Mary Beth made this point: …re-educating is difficult when people are stuck in their ways and do not care about the research and will not read it…. The part about people in a professional position not reading the research is really, for lack of a better word, poignant. It ties back to the people Jeff mentioned […]
Jim suggested that I turn this recent comment on grading into a blog entry so that we can access it via the categories. Here it is: Most kids have to want to be in the classroom in order for most approaches to grading to be accurate and honest and true indicators of progress. In my
Dear Ben, I’m wondering what everyone else in this group is doing about grades. Our district now has Zangle, which has a serious disadvantage in that whatever way you set it up at the beginning of the year is the way it will stay all year. No tweaking, unless you want it to affect the
I didn’t want to waste any time nickel and diming my students on their final exam this year. So I took a four page embedded reading from a recent story, with approximately 50% new material in it, and, during the first fifty minutes of the 70 minute final exam, we talked around the twenty true/false questions
Second email: A key component in this vicious cycle is testing. My students are expected to pass an accuracy based, grammar/vocabulary recognition test to enter into Spanish 2 (I have a TPRS colleague in a similar situation in another school district—so I know this isn’t a unique occurrence). I can understand why the schools do
Doug Stone has written admirably on the assessment and curriculum development pieces as they relate to input based methods. We really need to keep in the forefront of this blog the discussion about data, especially. Wwe really need to be careful. Data can carry a lot of misinformation. It is not easy to understand and even
[ed. note: I met Doug Stone in San Antonio last year. He is in the L.A. area and has worked with Blaine, Robert, and others to retool his teaching as per input based methods. He recently sent me a few emails that are quite powerful statements. They reflect a ton of hard work over the past year] First
Some teachers speak English as much as 90% of the time, others as little as 10% of the time. But sometimes, oddly, on year end assessments, students from the second teacher’s class – the kids who rarely hear the language in class – often show gains that are not too far away from those of the teacher whose
Ben, I know this topic has come up on your blog a few times in the past. Traditional language programs appear to “weed students out.” All but the best students end up dropping out of language programs. Only 4% of students acquire anything resembling fluency. Etc. This year, our department chair reminded us
Socrates: How can we know that we are learning? Students: What do you mean? Socrates: All we do is talk. There is no proof that we are learning. What do we do to prove that we are learning? Students: But we are learning! Socrates: That’s not good enough. Take out a sheet of parchment and prove
Backwards design – a term that originally came from discussion with Anne Matava some years ago – is basically “frontloading vocabulary”. It’s the same thing. We pick structures from a reading we want to do with our kids and we do enough PQA around them earlier in the week in the form of stories so
I will definitely continue to study how best to use Donna’s participation rubric. I learned in that discussion about a month ago here that when I use it to judge the kids’ levels of engagement as per those ten questions (reproduced below for ease of reference), that is not what I want. It is in the
