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Columbine Anniversary Thoughts
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19 thoughts on “Columbine Anniversary Thoughts”
TCI is about much more than a revolutionary way to teaching foreign languages, but a revolutionary way to approach education in general. It’s about teaching for cooperation and compassion. It’s about teaching humans. A humane approach. TCI teachers have a lot to offer ALL the teachers in our building.
Education has for too long ignored what we know about human psychology (research on intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards, self-esteem, positive psychology, etc.). Usually at best the humane instruction is given 20 minutes in the morning for a community meeting, but then largely absent from the rest of the day.
Amen. Let us every day try our hardest to be aware of what is REALLY going on in our classrooms, the invisible world that so many of our colleagues would prefer to ignore, but which gives us a insight into what our students really need from us, and which can become all too real if unacknowledged.
Everything you say is so true. And Laurie really is the biggest inspiration (in addition to all of you here on the PLC) that drives my daily interactions with my students.
Ben,
This entry really spoke to me. I’ve saved it for future reference, just as I did with your list of assessments and ‘L’Art de la Conversation’ as Word files in my hard drive. 🙂
Tu es une perle rare!
Leigh Anne when you mention the list of assessments are you talking about the categories on that topic? I’m not sure what you mean. I want to know what in that big discussion from this winter on assessment has had value for you.
I would like to add something to the concept of assessing our kids, because it is very much in statewide news in Colorado this week and someone (can’t remember who) wrote here lately how she will be assessed on student performance at 50% next year. So that is happening.
There is an article in the Denver Post on it yesterday and when I get out from under (queue is very jammed right now) I will try to post it. Diana asked me to write a letter to the Post in response but I have no idea what to say on it because what they are doing, tying assessment to student performance and school performance, just seems so odd and ineffective when all we have to do is look in our kids eyes to see what is going on. Right?
My thought is this: Student performance at 50% is not a good way to assess a teacher. It’s not just what poverty does to motivation vs. the kids in the suburbs, it’s individual in the kids as well.
At Abraham Lincoln High School so many of my kids work jobs until late at night and just want to graduate to get that monkey off their backs. They are smart and beautiful kids who will never go to college because they are brown, so they won’t perform in my classes like the white ones south of here who are motivated by college because they can go, those kids to whom the world to them looks less bleak.
(My super talented kids at Lincoln get scholarships, but that second tier who don’t get the scholarships either take out loans which will cripple them throughout life or just dump the thought of going to college. The loan sharks who have marked these kids as targets will find their own special place in Hell one day.)
Sorry for the editorializing, and back to my point. I am convinced that student performance would be different in ten different classrooms even if the same teacher taught pretty much in the same way in each of them.
Yes, the teacher is a factor, and studies have shown that, but to rate their performance on the absolutely impossible factor of student motivation (because motivation is what determines outcomes) is a very very bad move. Most kids are not motivated, not really, in spite of so many of us in the profession who sport rose colored glasses every day.
Therefore, for some years now, I have stopped even looking at my kids’ test scores. I don’t go into the computer when Diana sends the email. Everybody else does because they want to know “how they did”. I know how I did and I don’t need anyone to tell me.
I do the best I can in my classroom and I am passionate about it. Therefore my mental health cannot and must not be dependent on what others concoct in their data mills to judge me based on all sorts of impossible to define factors and squirrely data points.
My mental health is dependent on me and my trust in myself that I am doing what I can every day, I’m doing pretty much the best I can, and it’s only a job. If they want to fire me, that’s just fine. I am sure the Good Lord has plans for me that I don’t even know about. He’s proven that to me over and over and over for the last over six decades.
I’m not jumping on the fear wagon that blares loudly as it goes down Education Street. Life is too short. My only fear is for my colleagues, since I am retiring this year – that my precious and hard working and dedicated and super talented friends – you – will now jump on the fear wagon as it turns down Fear Street and be lost to yourselves as you work so hard for the approval of fools.
We tend to be needy for approval in the first place, and that neediness is a compounding factor in the chaos that is certain to ensue in this new assessment initiative. Don’t give in to fear. We got this. We got it. We don’t need to allow fear to have dominion in our lives. Hell no we don’t.
Ben, if you do write to the Denver Post (no more Rocky Mountain News?… I lived in Denver – Englewood in fact – from ages 7 – 12 in my youth, when John Elway was in his glory days) you may want to refer to one of our most powerful speakers, Diane Ravitch, on the more general topic of testing, not just the specific topic of evaluating teachers based on test scores. She was recently interviewed by Bill Moyers here:
http://billmoyers.com/episode/public-schools-for-sale/
She emphasizes that this testing craze is fueled in part by Wall Street types that want to profit on the $500 billion industry which is public education. The standardized tests, which make $ for certain corporations, become more legitimate if teachers’ evaluations are based on them.
Here are 6 things Ms. Ravitch says we can all do to help support public education…
http://billmoyers.com/2014/03/28/what-you-can-do-to-support-public-schools/
… funny thing is that writing to your local newspaper is #2 on her list! You have a powerful voice too, Ben. You’ve been at the forefront of making foreign languages accessible to the masses! People need to know this. And the people of Denver should be proud!
Ben said, “Therefore, for some years now, I have stopped even looking at my kids’ test scores…Everybody else does because they want to know “how they did”. I know how I did and I don’t need anyone to tell me.”
University teacher prep programs can now save billions, and lower their costs, by dismissing all their professors of educational philosophy courses. Students can pay 5 cents to have a print out of this, 10 cents to have it laminated, 15 cents to have it tattooed on their arms for reference.
Imagine a world where teachers aren’t allowed to assign grades. Imagine the students in that world. What would be their motivation? Imagine the teachers and what they would do in place of grading. What would that be like? So much to imagine…
Grading works well for gravel. It’s very useful actually, especially if you need just the right size.
But for human Be-ings?
And so we continue to program kids to think that grading people is a normal thing (Not talking about honest evaluation here…which actually can serve a purpose. Finding the logical person for a job, helping someone identify their weaknesses so they can overcome their limitations, etc.) But what in the world will they do with a random number we hand them? But the effect takes root and we see it turn up in their lives, though maybe not in numbers. For instance, the “superlatives” page of the school year books they make…which are student-voted. Most likely to succeed? Most attractive? Most intelligent? And schools proudly stamp their names on these year books? Sure it’s such good-natured, innocent fun in the school year book. Except that it’s a reflection of real life in the school. And then a Columbine happens. And then the teachers go on grading.
I don’t know how, but surely there’s got to be a way to get away with not grading. Short of just playing the system and giving everyone a 100, regardless of what they do. I basically did that last year. Made up about 10 bogus grades for non-existent assignments. Everyone got a 100 on each one. The only kids who failed were a couple that almost never came to class. Is that okay? I don’t know. But I don’t really care either.
A numerical grade is only the sum of its parts. When we add homework, behavior, formative, and summative testing, then what the hell does a grade mean? And departments weigh those categories differently. I especially hate hearing from teachers, and I hear this, about how kids do well on tests and/or do well in class, but they end up with low semester grades, because they don’t do homework. Grades in this way are not meaningful and they are simply judgments.
Some schools will report 2 grades: an academic and a behavior grade. Other “progressive” schools now report the “proficiency-level” reached, rather than use the traditional numbers/letters system. I think that is an improvement. At least then there is meaning on the report card, but these will be inevitably viewed by everyone through the lens of the traditional system (“So does Novice-Mid mean I got a C?”). And then there’s the problem of how we actually define the proficiency levels. Do we use ACTFL’s scale, although it takes a really long time just to move up 1 sublevel? We may not even agree with how ACTFL has described the way proficiency progresses. And how do we assess the proficiency level? We certainly aren’t trained, nor will self-study be enough to make us valid/reliable scorers. Are we to write our own assessments or pay for ACTFL’s computer-based assessments (AAPPL)?
Perhaps more importantly: What does this accomplish? We make a few fast processors feel smart and the rest feel dumb. Thus the “language is hard” and “I can’t learn a language” myths are perpetuated.
It’s time we changed our grading system, among other educational practices. This doesn’t call for reformation, but revolution. We don’t want to fix what is permanently broken, but rather choose what is new and based on what is best for ALL human students.
I think you’re right Eric….as long as there’s any type of category, even proficiency-based, people will correlate that will a scale (numbers, letters, whatever).
What if the only thing teachers were allowed to write on “grade reports” were descriptive comments, with the reports scanned and returned to the teacher for use of any kind of categorical word (good, bad, novice-mid, etc.)? Strictly comments about what the student is doing which is helping reach the course objectives, and what the student isn’t doing, but can do, to reach objectives. And to be really radical, the school can even refuse to offer any kind of grade report. If the parents of student wants to know how/what the student is accomplishing, they can arrange an appointment to speak with the teacher. Like people did a long time ago, and still do wherever kids are cared about, speaking around a fire, or a beer, or walking down the street, conferring about how little Johnny or Sarah is doing, and how we’re helping them to grow up and stand proudly on their feet.
When did grading start anyway? Isn’t it a fairly recent thing with the advent of schools as buildings? Did rabbis assign grades to their disciples in ancient Israel? Did the philosophers in Greece have grading scales for their devotees? When did the number business begin? Anyone knowledgeable about educational history know the answer to this?
“When did grading start anyway?”
I like this question. If I don’t see a solid answer to it before Monday, I’ll peek through Punished by Rewards and see if Kohn speaks to the beginnings of numbers-based extrinsic rewards in schools. I don’t remember if he did or not. I also don’t remember Gatto speaking to this particular question either in Weapons of Mass Instruction, although he does explore the history behind the advent of compulsory schooling in the U.S. I just recently got Ravitch’s new book Reign of Error, but I doubt she goes as far as to question grading in general in this way.
My view on when grading started is that it happened when kids were put into rooms in groups and the teacher had to have a discipline tool to keep them in line because sticking a bunch of kids in a room with a talking head adult is crazy. So grades were necessary and had clout. As heavy handed ways of forcing attention, they worked.
Pass/fail was tried. I tried it one year, when our entire school tried it. It was a disaster. It worked for the motivated kids but most kids just did the minimum to pass and paid very little attention to the course material because they were in a room with a bunch of other kids and learning just wasn’t interesting to them in that setting.
So in order to get kids to pay attention the teachers have had to give grades.That’s how I see it. Isn’t it unbelievable that we do that? Stick kids in a room with one adult who may or may not be interesting and expect them to learn? It’s such a bad design – it’s not natural. It puts too much pressure on the adult.
Grades are all about competition and we have really hit that topic hard here this spring, in a thread a few weeks ago about Columbine. We in this group are starting to smell the stink of competition and grading mixing with the sweet smell of comprehension based teaching in our classrooms – which is a process that is free from judgment – and we are starting to have discussions like this. The idea of grading and the way we are now teaching are now coming into direct conflict.
Competition, where some kids are “better” than others, is what fuels the school process and is probably the basis for school shootings. As we now push things in the direction of cooperation, which we can do because TPRS/CI does that, we end up having conversations like this about grades, because grades are not natural (competition) and not giving grades is natural (cooperation).
Grading kids in story telling classes is just stupid. We aren’t thinking far enough out of the box on this one. Maybe one day we will.
I have always felt that our big push to produce really cool CI assessments here in DPS would never work – not really. I know in my deeper mind that no assessment can be accurate to acquire how much language a kid has acquired.
It’s like a bunch of scientists trying to measure how weather is created. What do they really know and what can they do about it except watch it? Can scientists really measure the weather? What does that mean? How does measuring the weather change it? How does measuring the speed of language gains change anything? Can we really measure language gains in any but the most clumsy of ways?
Language acquisition is a divinely complex process. Words are mystical, in my opinion. And we are trying to measure that? It might maybe kind of work if the kids had had the language for ten years, but it can’t work for kids who have only studied a language for four years or less, which is a pathetic 500 hours.
We can’t summatively measure in any accurate way what kids have learned when the main bulk of what they have done is input. All we can really do in this work is present the language to them repeatedly and with style, record a few formative quiz grades, etc. in our books to keep our jobs, and give all our time to the available CI minutes we have, along with lovin’ on the kids so that they don’t feel judged their entire day.
I had a student tell me that when he took the writing section of the DPS exit exam in level one last week that he was totally frustrated. He said that he had tons of sounds going around in his head but couldn’t get them onto the paper. That was the ‘din’. He couldn’t get it onto paper because he hadn’t had much input (only about 100 hours of listening and reading) and that was to be expected. And yet I have to grade his writing. It just seems so stupid. The seeds are under the ground, and I have to assess their progress?
That was a bit of a rant.
This talk of grading makes me think of one of my students, Jazmine, who is a receiving an A in my class. She is a bit of a slow processor and she usually doesn’t answer my comprehension questions right away, but she is getting an A because of her interpersonal communication skills. Specifically, her eyes are clear every class period and she hardly ever speaks in English (L1). In contrast, I have a handful of fast processors who consistently respond verbally in L2 and voluntarily give output, but also often blurt in English and have side conversations. Some of those fast processors are getting a C at the moment.
Jazmine is giving it her all. She demonstrates rigor (thank you Herr Herrall for helping us understand the term rigor as defined by the Department of State: 1. depth and integrity of inquiry, 2. sustained focus, 3. suspension of premature conclusions, and 4. continuos testing of hypothesis), she respects the learning environment as a collaborative one, and she helps make the experience joyful with her smiles and friendly nature.
Maybe in other TCI classrooms, in other schools, Jazmine would be getting a B. But with my kids, where so much negativity and down-right depression permeates, Jazmine’s interpersonal communication skills need to be rewarded. These are skills that are not cultivated in other classrooms as much. It’s good for us to emphasize them in our CI classrooms. In the meantime, I certainly need to work on settling down the blurters, slowing down the CI, and checking in on Jazmine’s comprehension more often.
To continue on Ben’s rant, there are plenty of other problems with grading:
– how to validly/reliably test what has been acquired vs. what has been learned (if Krashen is right that learning does NOT turn into acquisition, then traditionally taught students should fail tests of acquisition. Yet they don’t since the tests are not completely acquisition-based)
-Ben says we are trying to assess the seeds under the ground, while Michael Coxen (migueltprser) on moretprs recently shared a nice image: that of the tip of an iceberg. That tip represents student output or perhaps even represents all that we can assess.
-And as you’ve said before Ben, the testing doesn’t account for affective factors, such as motivation.
-Another problem is how tests, especially multiple choice, do not account for SLA developmental stages. Progress is not often seen in SLA as an increase in accuracy, yet as we know from studying how people acquire first and second languages, they will progress through stages. For example, tests with a “right” answer don’t distinguish from the student in Stage 1 of 5 and the student in Stage 4 of 5.
Regardless of whether all the acquisition is being measured, CI-based instruction does show consistently better input and output results than traditional instruction.
…[Jazmine’s] eyes are clear every class period and she hardly ever speaks in English (L1). In contrast, I have a handful of fast processors who consistently respond verbally in L2 and voluntarily give output, but also often blurt in English and have side conversations…..
Sean you also point out that Jazmine is currently earning an A in your class and the other faster processors are earning C’s. This to me is something I never thought I would read. It is monumental in education. It means that A really is for strong effort, and C really is for weak effort.
It has been my prayer in assessment that in languages we assess in this way, based on observable non-verbal behaviors since the argument around jGR (now tested to be true for many of us over the past year and a half, with its testing done by us, not Krashen) is so compelling and new and powerful in language instruction in schools.
I see this as a victory that most people in education will never understand. Our field will always be colored by the perception that slower learners cannot possibly do what those who are more academically privileged, or privileged just in life, can do. The idée recue has been that slower people should not be given the same kinds of chances – like the one you have offered dear Jazmine – to succeed. I think of the foul owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.
By grading those students in that way, you have thrown a huge hand grenade into the field of language education, one whose explosion may not have been noticed when it happened, but whose shock waves will eventually impact everything we are doing now in language education in the U.S.
Jazmine gets to win in your classroom, because she wants to, and she didn’t have that chance before, when the world was flat and guided along by mind and not heart. If I were next to you right now, I would give you a big hug because I am so proud of you, and of Jazmine. The both of you have done something new, finally. Something really new.
You have gone and turned over the apple cart. To quote Ugolin in Jean de Florette:
…c’est pas moi qui pleure, c’est mes yeux/it’s not me crying, it’s my eyes….”
Just reading about Jazmine has made me happy that we are not all totally lodged, immoveable, in the competition car. Thank you Sean. Send lots of reports from the field like this one. They bring happiness to my heart, and tears to my eyes even if I don’t know why that is.
Thanks for the virtual hug!
I’m learning a lot from what you are all talking about re the acquisition assessment. Tip of the iceberg. Seed germinating under ground. Makes me think of those posters you find in some classrooms or the Dentists’ office, with a word like “perseverance” and a beautiful nature photo shot. These ones would just say “Acquisition” and for example have a picture of an iceberg, and some subtext that says “so much language under the water, you can only see the tip as it emerges” but much more poetically than that. 🙂 But seriously, that would be cool.
So, do we create sonar assessments that can measure under water/ground for acquisition? Eric said current acquisition assessments are not completely acquisition-based (I’m taking your word for it Eric, because I’m not very up-to-speed on the standard assessments). Is a completely acquisition-based assessment possible? (I imagine electrodes hooked up to a kids head in a dark quiet room with a psychologist at a computer tracking the synapses.)
Maybe we internalize the reality of what Ben said about grades and language above, and decide on our own to not pay it much heed? That has to be really hard in our isolated-ness. We aren’t taken seriously in a system based on rewards if we don’t dole them out ourselves. Kohn recognizes this and cautions against single departments or teachers removing grades within the reward culture school. Not that we could do so anyways without losing our jobs, or starting a shit-storm of controversy.
While we’re part of it though, it always makes me smile when I see someone writing about their simplification of the grading process, like when Robert wrote the other day about only having given 2-3 grades so far that semester. Happier teachers make happier students. And better language teachers grade less and communicate more. (notes to self)
The extent to which we can be true to our own commitments re: assessment is surely a topic for future years, Jim. I feel that our group is pretty split on the topic of assessment, based on what I have read here over the past six months.
Assessment certainly won’t change for some time, as the data folks have control over us now, and as teachers from the 1950’s still hang on to their power in most buildings.
What do you think will happen over the next ten years? I think that some of us will have spent that time fretting over numbers as impacting our job security, as we design flawed tests like the one we use in DPS, which is nevertheless light years ahead of most stuff out there right now.
But others of us will not do those things, we will learn to relax and trust what speaking to the kids in the target language in a relaxed way that they can understand and that empowers them means. Some of us will know that weighing the pig more often will not make it grow any faster.
And we’ll probably all keep our jobs, but some will have spent a decade being a worried teacher and others will not have worried so much. The latter group will have won the battle of caring what people think of them and of their teaching.
Oh wow! I just love this group so much! I’m feeling the loss of tribe rather acutely these days as I float about in this transition from classroom to…???…whatever my next mission is. I really really really miss my students and the daily sharing in my CI classroom. Being cut off abruptly from it is taking a toll right about now. Trying to sit in the discomfort of all of this as I grieve the big loss of my classroom life. I can’t say what compelled me to choose this particular post and read the entire thread, but that is what I just did. It reminded me of the power of this group. I miss daily interaction with all of you as much as I miss daily interaction with my students. It is energizing and life-giving to be in dialogue with so many deeply caring people! I hope that as I stumble around I will evolve into my CI self 🙂
I’ll be going through the same loss, and gain, next year, in just a few weeks, jen. We can commiserate.