Ask any non-teacher what are three things that a teacher is responsible for and they’ll inevitably say one of those is the grading/assessing of student work. It makes sense, we are the ones that went to school for this and we do have the higher level of proficiency in the language. But why should we be the only ones who hold this precious responsibility?
As I continued along my path to proficiency based teaching I realized the overwhelming importance of student buy-in. By “buy-in” I mean cuing students in on the decision making and explaining not just what is going to be done in class but also explaining why we’re doing it. I applied this approach to grading and took a step back to allow students to assess written work. To start this I took our department’s Presentational Performance Assessment rubric and gave each student a blank copy. Along with the rubrics, students received two paragraphs that mimicked an upcoming performance assessment asking them to write a Yelp Review of a local Spanish/Latin American restaurant. For this particular activity I wrote the two paragraphs because it was the first time I gave this assessment but in the future I will be saving student work to use as well. From there, students worked with their partners to grade the work according to the rubric. For most I think it was the first time they had ever really looked at the language of the rubric and began conceptualizing the difference between one category and another. The conversations started out as “oh that was so good” or “oh my that was rough” and gradually turned to debate. “This is an intermediate mid because he/she uses connected sentences”, “yes they talked about culture but it’s very stereotypical”, “do the errors really interfere with communication” were among the tremendous conversations I overheard. Later, as a full class we analyzed the two pieces of work section by section of the rubric and I continued to take a step back and not insert my opinion. After the discussion came to a conclusion I shared my opinions with the class and most of the time we were in sync in our decision making. I will admit that there is one element of this that was out of the ordinary for me and that was the use of English in the class. Normally I’m persistent on the use of Spanish 90% of the class but I chose for this class to be in English on purpose. Feedback is one of those chosen 10% times for me and this activity was a class long opportunity to give/receive feedback with students leading that discussion. As a result of this activity, the performance on the next assessment drastically changed. I saw profound cultural connections, long, connected sentences and personalized vocabulary that I believe would have been absent without this kind of activity. I also saw many kids use the “well written text” as a model in their own preparations at home and followed the format as they wrote their own Yelp Reviews.
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