I think that most world language teachers will agree with me that interpersonal assessments (assessments on which two or more students interact with each other) are very hard to get right, but they are arguably the most important. Most of us have learned that there has to be some type of problem for the students to solve; otherwise, the students spit information at each other without actually having to interact. However, they also need to be prompts that allow/require both (or more) students to communicate.

Twice in my very short career (and I am sure this number will increase), I have had to have the students redo an interpersonal assessment because my prompt just did not fit the bill. This week, I gave the students an interpersonal assessment that I thought was going to be amazing, and it totally flopped…and it was totally my fault. We all make mistakes, right?

What went wrong?

So, the students did an interpretive reading on tapas in Spain, and we have been working with that material for a while. On the original interpersonal assessment that I developed, the students were given a hotel name and a tapas bar, and they were leaving from the same place; they had to discuss how long it would take, how they would get there, what metro line they would take, what tapas they wanted to eat, and they only had a certain amount of euros, so they had to make sure that they did not overspend. The problem was that one student was pretty much saying everything because my prompt wasn’t interpersonal enough. One person could easily just agree, state the tapa he/she/they wanted and be done with it.

How did I remedy this?

Unfortunately, I did not realize how bad my prompt was until after one of my classes had already taken the assessment. But I was not willing to assess students who only said two sentences because the teacher (that’s me!) gave them a terrible prompt. Surprisingly, the students were not mad at me when I made them redo it with the new prompt. They were actually happy about it. Weirdos (just kidding. I love them).

To fix the prompt, each student had a different hotel. This made the world of difference because they had to listen to each other, and they each had different information to share. If they decided that they were going to go “tapa-ing” at 8 PM, then they had to make sure that they arrived there at the same time. They pulled up Google Maps and were able to figure out the fastest route from their individual hotels to the restaurant. Once they did that, they needed to decide what time they, personally, were going to leave to get there on time. For example, if the metro said it would take 18 minutes, then they had to leave at 7:42 to get there for 8:00. Here is the link to the assessment if you want to take a gander at the prompt.

The results

The results have been amazing so far. Students are asking each other clarifying questions and negotiating meaning in their videos. In the first prompt, there was really no reason for them to clarify anything. However, once they were leaving from different places, they had to make sure they would get there on time at the same time. At first, I worried that the prompt would be too hard, but it wasn’t. They did such a great job communicating with each other. If we are really focusing on our students’ ability to communicate as opposed to their ability to speak perfectly, then our students can accomplish tasks like these without being discouraged by a bad grade because of their language accuracy.

I am very happy with this assessment, but I would love to improve it, so feedback would be awesome!

This post first appeared on October 24, 2017 on the “Working Toward Proficiency” blog. http://workingtowardproficiency.blogspot.com/2017/10/ 

How do we convince students to stretch beyond their comfort zone when writing and speaking in the target language? I believe that teachers have to educate students about proficiency, both on a course level and the task level, so that they are invested in our collective work. Truly, we have a mighty task before us as we lead students on this journey. A standards-based rubric can be a powerful tool for undertaking this work.

This year our department has a new standards-based presentational rubric that a group of us wrote over the summer to help guide our work on specific tasks. We spent four intense days at the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association’s Proficiency Academy with Thomas Sauer and Greg Duncan, and each afternoon (and some evenings after dinner…and some mornings before breakfast…) we gathered to peruse existing rubrics and think about how to craft our own. Our resulting “patchwork” product is most definitely imperfect and a work in progress, but having one common rubric forces us to hash out our questions and disagreements collectively, which has great value. I can talk to a middle school Mandarin colleague just as well as a high school French colleague as we try to decide what we mean, exactly, by “strings of sentences” or “highly practiced words” (oh, and the ACTFL glossary helps too). My dream is that by the end of this year, our department will have developed its own lexicon, where we define all the terms in our rubric with examples in English.

Break in Your Rubric Like a Pair of New Jeans

A new rubric is like a new pair of jeans – you have to break it in to get comfortable. Throughout the first grading quarter this year, I dreaded every presentational assessment because I knew I’d have to face our stiff, unfamiliar rubric again and figure out how to make it fit me. Nothing was as cozy as my old rubric from Terrill & Clementi’s The Keys to Planning for Learning! Working with colleagues who shared my struggle made this work easier, and gave me many new insights into proficiency. At my middle school, teachers of four different world languages spent time rating ELL samples and comparing rubric scores so that we could debate and share our areas of uncertainty. As a result, we’ve got a running list of unanswered questions and an emerging glossary of terms to push our work forward. I also brought work samples and our rubric to my regional middle school French PLC so that I could hear what colleagues from other districts had to say about my students work, too. As a result, we are now piloting a different layout of our rubric to make it more comprehensible to middle schoolers.

Expose the Gaps in Your Instruction & Assessments

A new rubric may also expose some areas where there are gaps in instruction. Our new rubric mentions posing questions in the “text type” category for Novice High and beyond, which presented me with a challenge. Very few of the prompts that I was using gave students the opportunity to ask questions in their writing. To be perfectly honest, my first reaction to this change was a feeling of annoyance. Here’s a brief summary of the internal monolog running through my head, so that you can see what I mean.

Me, looking at the draft rubric: “Why are we including questions as part of text type? Isn’t that the rubric dictating instruction? Well, I guess I know why…asking questions is a hallmark of Intermediate proficiency. But I rarely have my students include questions in their writing. And now we’re saying that can’t even reach Novice High unless they can do that?!”

Me, thinking again: “Ooooh…maybe I need to change my presentational scenarios so that students need to include questions as part of the task. Then the door is open for those who can do it, and they can reach Novice High.”

Me, a few months into this school year: “I really need to give my students more practice with asking original questions. That’s the only way they’re going to start asking non-memorized questions in their presentational work.”

So although I was initially a bit miffed that our rubric was the “tail wagging the dog,” it actually got me to improve my instruction so that I can bring students along the path to proficiency. By committing to a new rubric, we were raising the stakes significantly for ourselves and our students. Having a standards-based rubric obligates teachers to ensure that we are providing students with all the tools they need to “level up.” We have to write prompts that let them shine: that push them to show what they know and can do in the language on many fronts: specifically, comprehensibility, vocabulary, text type, and cultural awareness. It’s the tail wagging the dog, but in a good way: the rubric nudges us toward writing assessments that closely match the standards outlined in the rubric, and ensure that we’re faithful to ACTFL proficiency levels. And when we write assessments that match the standards, our students stretch to match those standards and grow their language proficiency.

To Finish: A Thrilling Plot Twist!

To really put some fire in our bellies, our department head decided that on top of piloting a new rubric we’d also move to standards-based grading this school year. This means that meeting the course’s proficiency target will result in a grade of B, and only exceeding the target will earn an A. In the affluent, highly successful district where I teach, we all felt some butterflies in our stomachs about this transition. Our students want As! Our parents want As! And here we were, ready to mostly offer them Bs, Bs, and more Bs. Here is a rough summary of our (ongoing) debate on this matter in our department:

Ultimately, I was won over by the argument that a B for meeting the target ensures that most students will stretch their skills in language class. What else could we possibly want for our students?  My students received their first report cards of the school year just over a week ago. While only 2% earned Cs in French, just 26% received As. The vast majority of students (72%) met the target and therefore earned Bs of various flavors. I can say with confidence that most of these students are both unsurprised by their grade, and thinking carefully about how they can exceed the target in Term 2. And I haven’t received an angry parent email or phone call yet! My hope is that as we become more familiar with our rubric, I will sharpen my instruction so that it is more effective, and my students will internalize the rubric expectations so that more and more can exceed the course proficiency targets. In this way, our rubric’s “tail” will “wag” us along the path to proficiency.

In my education program, my professor would tell us a great analogy about grades and retakes.  She said that as teachers we should allow students to retake assessments, so they can continue to practice and improve with the language.  We want students to practice so well that they can attain a proficiency with the language.  Then, she made this analogy: if we were going to jump out of a plane, we would want to have the person who got an A in parachute packing, packing our parachutes instead of someone who earned a C.  Even if the person had to keep practicing until they earned an A, we would rather have the person who kept practicing until they earned an A instead of the person who got a C and then went to work.  Therefore, we want to let our students practice as much as we can to make them as proficient as we can.  We frequently discussed “how well is your parachute packed?”  It made sense for me; however, it was difficult to implement.  As my assessments after college mainly relied upon discrete grammar and vocabulary, it didn’t make sense to retake assessments.  I wasn’t sure how to recycle the material well enough for a retake.  

This year, I shifted my grading to focus more on each mode (presentational, interpersonal and interpretive) and less on completion work like classwork or homework.  I wanted to help my students to not feel like everything was riding on one assessment or two and I was a bit nervous to make this transition.  Wendy Farabaugh mentioned on Twitter that she gives assessments back and asks students if they are satisfied with their grade.  If not, they can do it again.  A light bulb went off, and I decided that I would try retakes this year.  As my assessments shifted to being more performance based and less discrete points, I was happy to let students retake it, and I have seen great results for a variety of reasons.

When we assess, our assessment timelines are built based on the school timeline and reporting guidelines.  We assess when we feel like we have covered material sufficiently and the majority of students are prepared, but some students may need more time or practice to truly attain what they need to be successful.  While I still have to give assessments based on a certain timeline, allowing retakes gave my students the freedom to improve and progress at their own pace.  I also became less concerned with my timeline of assessments and more concerned about my student’s improvement.  

However, I had some concerns that I am sure other teachers have when they think about retakes on assessments:

Would everyone just want to retake assessments to get one or two more points?  This really didn’t happen.  Over the course of the trimester, I had about six students retake assessments.  Plus, if students really wanted to improve their grade, they had to change their performance based on the rubric.  They had to improve their writing by including more details or utilize more vocabulary in their speaking responses.  Those significant improvements in their proficiency are worth the retake to me.

Would I take the first or second grade?  I would take whatever grade was the highest.  Ideally, they would improve.  In most cases, they did; I only had one student who did not improve.  However, I saw some improvement on his later interpretive work.  I do not believe that retaking a test should be considered a penalty.  These students want to improve, so I should do everything to encourage that.  This ended up being a reoccurring trend where I saw later improvement on the same type of assessment.  One student wanted to retake her interpersonal assessment.  She improved significantly on the original assessment, and she also did well on the next interpersonal assessment.

Couldn’t students just not prepare for the first assessment then take a later one?  Does anyone really want to fail- even the first time?  They are not blowing off my assessments to get an easier one later. Overall, I did not see a drop in first assessment scores when I gave the option of retakes.  In addition, performance assessments are hard to blow off.  They are a reflection of the students’ performance on a given topic based on their acquisition from class.  While I like students to look over their notes, I don’t expect students to really cram before an assessment.  Normally if a student struggles is can be because he or she needs more input or practice with a topic.  As we continue to build on each unit, students’ development and acquisition occur at different rates, so if they have accomplished my goals for the last unit a week into the new unit, I am happy to let them show off what they have learned.  

Did I require students to submit something to retake an assessment?  For me, this was an extra step that I didn’t need.  A pure desire to improve was really all it took for them to “earn” a retake.  And in theory, being in Spanish class each day was probably enough to really help them improve in each domain.  If I really wanted to add an extra step, I could have students reflect on how they can improve for the next assessment.  But if I want reflection, I would rather the whole class reflect instead of just a student who didn’t do as well.

Did it take a lot of time on my behalf? Well… this was the one result that I haven’t resolved.  I did have to find another article on Frida Kahlo for one of my interpretive assessments.  But I did feel that the desire to have my students improve is sometimes worth a little sweat on my behalf as well.  If my two goals (grading for proficiency and striving to have students constantly improve) were something that I really wanted to achieve, I was willing to dedicate a little extra time to find a new article or video.  However, if students wanted to redo an interpersonal or presentational assessment, I slightly change the questions or the prompt.  These two tasks do not require a lot of time and effort on my part.

Out of all of my doubts, I saw large gains on behalf of my students.  And I believe that I am continuing to send an important message to my students- that I believe that they ALL can improve and learn Spanish and that I acknowledge that it is not a linear process.  I believe that I am preparing them to really pack those parachutes well!  And thank you Dr. Ruth Ferree for sharing this idea with me that I can finally implement after 10 years- and for packing my parachute, so I was ready to jump out of a plane into the world of teaching!

“They know it for the quiz and then 15 minutes later they can’t use it properly.” How could they score so well on a scheduled quiz and then not use it correctly in a spontaneous classroom interaction? How could I make a more accurate appraisal of where they really are in acquiring a concept? How could I offer formative assessment on what they truly understand/know?

And so this year I began the “Pop Check-In”. When I first announced one in my Year 3 class there were looks of horror. “A pop quiz? You hadn’t warned us! A quiz? For marks?” So I explained what the ‘pop check in’ is and isn’t:

• It is a chance to see what you have in your head ‘right now’
  
• It is not ‘for marks’ but it is ‘for learning’
• It’s a chance for me to see if I have further teaching to do regarding this concept
  

Typically I “mark” the check-in that evening by putting a coloured dot next to response that needs another look  and the next day ask my students to look at/correct the problem. They receive a ‘complete’ mark when this is done.

This works well but one day I returned them the same class and noticed the effect. I realized that I should be opting for immediate feedback and immediate coaching, especially for those students who have still not mastered the concept. In other words if I could pop-check then I should pop-coach. So now I find myself 5 minutes during the class – 5 minutes to quickly look over the check-in and return them that very class. For some it’s a quick look and often “I know where I went wrong!”. But for the others it’s a great time to revisit the concept. When students are working quietly I take a moment to individually help those who need the extra support.

Students tell me that they like this approach. That it really shows them what they know and some are surprised that they didn’t really understand the concept as well as they thought they did.  They also say that it is a way to check in on their learning without a fear of it reflecting on their mark (their concern as always).  For others it gives the confidence to know that they are expressing themselves appropriately and correctly. And I’m finding the quick coaching moments to be more effective because they occur right away.

The other day I announced a pop check-in and one of students turned to his partner and said “I told you we’d have one! She’s checking to see if we’ve got it!”  And that’s formative feedback I’m happy to provide!