Common Assessments/Grammar

Tina wrote the following on the CI Liftoff page. It is a start in responding to the heavy-handed people in your department who still target grammar on common assessments and other tests. It’s a vigorous way to respond to them, and you may not want to do that, so you should only respond to such traditional teachers in the way you want, that makes you feel comfortable, because my general advice on this explosive subject is to fly under the radar and keep your jobs and “friendships” with your colleagues. But the plan described below is great for those who enjoy a good junk yard fight every now and then. I do know that Tina caused a minor earthquake in Portland when she exposed the high school teachers that her middle school kids were matriculating to in this way. They were humbled and, because of the presence of two principals in that meeting, all of them were forced to align with the standards. But the way Tina did it was make them want to comply by avoiding any kind of fight and instead just presenting to them (it was all put into motion by a parent in Tina’s classes who happened to be a principal of a high school) what she did without attacking. That event in Portland, by the way, was described here on the PLC in detail but I can’t find it since it scrolled out. I think it happened in about March of this year if anyone wants to look for it the archives here. It was very emotional for Tina but she went through it and won:
Someone asked about how to go into a assessment-creating meeting and get the assessments to be more friendly to their CI teaching. Tell them you’ll be willing to do any type of assessment as long as it aligns with the ACTFL standards and then pull out the standards which you have already pre-copied for them give one to everybody and say show me what you’re saying here in the standards let’s find it together. They won’t be able to find any of the things that they want to put into the common assessment, so you will have to resort to looking at the can do statements and making it proficiency oriented. This is what I did with my high school colleagues, and what we found was the little grammar points the textbook chapter wanted to include were not actually in the standards.