Here is some quality reflection on Standards and Common Core from Laura Avila:
Our school is unequivocally in the direction of Standards Based Grading (SBG).
The powers that be, aware of the strong, vociferous opposition to such a change, are doing their best to “take” us there in a gradual, most-stealthy way possible. However, the unspoken or very spoken knowledge is that we’ll have to walk that road. It is a national trend that our governor and his commissioner suscribe to. They want us all aligned to the common core standards doing SBG assessment by 2016.
I don’t have a big objection to this other than the hassle of having to learn a different way to assess and give a child a credit. It might even simplify grading, I can’t tell yet.
I will continue teaching with CI instruction, trying to improve my skills. I will keep giving a credit to those who made the true effort, day in and day out, to communicate in my classroom. Grades are blown extremely out of proportion in our school, and if I didn’t have to play the grade game, I would just have a pass-fail system. To me, quizzes really tell me how good a job I did anyway.
My problem is with the standards themselves:
- What are we expected to produce after each year of instruction?
- Who are they, those people writing the common core standards?
- What perspective, information and philosophy are they using to determine what my kids should be able to do at each stage?
- Are they writing these standards aimed at what the 4 percenters can do, as they always have written them?
Krashen says that our goal as FL instructors is to “bring students to the point where they are autonomous acquirers, prepared to continue to improve on their own”. He says that in formal instruction we can aspire to reach an intermediate level. Citing the FSI he adds that the amount of class time required to reach a 2+ in european languages, is of approximately 750 hours. This is equivalent to the Advanced level of ACTFL.
A rough estimate of the amount of instruction time our students get a year is 130 hours. We have a rotating schedule of 55 minute periods. Classes meet 4 times a week for three weeks and 3 times a week on the fourth week. My calculation does not deduct time spent in English for this or that, disruptions of this or that type.
So what outcomes can I expect from my kids with this amount of instruction time?
ACTFL has a pretty good chart: after one year of study 55% of students are at a Novice-low level and 1% are at intermediate-low. After two years of study almost 60% are at Novice-mid. So the majority of kids go up one level as they take another year. After four years of study 35% are at Intermediate-low level.
So how are they going to determine these standards we should meet?
Why are we not writing these standards?
The school representative working to smooth us into SBG told us we should be looking at intermediate-low by the end 2nd year. Is this really doable?
It isn’t for me so far.
Laura