I feel strongly that more discussions are needed about the huge split between how we use CI and how we test with CI, that whole gnarly topic. What’s going on now, testing CI students with traditional methods, is in my opinion a disaster.
Admins don’t actually read the research. They don’t have time. If or when they do read it, they do not really grasp it. How could
I got a question: “Hi Ben, I am preparing some documents that support CI teaching to show my administrators. I looked through the blog and
A teacher contacted me awhile back. She had been attacked about using CI from a team leader. I told her to get some research from
We don’t need any more research. In academia that would be a frivolous comment, but as a classroom teacher in languages I support it. Yes,
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2 thoughts on “Video on Assessment”
It really comes down to checking the box and making your gradebook look pretty and acceptable to the parents. I actually just did a spoken retell quiz in Spanish 1. Now, I KNOW that you will say that you are against this Ben, but what I did was told the kids that they only had to speak for 30 seconds and retell a story from this school year into Flipgrid. They could memorize it if possible. I made sure everyone got an A or a high B.
Then the word spreads to parents that I am “rigorous” academically. If I do this kind of stuff it buys me freedom to keep teaching with the Invisibles and with CI.
I would have said I was against it but for this sentence you wrote:
…I made sure everyone got an A or a high B….
It doesn’t really matter what you do as long as you put the kids’ self-esteem first. Even language gains are far less important than that.
The assessment game reverses things and puts the teacher’s – not the student’s – self-esteem first. That is why it is so popular. It is also why it aligns so poorly with the research. It’s the assessment game vs. the research game and currently most even self-professed CI teachers favor the assessment game to make them look rigorous. Teaching according to the research? Who cares about that? It’s all about how we LOOK.
If we were to truly put our students’ needs first, we would always grade in terms of what you have done in the example above. It’s a perfect example of how to make teaching work for you so that you can survive in the darkness of what school buildings have become in these unbelievably dark times.
So what if what we do conflicts with what the research says about how we learn languages? (I’m not being facetious or sarcastic here.) Schools are one of the LAST places on earth where language acquisition can happen successfully and it’s all because of testing. It’s the big monster in the basement of WL education in school buildings. As long as we have to assess, we will fail, unless we figure out a way to assess that is exactly what you describe you have done in the the final paragraph of your comment above.