I got these questions from a group member and thought I would share them:
Q. I’ve studied both jGR and the grading rubric in the book. I absolutely love the term “observable non-verbal behaviors”. It really holds the key to grading in terms of the standard, doesn’t it?
A. Yes. For too long language educators have thought they could evaluate what we must not forget is an unconscious – and therefore unmeasurable/unquantifiable – process. Teachers who evaluate kids in language classes in terms of how many questions they got right or wrong on a test are completely out of the loop on grading language students. They are clueless.
Q. How did the term “observable non-verbal behaviors” come about?
A. About ten years ago I was in a department meeting in my penultimate building, on the west (Latino) side of Denver – Lincoln High School. There were five of us in the department and we were all doing various versions of TPRS at the time. A Spanish teacher, Barbara Vallejos, coined it while we were talking about how to grade accurately according to the standard and I almost fell out of my seat.
Q. Why?
A. It is the perfect way to communicate to anyone what the kids have to do in a comprehension based language class. That one moment when Barbara said that phrase blew away all the garbage (quantified grading) I had ever done before. I had been thinking about coming up with a good CI assessment instrument for a long time before that and when Barbara said that I instantly saw then that all I needed to do was make a rubric.
Q. What was the first rubric?
A. The one that I and Robert Harrell and Jen Schongalla and a few others in this group developed here in the PLC in about 2010 – jGR. Those days were when I started pouring over the ACTFL pages. It was an epiphany of sorts. It kept developing over many years and culminated in the rubric that Carly came up with – the most up-to-date and in my view the best grading rubric out there for foreign language classes. AT 65% of the student’s grade, it packs a punch, which some kids need, a good punch in the grade to make sure that they see that we aren’t playing around.
Q. When you mention that some teachers ask the kids to use the rubric to self-evaluate, might not some kids try to take advantage of that and grade themselves higher?
A. The kids’ self-evaluation grade is NOT what you use to grade them. You put YOUR grade into the computer. Asking them to self-evaluate tells you if in fact you two are on the same page regarding expectations. In my experience, 90% or more of the kids give themselves the same grade that I gave them.
Q. Why do think that is?
A. One reason is that the rubric is so clear that it keeps some of them from self-inflating what they do in class, and others from being too harsh on themselves.
Q. And you said that over 90% of the students grade themselves accurately?
A. Yes – only one or two kids underrate or overrate themselves. The benefit for them is that if they underrate or overrate themselves, it can lead to a very informative conversation with the child, and sometimes help them quite a bit in terms of what is expected of them. Make sure that you avoid having such conversations within earshot of anyone – meet with them in the hallway or whatever. Seeing that you care enough to talk about their self-evaluation makes a big difference. What is more important than clear teacher-student communication in any classroom?