In teaching and in life we rely on feedback to inform us of what we're doing well and what areas need improvement. In proficiency based teaching, feedback takes many different forms but is critical to the growth of student language skills. Trying to condense this topic into a blog post is pretty much impossible. So we're going to talk about ways to give oral corrective feedback, rubrics and comments on writing and speaking. Oral Corrective Feedback: For so many years, when a student would speak and say something incorrect they would be corrected immediately. I can picture classrooms I've been in as a student or observer where a kid says "yo comer el almuerzo" and the teacher stops the class to teach about the conjugations of the verb comer and how that's an infinitive which means "to eat" but the kid meant to say "I ate" which is the preterite...bla bla bla. That's what the kid hears. Bla bla bla. The research on oral corrective feedback is so varied and quite honestly no one has the "right answer" for this topic. Here are a few of the ways to provide oral corrective feedback and some examples. All of these come from Glisan & Donato's book Enacting The Work Of Language Instruction.
Rubrics: This is another topic I could talk about for years. When grading written or oral performance assessments, gone are the days of assigning a number grade arbitrarily because it sounded like B level work. A rubric is a contract between you and your students. In this contract you're explaining what you're looking for and how to measure their performance on this assessment. When planning your rubric, I stick to no more than 5 categories to give meaningful feedback on how learners are progressing. Here's a copy of our department's presentational writing rubric (and it's not a perfect rubric by any means. It works for the time being and we are constantly making tweaks and adjustments) For each of our courses we have a proficiency/performance target that we are aiming for. Based on the target, we choose the areas of the rubric to focus on. So if our goal is Intermediate Mid then we will copy that part of the rubric and set that as our "meets expectations" which will score a B in our online grading system. Looking at the categories we have 5 maximum that we focus on. They are comprehension, vocabulary, text type, cultural awareness and language control. These are based heavily on the ACTFL Performance Descriptors which help us determine what we're looking for at each sub level of proficiency. Creating a rubric takes a lot of time so my suggestion is to look around to see who has rubrics that can give you a starting place and go from there. Scoring on a rubric is another challenge that takes time. The more you do it the more accustomed you are to it but at the same time you always want to be checking in with colleagues to see how your scoring compares to theirs. Here are some places to start looking for rubrics: •Ohio Department of Education •ACTFL Benchmark Descriptors •Jefferson County Rubric •South Carolina Interpersonal Rubric •South Carolina Presentational Rubric •Howard County Rubric Other rubric blogs/ideas to look into: •Rubric Repair •Holistic vs Analytic Rubrics •Single Point Rubrics •I've Never Met A Rubric I Liked Comments on Writing and Speaking: Once you've scored the writing or speaking assessment it's time to provide feedback. John Hattie states that teachers should be using "dollops of feedback" which means not correcting every single thing and not providing a laundry list of areas to improve. Learners can realistically handle 2-3 pieces of constructive feedback at most if it is geared toward helping learners grow. In our department, we use glow and grow feedback at the bottom of all of our rubrics. These are a series of pre-written comments that allow teachers and learners to see what was done really well (glow) and what areas to work on for next time (grow). Here's an example: So for a student, I would read through their essay and highlight areas of glow and areas of grow and then score them on the rubric. I then want to give them an action plan so I make sure to fill this out with great detail. I'll start by always finding what they did well. I want them to know that, grades aside, there are areas of strength in their writing. I then want every student to know there is always room to grow and I want them to know what I want them to work on for next time. Again, I'll choose 2-3 maximum pieces of feedback so that kids have a reasonable amount to focus their attention on.
If the feedback stops here, then it's not actually feeding forward. I make students remember their feedback, use their feedback in class, reflect on their feedback and, before taking the next assessment, I make them write down a goal for the newest assessment based on previous feedback. That way students know it's not just about the grade and it's actually about the growth.
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Backward Design... a term that probably brings us back to our college classes. It's such a simple term that has such a HUGE impact on our planning, teaching and assessment of student learning. Backward design is a fancy way of saying plan your unit before you teach it. As the figure above shows you, there are 3 stages to Backward Design that help you plan your units. Stage 1- Identify Desired Results- This is where you plan the big ideas for your unit. For a World Language classroom that means the following •Choosing your unit theme/topic/essential question •Choosing your big can do statement for the unit or that segment of the unit •Reminding yourself of the ACTFL Performance/Proficiency Target for that part of the unit. Choosing the theme/topic/essential question can be tough and take a long time (or you can use what your prescribed curriculum tells you to do). You want a unit that is Communicatively Purposeful, Culturally Connected, Intrinsically Interesting, Cognitively Engaging and Standards Based. This is a lot of work to figure out but little by little you'll start creating units that are truly thematic. More to come on this in a later post. The big Can Do Statement for that part of the unit is where you think of your end goal for the unit. Do you picture them being able to narrate a story of a past event? Is your goal for them to be able to describe their family? Is your goal for them to compare fast-food in their culture to fast-food in the target culture? Whatever that big goal is, you think of how to put that as a Can Do Statement that drives your instruction. Everything you do should be to get you to that goal. The Performance Target is relatively simple. Depending on the number of hours in the classroom will more/less determine your target for the course. Below is Greg Duncan's chart he uses to determine the performance level. Stage 2- Determine Acceptable Evidence- This is the part of your unit where you write your assessment. I mean it. Actually write out your end of unit summative assessment at this point and not at the end of your unit. Why? If you have this performance assessment written now it now becomes the driving force of your unit. Your goal is to get students to be able to perform well on that assessment. You could call it teaching to the test but in reality you're just creating a goal for your students and you're helping them get to that goal step by step. Stage 3- Plan Learning Experiences and Instruction- This is the part of the unit where you start to plan on more of a lesson based level. This is where I think of the authentic resources I'll want to gather for my unit, think of my language functions and targeted structures I'll need, how intercultural citizenship will be front and center in my learning. And from there, I start writing daily learning targets with Checks for Understanding to gauge how my students are doing with that material. Below I've attached a blank unit template that I use when planning my own thematic units. I find the template clean and walks me through step-by-step what I need to think of to help improve my students learning. My Step-By-Step To Thematic Unit Planning:
When you ask kids "why are you taking a language" there's one answer that prevails. Apart from the "it looks good for colleges" or "it's a graduation requirement" if you get down to it they'll tell you that they want to speak the language.
It sounds like such a simple thing. You take Spanish so you can...speak Spanish. But for years our classes have been English with some target language thrown in there for a speaking activity or to practice grammar or vocabulary. What we should be aiming for is what ACTFL's goal of 90% target language usage in class. That means that 90% of your 1 hour class should be in the language from both the teacher and from the students. For teachers, it's pretty straightforward because most of us speak the language with colleagues or other speakers of the language. The problem is making our language comprehensible to our learners. For students, this can be tough because they are going from their English speaking lives to now an environment where the target language is the focus. Here are a few tips for helping the teacher speak in the target language. 1. Use visuals, images and gestures- When transitioning to speaking all Spanish you have to choose your words carefully. If you spoke with your Spanish 2 students like you did with a native speaker in Costa Rica they would look at you like you're insane. So what we have to do is at each level (including level 1) use high frequency vocabulary words, pictures/visuals to support what we're talking about and gestures as well. So for example, I could say the word "escuela" or I could put a picture of a school on the board and point to it as I say the word. 2. Build strategies for yourself and your students- Making a word wall is a great way to put words around the room where students can access them or putting important phrases up so that you can use them, reference them and assure they know what they mean. 3. Choose your 10% carefully- So if you're teaching 90% in the target language, you have 10% of your class that you're speaking in English. That means you CAN use English at certain points. The most common uses of language include:
Here are a few tips for helping students speak in the target language. 1. Start Small- It's hard to expect kids to instantly start speaking the language as soon as you make the switch. So, what I've found is starting by giving a certain time challenge of how long they can speak in Spanish. So saying "ok we're going to try going 15 minutes with No English" and see if they can do it. Keep that up and as they get good at it, push them to do 20 minutes with no English. And 25 minutes. And eventually you'll hit the 90% goal. 2. Make It A Game- Once kids are invested, there are a ton of games you can do to make it less of a chore and more fun. A few examples include:
3. Give Students The Words They Need- If you are expecting them to speak in the target language, there are a ton of words they don't know. Create a space where they can access the words they might need. Some people use chat mats where they give all the words they could use for the unit or for the task, a list of expressions they can use in conversations or to interpret a resource, a word wall with thematic words, a personal dictionary that they keep track of, a thematic vocabulary list based on what they will encounter in their readings/videos or need in their conversations. Give them any words they might need ahead of time and overtime, start to remove those supports. What you'll find is that they will use the words they needed without those supports and the conversations will flow more naturally. 4. Have Students Self-Assess (Maybe for a Grade)- This opinion is not always a popular one or one that is completely supported in research, however I still think it's valid. A lot of people grade participation which, to me, is similar to target language use. If you can find a good system to keep track of student participation then you can give a grade to them if you want. What I like to do is have them self-assess at the end of a month or 2 week period and provide themselves with feedback. I then give them my score and we see whether we aligned or not and it merits a conversation if we didn't. Here's an example of my self-assessment rubric that I've been using and is still a work in progress. What you'll find is that your classes are more fun when students are immersed in the language from the minute they walk in the class. And, if you're lucky, they'll leave the room still speaking Spanish and forget to speak English once they're in the hall (and that's a language teacher's dream). As part of proficiency-based teaching, we shift from thinking about what students KNOW about the language (ex: how to form the preterite) to what they can DO with the language. When thinking about what you can do with language there are 3 categories or modes of communication. They are interpretive, interpersonal and presentational. We'll break down the 3 different modes and talk about ways to include them in your classroom practice.
Interpretive Mode- Interpretive communication means reading, listening and viewing. This is where learners are not necessarily expected to produce language but instead comprehend and interpret it for meaning. When looking at this we are talking about main idea of an article, infographic, video or audio. Students can't speak back to the text so it's what we call "one way communication". This does NOT mean translation. Translation means that you are taking each and every word and putting it in your native language. That's not our goal. We want to have students thinking in the language and learning how to process the language without thinking in their native language. This means we are teaching them to read/listen "between the lines" to find out why the author wrote it that way and what the author meant. There tends to be a push to use what are called authentic resources (#authres) which are resources written BY native speakers FOR native speakers. When looking for these resources we want to think of what our learners will be able to comprehend and also what they're interested in. There are so many examples but here are just a few: Reading- Newspaper articles, blogs, short stories, infographics, magazine articles, Tweets, Instagram posts, Reddit posts, advertisements Listening- Songs, Youtube videos, News clips, speeches, audio clips, movies, short films This mode is crucial to language acquisition. As learners read and hear more authentic language they are learning new words and grammatical structures that they can use when they produce language. Interpersonal Mode- This is when learners are speaking or writing with another person or a group of people. However, just because two people are talking doesn't make it interpersonal. There has to be a conversation with back and forth, negotiation of meaning (explanation if you don't understand), follow up questions, reactions. It has to be like a normal conversation and not talking at someone. This mode is one of the most fun ones to use in the classroom but it's important to set up situations where your students need to talk with another person and not just at them. This is a skill that a lot of adults struggle with, yet alone children. To teach this mode, we have to show the importance of listening and reacting appropriately (aka social emotional learning). Speaking activities are fun to create and easy to come by. Some of my favorites include: Speaking- Role plays, debates, info gap activities, games like headbands, ask ask switch, give one get one, pair crossword puzzles, turn and talk. This mode is crucial to creating communicators not conjugators of the language. You can also have interpersonal writing but this is less frequent. It involves two people writing to each other and, again, negotiating meaning and going back and forth. Some examples include: Writing- Text messaging, instant messaging on Google Docs, passing notes, emails (if there is back and forth). Presentational Mode- This mode is when learners are producing language for an audience. They are the ones communicating with no back-and-forth and they are essentially presenting their point of view. This can be done in writing and in speaking. This mode is the most frequently done in the classroom however, in reality, the least frequent in the real world. We do it in the classroom because we want to see how our students can write but in the real world it's not often that you are presenting in another language. That doesn't mean it's not an important skill, it just means we should always keep that in mind when planning our units and assessments. Some of my favorite activities include: Writing- Blog posting, writing a diary post, RAFT assignment, snowball fight, writing a tweet/social media post Speaking- Leaving a voicemail, jigsaw activities, short presentations to group members. Presentational writing is one that takes time and requires a lot of feedback to do it well. The idea of presentational writing is that it can be polished or on-demand. On-demand means the student produces it in class while on-demand means students wrote a draft, got feedback and edited to produce a finished product. Intercultural Mode- This isn't what is considered one of the three modes of communication but has become increasingly important as we aim to create global citizens. This "mode" is one that is found throughout the interpretive, interpersonal and presentational modes and is presented in the ACTFL Can Do Statements. We are looking for our learners to investigate and interact with other cultures through those other modes. For example novice level students will point out their observations of similarities and differences between cultures while intermediate students will begin to compare and contrast those similarities and differences. In the interpretive mode, we do this by interacting with authentic texts. Those texts provide us with a cultural perspective of the people from the target culture. For example, we could read a teacher written text about Día de los Muertos or we could have an authentic text of someone talking about how they celebrated and what it meant to them. In the interpersonal mode, we do this by discussing similarities and differences. Those conversations are important because they allow us to work with language to complete tasks. For example, we could practice asking each other questions about an element of teenage life from our culture or we could interact with a teenager from the target culture and ask questions to learn more about their teenage life. And, more importantly, learn what to do when we don't understand or need more clarity around an explanation. In the presentational mode, we do this by presenting our observations, our opinions and our questions. This mode is great for getting our thoughts on paper and allows for reflection. For example, we could write a blog post talking about what we see in a picture of a Carnaval celebration or we could ask students what they think they know about Carnaval, interact with texts to learn more and have students reflect on what perspectives they learned. I'm willing to bet that a lot of us have had a conversation that goes like this:
Person: What do you do for work? You: I'm a high school Spanish teacher Person: Good for you! I took 4 years of high school Spanish and I can't speak it at all Sound familiar? It's been shown that 10% of Americans speak a second language, 20% of students are enrolled in a language class in grades k-12 and only 8% of college students are studying a second language (source ACTFL). Isn't it time we change the narrative? Isn't it time we change those numbers? We want our students to be global citizens and yet only 10% of us can speak a second language. This is where proficiency comes in. The American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) coined the term "proficiency" and defined it as "the ability to use language in real world situations in a spontaneous interaction and non-rehearsed context and in a manner acceptable and appropriate to native speakers of the language.” (ACTFL Performance Descriptors). In layman's terms, teaching for proficiency is teaching out students how to USE the language in with real people in real situations and less about what they KNOW about the language. So how do I get started? This page on my blog will go through a bunch of resources for proficiency-based teaching that I recommend reading. Here are my ideas to get you started! *Note these are not meant to be step by step directions but instead more of a fluid process* Idea #1: Read the ACTFL World Readiness Standards- Think of these as your new state standards. These are 11 guidelines that help guide us to thinking about how we plan courses, units and lessons. They integrate what are called the 5 C's which are Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons and Communities. These are the overall guiding ideas that change how we approach teaching. So a unit transformation looks like this: Before: Students will be able to use the present tense. Students will be able to use vocabulary related to hobbies Now: I can explain what I do in my free time and compare/contrast that to what teenagers in Colombia do in their free time. The unit goes from being grammar/vocab driven to culturally driven. Students communicate about a topic using the grammar/vocab, they compare/contrast cultures, they compare teenage life in Colombia to life in their culture, they connect to other disciplines like art, music, and physical education and they have the chance to communicate with teenagers in the target culture. Idea #2: Read through the ACTFL Can Do Statements- I'll admit these took me a while to fully grasp. The basic idea is that every student is somewhere on what we call the "Path to Proficiency". Based on the number of contact hours your students have with the language you can have a sense of where they are and more importantly where you are targeting your instruction. Greg Duncan does the math that about 135-155 hours of instruction (theoretically) moves you to the next level. These Can Do Statements give you an idea of what your students CAN DO in terms of reading/listening, speaking and writing. They break them down into novice, intermediate, advanced, superior and distinguished. In our classroom reality, we are looking at novices and intermediates. They then break them down into sub levels of low, mid, high. So for example a novice mid can produce short phrases and memorized language when speaking/writing while an intermediate mid can produce connected sentences to begin to explain their ideas. There's a lot more depth to these Can Do Statements but at a glance they give you a great place to start as you think about where your students are and more importantly where they're going. Idea #3: Read through the ACTFL Core Practices- These are what I consider my guiding principles of proficiency oriented teaching. These 6 guidelines help me focus my instruction. They include: Using 90% target language in class, Planning with Backwards Design, Providing Effective Feedback, Using Authentic Resources, Planning Interpersonal Tasks and Teaching Grammar as a Concept and in Context. My future blog posts explain these in more detail. Idea #4: Look at a unit you are teaching in the future- Take a look at a unit you have coming up and just try some new techniques in it. Think of how you're presenting culture and see if you can weave it in throughout the unit so it's not presented at the end as a "by the way". Are you looking to see how much your students know about the language or what they can do with the language? Plan times for them to be creative with the language and produce more. Start small with this. Taking on proficiency is a big task so it's important to try smaller chunks before taking on a huge project Idea #5: Try using an authentic resource in your classroom and see how it goes- Take a look online or on Pinterest and type in a topic/theme you're working on and see what shows up. There are articles, videos, infographics, commercials, Tweets, advertisements and more all waiting for you to bring them into your classroom. Find some that are related and ones you think your students can work with. Incorporate them into your unit by asking students some questions such as main idea, word detection, have them infer answers to questions, react personally, compare cultures and more. They don't have to know every word in the article, they just have to be able to do a task at their proficiency level (see the Can Do Statements for ideas) Idea #6: Challenge your students and yourself to speak the target language for a full class period, a full week, a full month- Tell your students at the beginning of the class that you want to challenge them to speak the target language for the whole period. Offer a reward to them if they do it (but don't punish them if they don't). If they can do a class, try it again. Then try it for a week. And it's not just them speaking the language...YOU are too. It becomes a really fun game where you're trying to get your ideas across all in the language with little to no English. Idea #7: Instead of giving a test, try a performance assessment- Take a look at that end of unit assessment you're giving. Does it tell you what students know or what they can do? If it's what they know, think about how you could change it. Is there a way you could make it a conversation between two-four people instead? Is there a way to make it a writing prompt instead? For example: Before: A test including multiple choice vocab questions on environment vocabulary and fill in the blank subjunctive verbs. Now: You will have a mini-debate in a group of 3-4 to discuss your opinion as to whether your community should eliminate plastic water bottles, plastic straws and plastic bags. In your conversation make sure you express your opinion and back it up using what you learned about the topic. Now we're seeing how students can handle a conversation on a relevant topic and the grammar and vocabulary that I would have been testing before is woven in so they have to use it to complete the task. These are some starting ideas. Read more of the posts for more ideas and resources! |
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