I had an email conversation with a teacher about assessment this past week via email and would like to share some of it here:
Teacher:
Hi Ben –
I have been following your work for the past several years and I was hoping you would give me your opinion on how you would tackle this. Our school needs to measure student growth from the beginning of the year to the end. We are fortunate enough to be backed with CI and proficiency based so I can give them basically whatever I want.
If you had to measure your student’s growth, how would you do it? What would you give them?
Me:
In my mind reading is the biggest way to get inside a kid’s head and find out what is in there, without causing intrusive damage. Auditory input sets it up, but the big card in the CI deck, the real way we acquire languages is through reading even more than listening. Or they are very close and both, as input, are what we should be doing all the time in our work vs. output writing and speaking which are very bad assessment tools, very bad indeed.
The one exception is free writes (timed writes) where the kids count the amount of words that they can write in a ten minute period and graph the improvement each month. This is a huge confidence builder and gives us a great artifact to share at the end of the year conferences with parents. It pretty much shuts doubting parents up when their kids happily show them their bar graphs (which are not compared to anyone else so that the kids are being compared only to themselves which is the way all assessment should be.
Listening is great, of course, if at the end of a semester or year we ask them some simple questions about a story that we create with them as the semester or final exam, but just handing a familiar text to a child and having them translate it is even better. I do both, plus a timed write, just to make the exam look more credible in the eyes of admins who don’t really understand what assessment should look like in a high school or middle school class because, bless their silly hearts, they don’t know the research.
As long as we don’t rank our students as smart or dumb on some scale and as long as we don’t compare them to other kids of different social and economic backgrounds, we are honoring the children in the way that they need during their days of darkness of being compared (read judged). Not by judging, but just by aiding the kids in seeing where they are that day, adding a side plate of good will, then that is best and shows them something that they don’t get much in school – the respect of their (very often bullying/our colleagues down the hall) teachers.
Now what that should look like can vary depending on your preferences. But an August base line in reading and then one at the end of the year should do the trick along with the bar graph on the free writes that gives you another base line/year long piece of growth data as well. Or you could have them draw a picture, like Steven Ordain does, to assess what they understand you to be saying. I would link that to known stories done over the course of the year.
I don’t like the term “measuring student growth”. It’s a test. I don’t like tests.
Teacher:
I completely agree about the tests. We do so much in class with what we are doing and the kids enjoy it so much that when the topic of tests and quizzes come up, it is like a shot of school reality with a sense of betrayal, if that makes any sense.
Me:
It makes a ton of sense but nobody ever says it. In ten years this particular point has only been made once before on the PLC. Only once! Thanks for saying it. I can’t remember who said it but it was about five years ago. Who was it? Do any of the long-time readers here remember?
Teacher:
One student in my Spanish 3 class told me this year “I have learned more Spanish this year than the ever doing the least amount of work”. But, unfortunately, our state wants to measure student growth. The best part is that our admin is allowing us to do this however we want. I had thought about measuring their proficiency levels through ACTFL at the beginning of the year and then again at the end.
Me:
This is a slippery slope and the more I used the ACTFL guidelines over the years in Denver Public Schools the more I believed in using only free writes and translation tests and not trying to use the guidelines. They are fraught with potential error and bias. And I also don’t trust them because kids’ egos are so fragile. And the speaking rating system should never be used since it conflicts totally with the research about how long output must wait before we can say anything accurate about it, far longer than the kids are in high school. There is something that stinks in the proficiency guidelines. Very smelly.
Teacher:
I just have to give them the same thing at the beginning and then at the end and I don’t have to do this in a test format nor all in one shot.
Me:
This is great news. Now you are in charge. Very good.
Teacher:
My other hurdle is that the rest of my department says they are in and want to teach CI but don’t do their part in learning how and why. So, I am also facing curriculum development so that it at leads them in that direction.
Me:
Do the curriculum development but the only person I think who has the golden ticket on that subject of assessment is Tina so my advice is to listen to her. You won’t find anything new on this in too many, if any, other places. But the same old same old assessment game has not worked. It is because the TPRS people can’t get past the idea that they are not there to judge kids.
Even if your team members SAY that they want to do it, most don’t, not really. It is not their fault. They need to see something that actually works, not that might work. TPRS might work – that is its track record. It might work if you are a 4%er teacher.
I say this based on my 15 years doing TPRS. I’m done with it. Just don’t wear yourself out trying to get people to do TPRS. You can let your teaching do your talking in your classroom and let all your happy kids make them eventually see the core benefits of non-targeted comprehensible input and then they will want to do it. Just don’t make your colleagues go down the current TPRS rabbit hole – it’s hard for most new people to breathe down there and in my experience the summer conferences on traditional targeted TPRS have not worked for a lot of people. It’s too frickin’ hard to figure out for a lot of people.
Teacher:
So much of what you discuss in A Natural Approach to Stories is what I have encountered in class and it has allowed me to see that I wasn’t the only one and that I am indeed heading in the right direction. I have gotten away from targeted structures and thought “Wow, I am doing this wrong, but it feels right with the class”.
Me:
That is so well said! It is certainly my experience as well!