Can Do Statements – 5

1 thought on “Can Do Statements – 5”

1. Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg

   May 4, 2018 at 2:36 pm

   In my elementary Spanish program, I see the kids roughly 50 hours per year, that’s 200 hours over their 4-year span. Due to the new PERA (Performance Evaluation Reform Act) linking student growth to teacher evaluation, I was required, during this my evaluation year, to assess and report student progress in all 4 grades.
   Though we WL teachers pleaded our case against this, in the end we had to ‘show’ something, so in first grade we had a 7-item picture activity. Each test item had 2 pictures – say item #1 had images of a small cat and a large dog. Then, we would read a Spanish sentence and they were to randomly guess, oops! I mean select which item matched the teacher’s utterance. (“The big dog wants to eat.”)
   At the beginning of the year, before we’d ‘taught’ any of the ‘vocab,’ they all got 0’s or 1’s, maybe a 2 for the kid who went to a Spanish enrichment preschool program…. This was supposed to be ‘good’ for us teachers – setting a low bar and making it all the easier to show progress a few months later when we re-administered the same lame assessment.
   For the remaining grades, there was incrementally more text until in 4th grade we read a 6-line story and the students had to choose an A or B option to circle details from it – which were written in English. A. The boy is sleeping; B. The Boy is playing soccer.
   We backwards-planned this assessment from a new leveled novel we’d never used, and then ‘taught’ the novel and retested – see how we lined up our ducks?
   The whole enterprise, we decided early on, was sinister and misguided, so our pinky promise to each other in the dep’t was to try our best NOT TO FREAK THE KIDS OUT and NOT TO SPEND ANY SERIOUS TIME CREATING THESE RIDICULOUS ASSESSMENTS.
   Oh and yes, we had a district template in which to write in the ‘data’ showing percentage growth over time. Yes, very scientific and controlled, indeed.

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