We ask our students to do free writes every week or two. The idea of course is to give students limited practice in writing, but we can also use the free writes to mark gains. A student in a level 1 class who can write just a few single words in the first few weeks of school and who can by the end of the semester write 100 or more words must draw the conclusion that they have indeed learned something during the course of that semester.
That is worth noting because it is not something that traditionally taught students can do. They don’t have what they need to be able to do it – a rich base in their deeper minds of sounds that, since they mean something to the student, can be written out.
(An addition to the idea of idea of ten minute timed writes has recently been presented here by Chris Stolz in the form of what he calls “relaxed writes” which – from what I understand and Chris please correct me on this – can last up to half an hour.
I think that the relaxed writes are a great idea for kids who can handle them because the extra time available really gets the kids’ minds churning up and dragging up from their deeper minds all sorts of CI. During the time the students are writing, Chris tracks grammar and word count.
Chris reported about a month ago here that he once asked his kids to look at free write #1 and the most recent #6 – a few weeks separated each one – and the kids were astonished to see, as Chris reports, that they could write sentences like “There is a tall boy who has straight back hair and green eyes”. This is a fairly complex sentence for students who have only had Spanish for twelve weeks. Chris credits such gains to the relaxed writes.)
Whether free writes are ten minutes long or take the form of longer relaxed writes, it is important that we seize on their value in convincing students and their parents at the end of the semester that they have indeed learned something.
When talking with John Piazza the other day he told me that the biggest buy-in he has gotten all year in his very traditional building (to say the least) came from a stack of free writes collected at three week intervals over the course of the just-completed first semester.
John told me that formerly skeptical students about CI – and they are like ants in his classroom due to a true battle ax of a Latin teacher from the year before his arrival this year – had to admit that they learned something when faced with the reality, in one case, that a kid could write 180 word eight minute free writes after just four months in his Latin 1 class with John, who has been bad to the bone in sticking to his CI guns this year in the face of tremendous opposition.
What we do is, every week or two (three is too long in my opinion), collect and track word counts in our students’ ten minute long free writes. (We could not do this in our relaxed writes because our students can’t stay that focused for so long.) Students can make bar graphs of their progress. Then, at the end of the term, we ask our students to stack up their free writes chronologically and refer to their bar graphs tod write a response to what they see.
This is the brilliant part, from Bob Patrick. We make them respond in words to the gains that are there right in front of them. They see what they can do. They have to admit that even though they didn’t think they were learning much from the (unnoticeably effective) CI classes, the gains visible in each successive writing prove otherwise.
Asking for a stack of free writes from a student at the end of each term and then looking at it in front of the class, perhaps putting them on the document reader to share with the class, while heaping praise on the student, is a way that we can show concrete proof of gains. We really should keep the stacks of free writes from previous years to share with parents at parent’s night in the fall.
Why not? Since most parents don’t know how languages are acquired, and so need to have provided to them some proof of gains, this is a great way to do it. We can tell parents that in our classroom their child can expect similar gains at the end of every semester.
Thanks to Chris and John and Bob for seeing an opportunity for good PR with our parents and describing how we can do it.
The Problem with CI
Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and
