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Next Year
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11 thoughts on “Next Year”
What if we had a student with a stopwatch whose job it was to time how many minutes the entire period are spent in L2, not counting translations? You could record it and keep an ongoing sum or graph daily L2 and use it to compare classes.
My mistake this year was to think I could norm the class at the beginning of the year and get on to instruction. But we have to constantly remind kids of rules and enforce them all year long.
I’ve tried having a magnetic arrow point at English or at Spanish (like the light on/off), but it was too much to remember and got annoying to me. I also tried to have kids keep an individual jGR rubric stapled in their notebooks to be filled out weekly, but it meant giving up time to pass out notebooks, pencils, fill out, and return materials. I don’t think that lasted more than 2 weeks. All I really needed to do was what Ben asterisked above, but do that all year long.
Next year, I’m also contemplating having bi-weekly reading and/or listening assessments. It can give me something more objective to put into the grade book (I don’t have a single 2nd quarter grade entered) and this light accountability may benefit a few students.
…we have to constantly remind kids of rules and enforce them all year long….
Thank you Eric. It is a point well taken. However, and I can only go on my own experience, I find myself enjoying the kids so much in CWB, getting into whatever their particular class exhibits for humor potential, and the English just flows. So for me it’s all about both of these things: 1. getting the class and myself to buy in fully to the use of L2 in the classroom, and then 2) maintaining it all year. Not an easy order – 98% TL – but worth the effort I think. It’s just that darned unconscious mind that needs to be programmed and needs to be spared all the reasoning in English. We can do one of two things but not both and – as it took me all winter to read here to figure this out in that long discussion – mixing L1 and L2 is just a very very bad idea. That’s why me likey the little light idea.
Anyone new to our group can see that we have nothing figured out and are constantly testing and re-evaluating what we do. Yes, jGR/iSR needs lots of tweaking to fit our own personalities. Mostly it means that we need to grow a spine (see that category) and figure out a way that jGR works for us. The light thing, or the arrow, seems do-able to me, in that if we can just get into L2 and stay there we won’t have to keep up with it so much. The light, when on, basically tells us to stuff the cute story in English about the time we snuck up onto the roof of Sacré Coeure and ran around up there all afternoon. But a kid can’t control the light as a job. Only we can do that. So what I like best about the potential of the light/arrow is that if it is on it keeps US in the TL. Plus I like the idea of a little light bulb attached to a piece of wood. I can tell observors that is how I use technology in my classroom. There is so much to test, so much to find out. At least we’re not teaching the same worksheet crap every day five times a day. Man did THAT ever suck!
I too, Eric, was thinking of doing a substantive bi-weekly assessment next year as something for my kids to be able to hold, feel, and understand AND show growth. I thought a 5 min QuickWrite would be my only option, but you’re making me think that I should try a listening & reading assessment (i.e., listen to the teacher read the passage on your paper and answer the questions in English). I don’t know. I like those hard numbers (word count) that the QuickWrite gives us.
Granted, I’m only thinking about doing this bi-weekly assessment because I need more buy in from students. Actually, I need to change mindsets entirely. Once I get more buy-in and I can sustain longer CI sessions without disruptions, then I’ll let go of the bi-weeklies.
‘Plus I like the idea of a little light bulb attached to a piece of wood. I can tell observors that is how I use technology in my classroom.’
Hey, that plus pitch counters for reps. Add a giant plastic clapper and you made it to the cover of ‘Wired’ magazine.
Anne Matava told me once that she feels a moral obligation to downplay the use of tech in her classroom in favor of human to human contact. For obvious reasons. I feel the same way. Ours, among all the subjects taught in a school, may best be served by letting the magnificent neural technology of the unconscious aspects of the human brain, where alone language can be truly acquired, be our technology of choice, because nothing made by a human being can remotely approach the grandeur and majesty of what we have sitting there up in our noggins, freely given, if we but provide for it enough input. If someone wants to fire me for not using enough tech, please do so. Someone in the building has to teach kids that life is about more than screens.
http://srdickison.weebly.com/extra-resources.html
This is a link to a page on my class website where I’ve posted the rubric for my jGR (it’s at the very bottom of the page). At first I used when it was time for the comprehension quiz and the students would write their score in the box based off of the standards on the rubric. At the end of 2 weeks I would collect them and post their score. That worked, but not very well for a couple of reasons (it was hard to calculate the score of students who were absent, if students forgot to write their score they would write some random score later, etc.) Now what I do is have students draw a box on the small paper that they are using for the comprehension quiz, and write their jGR score in it. They still follow the standards on the rubric to figure out their score. Next year I am going to have a poster that has the jGR standards on it that they (and I) can refer to more easily. I can go to their papers at the end of the period and write the score I think they should have gotten, or I can just tell them right there too. This has helped me be consistent and has been an effective management tool.
I started using a modified jGR this year. I printed it off, I hand it out every 2 weeks, the kids self-evaluate, and I tell them “you are gonna get a mix of your score and mine. If you are more than 2 points off my score, I’m ditching your score” (the modded version is out of 20). They are bang-on and the only thing missing is story co-creation details. My 2s are a bit cynical about stories so that slows things down a bit.
After 3 years of experimenting, my conclusion about year starts is the opposite of Ben’s: I start my first story, in fully unsheltered grammar, on my first day, and that works the best. The problem in my experience with cwb, questionaires etc is that if things are not “packaged” or “platformed” in an a) meaningfully tied-together and b) written, the kids don’t really remember them.
It only takes about 25 mins to say hi, do administrivia, explain rules etc so then it is vocab and off we go with our first story.
Chris, don’t you also do lots of TPR with your students at the beginning of the year? Or do you mix that in with the stories?
I randomly do 5 mins/class of TPR as brain breaks throughout the year. Other than that, my motto is “if it gets said, it has to be read.”
Ah, oh. Ben, I think we have another favorite quote: “If it gets said, it has to be read.”