students who’d give the TPRS novels a chance, but it wouldn’t do much for reluctant readers. (I’m a bleeding heart for reluctant readers.)

  19. teachers know exactly what it means because they get so used to the same miscues and they know the kids. It’s super cute.
    YES! This is what I feel in my bones, despite the fact that I have no children of my own. I know that parents understand their children’s speech and writing…because they know and love their children! It’s the same thing that we are trying to do. Know and love the kids.

Leave a Comment

  • Search

Get The Latest Updates

Subscribe to Our Mailing List

No spam, notifications only about new products, updates.

Related Posts

Stendra Super Force generico all’ingrosso

Stendra Super Force generico all’ingrosso Valutazione 4.6 sulla base di 352 voti. Nome del prodotto: Stendra Super Force Categoria: Disfunzione Erettile Nome commerciale: Extra Super

The Problem with CI

To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to

CI and the Research (cont.)

To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to

$10

~PER MONTH

Subscribe to be a patron and get additional posts by Ben, along with live-streams, and monthly patron meetings!

Also each month, you will get a special coupon code to save 20% on any product once a month.

  • 20% coupon to anything in the store once a month
  • Access to monthly meetings with Ben
  • Access to exclusive Patreon posts by Ben
  • Access to livestreams by Ben