Chapter 6: Your Gradebook

IN PROGRESS - WILL BE EDITED & SPLIT INTO CHAPTER 6.1 and 6.2

Sadly, many teachers today end up with students who have not gained much in the way of language proficiency even after years of language study, and whose grades have communicated to them that they aren’t really cut out for this whole language learning thing. It’s time for those days to be over.

We can and must do more for our students. We want them to gain true proficiency and happiness while they are with us. We want them to leave our classrooms wanting more of what we have given them during our time with us, wanting to keep finding ways to interact with the language and gaining further proficiency. Above all, we want to communicate that they are smart people, whose brains are amazingly well-suited, as all human brains are, to slipping almost magically into the ability to use our languages to express and understand real, authentic communication.

Dr. Krashen has said that the goal of our language programs should be to equip the student with a proficiency level that allows them to to make the world their classroom, able to take in input from the real world and continue to build higher proficiency when they exit our programs. We want our grades to build students’ selfconfidence so that, when they leave us, they are motivated and eager to continue their language learning journey, as Krashen suggests.

This book is not offered as just another book on second language acquisition. It is written as a challenge to world language teachers to make a strong decision to make a break with the kinds of instruction that have come before us. We can now seek the new.

The Messages Your Gradebook Sends

Everyone can effortlessly achieve proficiency in the language they are studying with you, just as they did in their mother tongue. But to fully absorb that truth, and communicate it to students, teachers must finally begin to look at their work with their students through the lens of how people actually acquire languages. If we do that we will know that the only factor preventing all of our students from achieving is really nothing more than our own mindset and commitment to their success.

That bears repeating. The only reason that all our students are not achieving is us.

Our instructional practices. Our assessment practices. Our mindset. Our expectations.

If we have the right instructional and assessment practices, mindset, and expectations, all of our students can achieve. This is a powerful, and humbling truth. It means that the buck stops here, with us. We can set up

the conditions for all to succeed. And not just to “give away” the grades, but for students to actually earn those good grades, doing things that feel natural and easy and even enjoyable. What a beautiful vision.

So, how can we achieve that?

First, we need to think deeply about the truth that, barring severe cognitive or physical limitations, practically all people can effortlessly communicate complex messages in their first language(s).

Our students have already proven that they can acquire language. Only people who live with the most profound physical and mental challenges lack the ability to acquire language proficiency from the right kind of environment.

Each and every student can successfully build a mental representation of the language in their minds, and from this representation they can, after a period of time, begin to form utterances to express meaning. The proof of this? Just listen to them in the hall. Yak, yak, yak! Even the “slowest” student in your class can most likely hold forth at length, with all kinds of colorful language, and even highlyspecialized vocabulary, when you get them going on a topic they know a lot about and feel strongly about, like hunting or soccer trivia, or cheerleading, fixing cars, social justice, or fashion.

So, they can all achieve this in another language, given the right circumstances. However, students cannot control the rate and pace of that acquisition any more than a two-year-old can control the rate and pace of their own acquisition of their native language.

What does influence a two-year-old’s acquisition is the richness of the language that they hear around them, the amount of time their caregivers spend interacting with them, how much print material they see and interact with, and - perhaps most importantly - how they feel when they are being spoken to.

Therefore, like parents concerned with optimally developing their toddler’s L1 acquisition, we work to give our students an emotionally-supportive learning environment rich in texts and spoken language. From this environment, students can take what they need to build the language inside their minds, at the rate and pace that are natural for them. Each student will have a different timeline. Still, all can succeed.

In fact, some of the “slow” students in level classes one often turn out to be the most solid acquirers by level three. Our gradebooks must reflect the following truth: All can succeed, as long as they are being evaluated according to their own internal timeline.

We must reward growth, focus, and interaction with the language. We must NOT base our grades on the ability to produce (usually memorized) language on an arbitrary timeline set by external, and often for-profit, organizations, such as textbook companies and national exams of grammar.

There are so many factors that come into play in the rate and pace of a particular student’s language acquisition. Their already-established literacy is an important factor. The richer a student’s existing

vocabulary in their stronger language(s), the more cognates they will recognize in the new language, if it is a cognate-rich language for them.

The more reading and decoding skills they have already developed, the stronger, faster, and more confident they will be when approaching text in the new language. The more confidence they have in general, overall literacy, the more robust their self-concept as a student will be, and the more risks they will be apt to take. And then there are learning differences, neurodiversity, the effects of poverty, mental health concerns -- so many factors influencing how quickly students will acquire the language and develop proficiency in reading, listening, speaking, and writing.

So, what should we base our grades on? We should base them on what students can control, and not on what they cannot control, in an acquisition-focused classroom.

Grading What Students Can Control

We do not base our grades on correctly outputting a certain verb form, or being able to answer memorized questions with memorized phrases, or being able to memorize vocabulary lists. We do not grade our students on their progress through the ACTFL Proficiency Levels, because each student must necessarily progress through the levels at their own pace.

Besides, students’ progress through the proficiency levels is so slow as to not provide sufficient data for grading students with any degree of accuracy. In a proficiency-oriented setting where students are interacting with the language for the majority of their class time, the majority of first-year students advance extremely rapidly up to Intermediate Low on writing performance tasks, and Intermediate High/Advanced Low on listening and reading performance tasks. They tend to stay there for the entire year.

Instead, we base our grades, for the most part, on the most important element of language acquisition - students’ attention to, comprehension of, and interaction with messages that we provide them in class.

Each student makes progress in building proficiency at their own pace. Students cannot consciously control that pace. Therefore it would be highly inequitable, not to mention nerve-wracking, for students if we were to base their grades upon hitting certain proficiency targets on a pre-determined timeline.

Grades should be based on students’ production of work in class – listening, reading, writing, and speaking during the class’s activities.

Our grades thus reflect our students’ performance in:

● Demonstrating comprehension of the input, through responding to oral or written questions and through maintaining a flow of conversation in the language ● Reading texts during free-choice reading time, using them as a tool for language acquisition and working to find texts that offer sufficient challenge while also feeling easy and mostly comprehensible ● Demonstrating more and more complete reading and listening comprehension, of increasinglycomplex, abstract, and/or unfamiliar passages, about a wider and wider variety of topics ● Writing and speaking at an appropriate level and working to outgrow themselves by setting writing/ speaking goals and using tools to begin incorporating traits of strong writing in various genres (e.g.

Description, Information, etc.)

Since the only elements under our students’ conscious control are really the quality of their attention to the input (with modified expectations to differentiate for students with learning differences or emotional challenges, etc.), and their goal-setting and tool-making to help them make progress in stronger writing and speech in the various genres, then we need to design their grades to support them in developing better attention and engagement with the material in class.

Grade in Ways That Reward and Encourage Interaction with the Language in Class

In our proficiency-based teaching, we are not able to exert control over students’ rates of acquisition, nor can we force a certain structure to be acquired. Through conscious learning - Language Study and Writing Focus Days - we can effect memorization and even form manipulation, and there is nothing inherently objectionable about doing that, as long as we take equity and student self-esteem into consideration when grading students’ ability to control forms (more about this important topic is found in the Appendices). We just need to remember that this is learning not acquisition. Acquisition is not under our conscious control.

To build our students’ acquired competence, the only thing we can do is provide spoken and written language that the students find interesting enough to attend to and that they can understand, while we also set up classrooms and gradebooks that support students’ attention to the messages we provide.

If we are to truly align our instruction and assessment with the standards and proficiency goals, then our objective in language instruction must become very simple:

We must provide messages that students can comprehend.

These can be about any topic, as long as they are interesting enough to compel students’ attention, and we must use language - any language, any words, any verb tense or structure - that the students can comprehend to deliver those messages.

We do not have to make sure that students comprehend every single word in the messages. We have to make sure that they comprehend the overall message. The words and pieces will sort themselves out in their own time. We can’t control it.

We must provide scaffolding in the form of writing, translation, gestures, visual aids, and actions, to support students’ comprehension. We can ask students to take notes on a graphic organizer to show that they are understanding the messages we are conveying to them. They can write in the course language, or in any other language, or simply sketch. We can grade their notes based on how many details they are able to extract from the input, or for completion.

We must provide support for attention and engagement with a strong classroom management system that creates a calm, quiet environment for listening and reading. If we cannot provide this, then it is very difficult for all students to succeed.

We must provide repetitions of the language that was presented during Guided Oral Input, continuing on to Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, Shared Reading, and Student Application and Assessment.

We must make a variety of texts available to them for free-choice reading so that each student can find texts that are interesting and comprehensible.

In short, we must provide linguistic data in the form of interesting spoken and written messages, with plenty of built-in repetitions, and a calm, focused classroom in which to process it. These repetitions are already pre-planned for you in the structure of the Daily Instructional Framework, because the language and concepts that you present during Guided Oral Input is recycled in different ways through continuing on to Scaffolded Oral Review, Shared Writing, Shared Reading, and Student Application and Assessment, and perhaps also during Reading Workshop in the following lesson, if you choose to bring the class’s Shared Writing text back to students in the Reading Workshop of follow-up lessons.

This means that you do not have to worry about how many times you use a certain word or language structure during Guided Oral Input; you can simply focus your attention during the input portion of the lesson on making the messages comprehensible, checking for understanding, and student engagement/ classroom management.

We can model and teach traits of strong discourse in the genre (e.g. Narration) during our lessons, and model tools, during Shared Writing, such as anchor charts or graphic organizers, that activate conscious, metacognitive knowledge of how strong discourse in that genre tends to go.

For example, we can use a Story Mountain graphic organizer in the Narration cycle to cue us to include a setting, a problem, and a solution, which are traits of strong narrative discourse. Or we could use a post-it reminder with words like “said” and “thought” on it, to cue us to include inner thinking and dialogue in our stories, another trait of strong narratives.

In the Stepping Stones approach, two things are happening simultaneously. First, students are developing acquired competence, on their own timeline, which cannot be altered or hurried, except by giving more input. Our students then take from that data the building blocks of their own mental representation of the language, on their own internal timeline.

Grading students on how fast they are able to build that mental representation is not equitable, or even realistic, or even useful in helping build language proficiency, considering the uncontrollable, unconscious, and immutable nature of language acquisition.

The other thing that is happening is we are using a literacy-focused, workshop-style approach to model and teach traits of strong writing in the various genres. So, in Cycle One Phase One (Describing Settings), the first writing focus is “using sensory details,” or in other words, adjectives that describe how a place looks, feels, sounds, etc. We might make a list of “sensory details” on an anchor chart, as we work through the lessons. For beginners, this list will be quite simple, of course. Most likely it will list terms like “hot” and “cold” and “a little” and “very.” For upper-level students, these might be idiomatic weather expressions or sayings, or comparisons, or superlatives, or other ways to include sensory details about a setting.

However, the learning objective is not to be able to say “very hot” or “a little cold” or whatever specific terms ended up on the chart as you taught the lessons in the phase. The learning objective is to get stronger at using sensory details. So, a student might not remember all the specific words (or they might!), but we can expect that if they have been paying attention in class during the four to eight lessons in a typical phase, that they will have the ability to say some terms about the details of a setting.

And if we ask students to make themselves tools, like word lists or post-it notes, or graphic organizers, and try those tools as supports while they write or speak for a grade, then we are simply supporting them to interact more deeply with the input, for a purpose, and our assessments become a learning opportunity just like regular class.

Our assessments will then naturally convey to the students the very important and very true message that they are naturally very good at language acquisition.

It’s All About Building Students’ Confidence and Positive Self-Concept

Each student needs to do no more than attend to the meaning conveyed in the messages we provide them, in written and spoken form. Especially during the first two years, students should never, ever be made to feel that they are not making adequate progress because they are not reaching the same benchmarks as their peers on some arbitrary timeline. Our assessments must give students tangible evidence that they are making progress so that they can feel pride in their abilities, from the beginning, and without interruption or even the slightest hint that their efforts are not resulting in the desired outcomes. This is why World Language teachers need better learning progressions, such as the rubrics and continua in Stepping Stones. They are, as far as I can tell, the most complete and useful set of assessment tools that have yet been developed for World Language programs.

These assessment tools are designed to show students in a very tangible, concrete way, how they are growing stronger, step by step. This builds motivation, which is so important for student success in our courses. If our students do not feel that their efforts are being rewarded by a growing ability to comprehend and eventually produce messages in the language, many of them will lose their motivation.

This, sadly, happens all the time. If students receive enough messages indicating that they are not good at learning languages (usually through feedback on errors in their work, correction in class, or through Page 74

instructional practices that put students on the spot, such as asking individual students, “What did I just say?”), then many will begin to lose faith in themselves and in their innate ability to build a mental representation of the language.

When students lose confidence they, lose focus. Loss of focus leads to disengagement, and disengaged students do not comprehend because they are not paying attention to class. This leads to a further loss of confidence because students feel lost, and also to classroom management problems, as the disengaged students have more motivation to act up and disrupt class. These disruptions can make it more difficult for everyone to attend to the input, which decreases everyone’s motivation and enjoyment of the class. It is a negative feedback loop. The negativity thus experienced by my “lazy” or “disengaged” students is usually fully attributable to my failure to make sure that I am delivering messages that all of my students understand. If we are to indeed fulfill our school mission statements to serve all learners, and we intend to live up to the promise of communicative language teaching, which is that everyone can do it, then we must avoid entering into that negative feedback loop at all costs.

Students’ self-concept as language learners is fragile. We teachers must take great care not to erode this allimportant foundation of confidence through conveying to students that their listening and reading efforts are not bearing adequate fruit. The efforts required from students to sustain focus on our messages and the rigorous mental work that they must do in order to comprehend on a daily basis meaning in a new language should be their only concern. It is concern enough.

Students’ self-concept as language acquirers can be almost irrevocably damaged by even one message that indicates that they do not measure up to expectations. Thus, our only expectation at the beginning stages of language instruction should be attention to, and comprehension of, the spoken and written messages that we are conveying. This, truly, is the only factor over which anyone has have control in the process, and the responsibility for providing understandable messages rests fully upon our shoulders as proficiency-based instructors. If students are not comprehending the messages they hear and read, then we must take the responsibility for slowing down, rephrasing, repeating, or scaffolding with visual supports or translation.

It has been said that “a flood of input must precede a trickle of output,” meaning that we would expect students’ performance in the receptive skills of listening and reading to outpace their productive skills in writing or speaking output. The assessment tools in Stepping Stones are designed to accommodate this reality; the receptive performance targets are, from the beginning, set higher than the productive language targets for writing and speaking. See “Performance Guidelines for the First Two Years” in the Appendices for more specific examples of learning targets and typical student performance at various levels, for summative assessments at the end of the first four semesters (year one and year two) of working Page 75

with the Stepping Stones curricular frameworks and materials.

Our Gradebook Categories

I set up my gradebooks with categories for both formative and summative assessment. If my school required me to weight the formatives and summates using a certain percentage, even if the percentages were not the way I would personally prefer, these assessments will work, regardless. It honestly does not matter how you weight these grades.

The more important considerations are that you use a consistent structure and format in your assessments and consistent assessment tools (e.g. rubrics, continua) over the course of the term or term(s). A portfolio system of regular performance assessments in reading, writing, listening, and perhaps speaking allows students to lay their collection of work samples out and see evidence of real, measurable growth in concrete, meaningful skills. For example, they can see their progress in writing more complex sentences with clauses and conjunctions, or incorporating more dialogue and inner thinking into narratives, or using organizational phrases in their informational writing or speech.

Example of a writing

Examples of rubrics

Our gradebooks often have a lot of “cooks” in the “kitchen” looking over our shoulders, adding a dash of spice here, or substituting an ingredient there, in efforts to improve the department’s or building’s grading practices. Administrators and departmental agreements often mandate certain gradebook setups one year or semester, and then adjust or change the requirements, so that the next year or semester, teachers need to readjust.

Stepping Stones was designed to “roll with the punches,” meaning that, since I have been through many different administrators, in several schools, and in multiple districts and programs, and also worked with teachers in many different situations, I designed the assessment systems and tools to be flexible enough to fit into a variety of possible grading setups, since they seem to be constantly changing. And, at this point, teachers faced with all kinds of requirements have ben successfully using and adapting the assessments in Stepping Stones, for three years now, and I have yet to work with a teacher whose gradebook requirements, no matter how specific and onerous they seem at first glance, have created any real impediment to implementing the assessment systems provided in this book. After seeing the success, flexibility, and adaptability of these measurement tools and systems, used in a wide variety of teaching contexts, I can confidently assert that they truly represent the next generation of World Language assessment practices and tools.

The Meeting with My Boss That Led to This Book

I clearly remember the meeting in which I decided to take on the task of creating these materials. It was in late 2016, and I was debriefing a recent class period with Mr. Kellen, my supervisor. We were looking at some of my students’ portfolios, which at the time we were assessing with a general rubric derived from the ACTFL performance descriptors: Novice Low, Mid, High, Intermediate Low, and so on.

Mr. Kellen’s question to me that day was, “How do students see their progress when they go to Intermediate Mid writing performance by the time we completed the first round of portfolio assessment in early October of the first year, but then they are still at Intermediate Mid six months later?”

My response was, “That’s just how it works; it takes students a long time to grow from Intermediate Low to Intermediate Mid, and that process is out of my control. Students just need to listen and read, and the process of language acquisition will proceed on its own timeline, which we cannot alter or hurry.”

Most administrators do not like to hear “I can’t measure that, and I don’t actually care about it all that much,” which, while technically true, is not how schools are designed these days, with all the data and accountability that we are expected to demonstrate. So, understandably, my boss pushed me on my statement and assumption. If he had not pushed me that day, Stepping Stones might never have existed. But he did push me, saying, “Be that as it may, Tina, there surely must exist some assessment tools that would show World Language students more tangible progress, in smaller, more achievable increments than the huge jumps in the ACTFL performance descriptors.”

I replied, with growing frustration, “Actually, they do not exist. I have attended many ACTFL and World Language trainings, and I have looked far and wide, but I have not seen any tools for World Language that are as finely-tuned and student-friendly, with concrete, “next-steps” learning targets, as what I had when I was

teaching English Language Arts (ELA), using the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP) assessment materials.”

At that moment, Mr. Kellen and I looked at each other, and I felt a little nervous because I knew what I was going to say next would have a huge impact on my life. I went on, “I have thought about developing some assessment materials for World Language modeled on the TCRWP materials, but right now it is just an idea I have. And I have never seen anything like this for language teachers, so I am not sure it will even work.” But we both knew that I was basically signing myself up for years of work developing, implementing, tinkering, and experimenting with some new assessment tools that would give me the same kind of powerful data on my French and Spanish students’ performance that we had used in ELA.

Reader, I did it. I did create those kind of assessment tools. And, four and a half years later, you are now holding a book containing the results of that research and experimentation. My very sincere hope is that these tools spare you from having to endure these same kinds of conversations with your boss, especially because I have huge doubts that teachers who have not experienced the kind of powerful assessment tools (from TCRWP) that I had used for ten years in English Language Arts (or ELA) would be hard-pressed to even know where to begin in developing the same kind of tools for World Language, simply because it is unlikely that teachers would envision what we have never seen before, and there are, I have discovered, quite few World Language teachers who have also been trained in using the kinds of powerful assessment practices and tools that I was so fortunate to learn through the TCRWP.

I want to stress here that I am not some kind of special, magical unicorn. This is not due to any personal attributes or deficiencies on the part of World Language teachers. Rather, it is simply due to the extensive training I received from TCRWP over the years that I spent as an ELA, Social Studies, and Reading Intervention teacher, and the years of experience I had logged using their excellent assessment tools with a wide variety of students in my classes. I was simply in the unique position of having learned and implemented some tools and skills that did exactly what my supervisor was now asking me to do in World Language. It was a matter of being in the right place with the right knowledge at the right time. Now, you are in the right place at the right time, too.

In this book, you have the fruits of all those years I spent nerding out on literacy assessment, using the most powerful tools that exist for ELA, and the years I spent reworking my World Language assessment tools, to arrive at the rubrics, continua, and assessment practices that you have in this book.

That conversation with my principal, and all the other ones that we had over the years, was not exactly a pleasant experience for me. But the result is very pleasing indeed, because they pushed me to develop these tools, and they have helped so many teachers to make sense of the often-confusing question of what to measure in students’ performance, and how to communicate growth in a set-by-step way that gives more finely-gradated learning targets than the ACTFL levels.

The formative, daily, assessments measure students’ performance in interpersonal communication (which includes listening and speaking), listening comprehension, reading comprehension, presentational writing, and the skills that support a strong reading habit and a strong writing practice. These are all described more fully later in this book in the assessment chapters that accompany each instructional cycle. The summative Page 78

assessments are also performance assessments, collected in students’ portfolios, that measure reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and writing and speaking production. These are described in detail in the assessment chapters.

Some World Language teachers are required to enter grades in the four domains of listening, reading, writing, and speaking. You will find assessment options for both summative and formative assessments in all these domains.

Grading

In the Appendices, you will find a very useful document called “Performance Guidelines for the First Two Years,” in which you will find outlines of performance targets in various contexts (familiar and unfamiliar topics and passages), descriptions of suggested assessment tasks for various levels, and suggested grades and performance levels — Exceeding, Meeting, Developing, Emerging, and Redo — for the first two years of this literacy-based World Language instruction. But first some thoughts on gradebook setup and grading student performance.

You can enter the portfolio grades into your “summative” or “testing” category, under “reading”, “writing”, “listening”, and “speaking” if that is how you have your grade book set up. You can weight them anything you want, from 10% of the final grade to 70% or more. In fact, you can weight your grades any way you want or need to. If you are required to give tests of conscious knowledge of grammar or vocabulary, my suggestion is to weight that as little as possible, or just count it as a “feedback” grade, if you can swing that with your administrator. Not your colleagues, your administrator. Go straight to your administrator. Your students’ selfconcepts as language learners are on the line; the boat-rocking you might be doing with your grown-up adult colleagues is, to my way of thinking, worth any temporary discomfort, considering the hundreds and hundreds of students’ experiences that you stand to improve with a shift to portfolio performance assessment.

Communicating these Changes to Your Administrator

Go to your administrator. Tell them that you have been reading a book on constructively-aligned curriculum and assessment that is backwards designed from the national standards (and, depending on your specific state, possibly your state standards as well), and designed to measure performance in cross-curricular literacy goals aligned to World Language standards and to some of the Common Core literacy standards.

Tell them that you want to shift your assessments towards these literacy goals in your language course. Tell them that you want to assess student performance on their literacy skills in the Narrative, Descriptive, Informational, Opinion, and Argument genres by collecting work samples of performance in listening, reading, writing, and speaking, over time, in increasingly-challenging contexts and with increasingly-complex and unfamiliar passages and topics. Tell them that you want to increase students’ eyes-on-text time and you want to use daily modeled writing of strong literacy skills to explicitly unpack literacy in your daily lessons. Tell them that you want to make the criteria for success in these literacy skills transparent and achievable by breaking them down through the use of anchor charts and scaffolds for speaking and writing that align to the desired performance targets on the rubrics and continua.

And then, if you have a shared assessment on grammar or vocabulary, tell them that you will be teaching more grammar and language than you can assess with the shared assessment, so you will need a more robust, authentic assessment of their performance in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Tell them that therefore you either want to revisit the content of the shared assessment or use it as an “informational” grade to provide feedback on the grammar or language that you need to re-teach. Explain to them that you plan to use PACE lessons (i.e. “Presentation, Attention, Co-

Construction, Extension” lessons, explained in detail in the

Appendices) to teach grammar in a constructivist way, asking students to use higher-order thinking to analyze language samples to construct their own understanding of the features of the language, so they develop more lasting, durable understandings of the required grammar.

It is a rare administrator who will not be interested in such an approach to language teaching. So, once their interest is piqued and you have whetted their appetite for the changes you intend to implement, then “reel in the fish;” tell them that you would like to form a PLC or study team, to look at the assessment systems you are using in the building or district. This shows your willingness to work collaboratively with your colleagues. Ask your administrator when they are available to meet with the team. You need to ask this with authority, as if you assume that they will, of course, want to support this important reform in the way you teach languages.

If you do not have common assessments, or they are not assessments of conscious knowledge of the language, and you are basing your gradebook almost entirely, or entirely, on the assessment tools provided in this book, then it actually does not matter much how you weight your grades. Using these assessment tools and teaching in the way outlined in this book, no matter how you weight your grades, most of your students will very, very likely be making As and Bs. This is because you have been “teaching for mastery”.

Teaching for mastery is when your assessment is aligned with your instruction, your instruction is aligned to standards, and you are teaching the way the brain learns. The pedagogy exists in every subject area for every teacher in the world to be teaching for mastery. Assigning grades of “failing” to our students — unless we are talking about those who do not come to class, that is — could truly be a thing of the past. This could happen right now, if we all got straight on a very important point.

They Can All Do It

Everyone can learn. Especially a language. Everyone, unless they have severe cognitive or physical impairments, the kind that mean they cannot speak any language, including their mother tongue, can develop the ability to speak and understand another language. They all speak at least one language as proficiently as we hope to have our students speak by the end of the typical two- or three-year program: they can all

describe and narrate in all time frames, and speak of topics of general interest, and string together paragraphs topics that matter to them, at least in spoken language.

And even though everyone will not reach the same levels of skill, or literacy, or ability, everyone can get stronger today than they were yesterday, and stronger this year than they were last year. Even if the progress is in very small increments, and even if it is slower than the “bell curve” of the rest of the class, everyone can make progress in the language, day by day, if they show up to class, listen with the intent to understand, and engage in the L2 interactions that we plan for them. In fact, it is actually almost impossible not to make progress in language development just simply by being in an environment in which the language is being used extensively, in a comprehensible manner, to talk about interesting things.

If you want proof that they can all learn a language, just listen to them speaking the languages they already know! They have already done it once. They have already acquired a language, or maybe more than one. We just need to provide the conditions under which they can replicate the process, and adjust the instruction to match the developmental and cognitive abilities of people who are (by and large) already at least somewhat literate, or who are already receiving literacy instruction (in the case of primary learners) in at least one language.

Why do we have students failing left and right if everyone is naturally gifted with the ability to acquire language proficiency? Some of the factors that impede students’ academic success are, indeed, beyond our control. A parenting student, or one with health problems, or who is dealing with homelessness or addiction, often feels they have bigger fish to fry than Spanish class. These students need our support in class, and they also need stronger, wraparound support, from Social Services, outside organizations, school administrators, and the school counseling team. But why do students who attend class regularly and even put forth an effort still fail? This is not what education is all about. We want all of our students to succeed, grow, and learn. It is generally the foundation of our organizations’ missions.

Just take a look around your average school’s website, brochures, or flyers, or even the slides at the back-toschool teacher inservices. Most likely, you will not have to look too far to bump into a district and school mission statement that says something like, “All learners will succeed” or “Every student will achieve” or “All students can learn.”

We want this for our students, we want all learners to achieve, but we do not always act like that is true. We have a notion, even when we are aiming for language acquisition, which, as noted above, is firmly within the grasp of almost each and every student, we still have a notion that our grade distribution should look like a bell curve. A few Fs, some Ds, a lot of Cs, some Bs, and a few As. This notion is rooted in the factory model of education: sorting the “product” (the young human beings we teach) into “grades” or “levels of quality” and communicating to them if they are of above-average, average, or below-average (or even “failing”) quality.

This is a damaging and tragic notion that is based on the expectation that not everyone can achieve. It’s especially tragic in language courses, because we know that everyone can accomplish the goal of language acquisition. To continue belaboring the point, because it is of such foundational importance: they all already speak at least one language. They have thus proven that they can do it. If they are not making progress in our language classes, it is because we teachers have not set up the proper conditions for that to occur. Or Page 81

we are not measuring the right data, to show that they are, in fact, acquiring the language as they move through our programs.

There is a way to reform our approach to grading that does operate from the assumption that everyone can achieve the learning targets. Standards-based grading, also known as “proficiency-based grading,” holds forth the expectation that all students will meet the learning targets. Even if teachers need to give multiple opportunities and multiple ways for them to demonstrate their proficiency at, say, solving quadratic equations in a math course, or analyzing the significance of a minor character upon the development of the main character in an English course, in a proficiency-based or standards-based grading system, this is the expectation.

The expectation in standards-based, or proficiency-based, grading is that everyone can achieve a “proficient” level of performance, but that some students might take longer or need re-teaching in a different way, or need a different method of demonstrating their performance — perhaps speaking aloud to the teacher to show their analysis of the minor character’s influence, or making a PowerPoint or YouTube video in which they explain how to solve a quadratic equation.

So, why the fear that we are “giving too many As” in our standardsaligned, carefully-designed World Language programs? Under a proficiency-based grading system, we would be held up as “teaching for mastery the first time,” as long as we had standardsbased data to prove that our students are indeed, performing at the desired level. Portfolio assessment and properly-designed rubrics and assessment continua do just that. Portfolio assessment leaves a trail of tangible breadcrumbs that anyone can follow, to prove that we are not just “handing out” As but are, instead, teaching in a powerful, brain-based way that supports all students to achieve, grow, and learn, just like the school mission statement most likely says.

Be proud of your work, and wear your long lists of As and Bs like a badge of honor. You are in the forefront of education reform, which is, ultimately, societal reform that does not bear fruit for a couple more decades. Thank you for being you!

It’s high time that we language educators who are teaching for mastery, and working dang hard to learn the very best ways to do it, it’s time that we seize our power and build a fortress of unassailable data to defend this important shift in language assessment. Students’ portfolios, their collection of work samples over time in various contexts, are like fortresses that can prove that, miraculously, and quite conveniently for us and our level of happiness at work, the path of joy and communication and success really is the path to making good on the promise our administrators make every time they hand out their business card with that motto “Every Student Succeeds at Sylvan.”

Tell your principal that you are just trying to back them up on that promise if they question your grading. Tell your colleagues who are talking about you behind your back that you just got tired of failing kids. You can tell

yourself that they’re just talking cause they’re jealous, anyways. Who wouldn’t be? You have found the pot of gold. You have found the Pot of Goals.

With the right goals, the gold is there, shining right THERE, in your students’ innate ability to learn, if only the conditions are right. This book so far has been about the conditions for learning. Now, let’s turn to the nitty-gritty of how to sequence and plan our instruction and assessment so that we can amass that pile of unassailable data until it is so tall that we can use it to show, not just our World Language colleagues, but also the whole entire profession, what it means to teach the whole child in a way that they can all learn.

A note on terminology

In our World Language courses, the term “proficiency-based grading” has caused some confusion in terms, because ACTFL uses the term “proficiency” in a specific way that other disciplines do not. Additionally, we have very broad standards and Can-Do statements that make it difficult to establish the specific criteria that we expect students to achieve.

It is important to note that “proficiency-based” grading does not mean that students’ grades are based on their proficiency level, according to the way we use that term in our ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain a student’s proficiency level in a typical classroom setting.

Proficiency means how students can perform in listening, reading, writing, and speaking in any context. If a student is truly proficient in speaking at a given level, let’s say Intermediate Mid, that means that in any Intermediate-appropriate context, that student can produce speech that consistently meets the targets for Intermediate Mid.

The student who is proficient in speaking at the Intermediate Mid level can sustain that level of speech in a variety of contexts, both “practiced” contexts they have worked with in class and “unfamiliar” contexts that they have not “practiced.” You could ask the student who is proficient at the Intermediate Mid level of speaking to retell a story that they have “practiced” in class, and they would speak at the Intermediate Mid level. You could ask them to spontaneously tell a story about their own life, and they would, again, without preparation or practicing, produce Intermediate Mid speech. You could ask them to tell you about some content they have studied in class - let’s say you have studied school schedules in various German-speaking cultures - and they would speak at the Intermediate Mid level. You could ask them to spontaneously tell you about a topic they have not studied in your class, for example what people like to do in the summer, or popular social media platforms, and, once again, without rehearsal or preparation/study, they would speak in that context at the Intermediate Mid level. This is proficiency: the fluid, flexible ability to use the language at that level, regardless of context or specific topic.

In our classrooms, on any given performance assessment, we are not able to ascertain students’ proficiency. This is because the best we can generally do in a classroom setting is collect evidence of students’ performance in various contexts — how they perform in reading, listening, writing, and speaking on a given topic, using a given listening or speaking passage, within a certain context. This context might be highlyscaffolded, as in the case of a student whoo is writing with a list of sentence frames by their side, or with anchor charts and model texts available for their reference. Or the context might be much less-scaffolded, with no access to resources that were used in instruction.

Only by collecting and analyzing students’ performance across many contexts, with many topics, and with many kinds of listening and reading passages to interpret, can we infer with any degree of certainty their probable level of proficiency. That is why portfolios are such a powerful tool. They collect samples of performance in various contexts, and when students have been able to demonstrate a consistent pattern of work samples at a certain level, in a variety of contexts, and across multiple assessment events, we can more-confidently assert that they are likely to be proficient at that level.

Because students’ proficiency is such a complicated construct and difficult to pin down with any degree of certainty (since true proficiency can be sustained throughout so many contexts and we generally only have the classroom context in which to conduct our assessments), we need to base our “proficiency-based grading” or “standards-based grading” on students’ performance. This is what is done in other disciplines. We World Language teachers just have the additional hitch in our giddy-up of disentangling the ACTFL term “proficiency” from the way the term is used in “proficiency-based grading.”

In ACTFL terms, it would be “performance-based grading,” because we are collecting performance samples that, over time, can serve as an indicator of the student’s probable proficiency level.

Consider how other disciplines measure student achievement in proficiency-based grading. In math class, students are not assessed on their overall “mathiness” or even their overall level of “numeracy” or “mathematical thinking” because it is impossible to measure such a broad construct with any given assessment task or tool. In English class, students are not assessed on their overall “readerliness” or “writerliness” or “literacy” but rather on their performance on specific, increasingly-complex listening, reading, writing, and speaking tasks that allow them to demonstrate their performance in executing the things that strong listeners, readers, writers, speakers, and thinkers do when interacting with increasingly-complex ideas and text types.

Thus, we can base our assessments on using portfolios to collect a variety of “snapshots” to capture how our students perform in reading, writing, listening, and speaking across various topics, using increasinglychallenging passages, and in less- and less-scaffolded contexts as they grow in their abilities and confidence. Then, once we have collected a data set in their portfolios that demonstrates sustained performance in many contexts, with many topics, and with various text types, including culturally-authentic and “unpracticed” (or “unfamiliar”) listening and reading passages that were created for their proficient grade-level peers who are receiving their education in the L2, then we can begin to say with more clarity that their proficiency is likely to be at a certain level — the level of performance that they have been able to sustain across these multiple contexts.

We can engineer these contexts to move from highly-scaffolded to less-scaffolded and more-challenging, as students grow in skill and confidence. A worthy goal is to design our assessment tasks to so that students can begin, even in the first semester, to perform at an Intermediate Mid or even an Intermediate High level in interpretive listening and reading, and an Intermediate Low to Intermediate Mid level in presentational and interpersonal writing and speaking. Then, we can gradually increase the difficulty of the passages we ask them to interpret, and the topics about which we ask them to speak, and we can gradually remove the scaffolds to which they have access during the performance assessment, so that they can sustain a satisfying, meaningful level of communication even as the context becomes more challenging. Even first-year students can perform at an Intermediate level when reading, listening to, or writing and speaking about, a “familiar” or “practiced” topic and texts.

It is important that first-year teachers, or teachers whose upper-level students have not benefitted from previous communicative, standards-aligned instruction in prior years, design the contexts for student performance so that students can perform at an Intermediate level on the majority of assessment tasks. For example, in the first assessments, teachers might ask students to read passages that the class has written or read together prior to the assessment. Most students will be able to perform at the Intermediate level on such a task. Setting up tasks and situations in which they can only perform at the Novice level, even the Novice High level, is frustrating and, honestly, can feel quite humiliating to students.

For example, if we gave our first-year students an unfamiliar passage from a culturally-authentic news magazine, written for adult readers who are already proficient in the language, about a topic that we have not “practiced” or worked with in class, they would most likely only be able to pick out isolated word, phrases, and, if they were lucky, a sentence or two here and there. That’s not very motivating! It feels like an exercise in frustration. It is disheartening for many students. Why do that, when instead we can give them contexts in which they can, so fast, at seemingly-lightening speed, perform at the sentence and even the small paragraph level? We can bring them “challenge” readings, too, so that students can test themselves in more-challenging contexts. But it is my strong recommendation that the bulk of the assessment contexts be designed so that students can experience a satisfying level of performance from the very first assessments, and this book is designed to lead you through learning how to do just that.

Formative Assessments and Daily Grades

The Daily Instructional Framework is designed to allow you to collect informal observation data throughout the lesson, as you interact with students in the course language each day. There are two components of the framework that are specificallydesigned to provide opportunities for formative assessment, either through observing students’ performance during class activities, or by having students produce written work to demonstrate their performance, which we can collect and score for daily grades. These two components are Scaffolded Oral Review and Student Application and Assessment.

Scaffolded Oral Review, which comes right after the “heart” of the lesson, Guided Oral Input, is a short (about three or four minutes) oral review of the content that was created in the previous segment of the lesson, usually conducted through a series of questions and/or a recap, often re-using a visual aid that was created or used during the Guided Oral Input (such as student-created artwork, the calendar, the input chart, or the image(s) from a Picture Talk or Picture Walk or still screens from the Movie Talk). It is an opportunity to check for understanding and get some repetitions of the language and ideas presented in Guided Oral Input.

Your Scaffolded Oral Review time can be shortened or lengthened depending on your schedule. For Block classes, you might use two or three different Scaffolded Oral Review strategies in one lesson, to incorporate variety and more “hands-on” or interactive strategies into the longer class period. Some examples of tried and true, simple, low-prep “Go-To” Scaffolded Oral Review strategies are: Whole-Class Questions and Answers, Kid Grid, Finish My Sentence, Review Artists’ Work, Reading the Walls, Word Card Review Game, Thought Bubble Review Game, Video Retells, Five-Finger Review Chart, or any other review strategy.

Student Application and Assessment is the closing or “exit ticket” at the end of the lesson. It, too, can be shortened or lengthened depending on scheduling constraints. There are many possibilities for students to apply and use the language and content from the day’s lesson. My go-to strategies here, that I can use about 75% of the time and not get tired of them, are the Quick Quiz and the Question and Answer Game. The Q and A Game can be used with the Play That Word and Say It Twice modifications thrown in here and there for variety. Quick Quizzes can be either oral review, with whole-class answers, or written, so that you can enter a daily grade. The Q and A Game can be played with the appropriate version of the “game board” found in the Appendices, or with partners simply counting the number of words that their partner says. Another strategy that I like here is Listen and Sketch or Read and Sketch.

This is another part of the daily framework that can be stretched out for block classes, because it is comprised of more active instructional strategies that have students using the language with which they have interacted, beginning with Guided Oral Input, that day. You might want to add in more active strategies like Everyone Acts or Running Dictation, if you have block class periods. But you can get quite far with the very simple, lowprep strategies of Quick Quizzes, various versions of the Q and A Game, and Listen and Sketch. If you have more time than anticipated, you can easily fill it with meaningful language review by adding questions to the quiz or game, or have everyone switch partners and play the game some more.

Other Student Application and Assessment strategies that we will cover in this book are Write Inside the Story, Finish My Sentence, Everyone Acts, Quick Writes, L1 (English for me) Summaries, and Learning Logs. Learning Logs are particularly useful in Block classes because they offer students choices in how to represent their learning from the day, and you can make them part of your closing routine, setting aside the last ten minutes or so of the block period to have students add another page to their Learning Logs each day, as a differentiated closure/processing activity.

Summative Assessments

These assessments are administered every six weeks (or in an interval that corresponds to your academic calendar). They are collected in student portfolios to document growth over the course of the year.

Setting Daily Student Learning Objectives

To set daily learning objectives, we want to consider both language and content/process goals and objectives for the lesson.

Teachers in all disciplines want our students to develop their language abilities (for example, to learn subjectmatter vocabulary such as science terms) as well as to learn content and processes that are important to the discipline. However, there is a major difference between subject-matter classrooms and our language acquisition classrooms. In subject-matter classrooms, for instance Chemistry, teachers have two pre-selected goals. There is (1) a language goal, ensuring that students are understanding the language and learning Chemistry-related vocabulary, and (2) content/process goals, learning the facts of Chemistry or the process of conducting an experiment or writing up a lab report, etc.

In a World Language classroom, we also have two kinds of goals: (1) that students understand the language as well as (2) the actual facts, content, or processes of the class. The difference is that, for us, at the beginner level, and even at the intermediate level, the “facts of the class” are not specified by our standards, as in the case of the Chemistry or Social Studies, in which the standards generally require students to retain certain facts, such as the structure of the Periodic Table or the various social roles under the feudal system. Our ACTFL standards do not specify specific content. Some states or districts have developed standards and/or pacing guides that do specify specific topics or themes, but even these documents are generally far less specific and contain far fewer facts or content to impart to students.

If you do, for whatever reason, need to impart certain specific content, you will find recommendations for how to integrate that content into the Stepping Stones cycles and phases in the Appendices entitled “Angling Guided Oral Input to Elicit Language Features” and “Language Study/Writing Focus Days.”

For most of us, the specific content is not given to us by our standards documents, so - especially for firstyear students, the specifics of the content is determined by the teacher, and sometimes arises from the direction the class’s interests lead the discussion. So, instead of how to read the periodic table, we teach our students about each other -- what their classmates like, dislike, what they do each day, what kind of people they are, what kinds of imagination they have.

When the objective is to learn personal information, we cannot know what specific words or topics will arise in class as we plan and map out our objectives. We thus need content objectives that are flexible and responsive enough to allow the class to take the lead on the trajectory of the discussion that day.

Thus, any Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) that we write for our lessons will have two components: a language/literacy component and a content/process component. I will be using the following template or formula to state the daily learning objectives in this book, which guides us to include both language/literacy and content/process objectives in each lesson:

By the end of class, you will be able to ___ to ___ about ___.

What goes in the blanks?

“By the end of class, you will be able to do something in the language to execute a language function about a topic/theme .”

We will look at each of the three elements in the blanks in this objective “frame,” in the sections below.

Do Something in the Language

The “do something in the language” is what students will do in the Student Application and Assessment strategy that you will use at the end of class. For instance, if you plan to lead the class in the Q and A Game that day, you would choose an objective that involves speaking (see the examples below). If you planned to have students Listen and Sketch to demonstrate comprehension as you retell the day’s content, you would choose an objective that involves listening (see the examples below).

The “do something in the language” is, of course, going to change, depending on the level of performance that your students are capable of. It might look something like this, in various levels:

For beginners: (a) say words in French (b) write words in French (c) read sentences in French (d) listen to sentences in French For more-advanced beginners: (a) say phrases in French (b) write phrases in French (c) read a short paragraph in French (d) listen to a paragraph in French

For intermediate students: (a) say sentences in French (b) write sentence in French (c) read a (multiparagraph) passage in French (d) listen to a (multi-paragraph) passage in French For more-advanced intermediate students: (a) say strings of connected sentences in French (b) write strings of connected sentences in French (c) read a (culturally-authentic, unfamiliar multi-paragraph) passage in French that gives more information on the lesson topic (d) listen to a (culturally-authentic, unfamiliar, multiparagraph) video in French that gives more information on the lesson topic

For advanced students: (a) say paragraphs in French (b) write paragraphs in French (c) read a (culturallyauthentic, unfamiliar multi-paragraph, grade-level or adult-level) passage in French that gives more information on the lesson topic (d) listen to a (culturally-authentic, unfamiliar multi-paragraph, grade-level or adult-level) passage in French that gives more information on the lesson topic

Execute a Language Function

Let’s move on to the second component of the lesson objective, “By the end of class, you will be able to do something in the language to execute a language function about a topic/theme .”

The objective for “executing a language function” depends upon the cycle and phase of the Stepping Stones curricular framework you are currently working with. The cycles and phases are built around language functions, so each phase will have a ready-made baseline language function for you to use.

For Cycle One, Phase One, Describing Setting, it might be something like this:

For beginners: to use sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) For intermediate students: use sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) and compare and contrast For advanced students: use sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) to describe in the past, present, and future

For Cycle Two, Phase One, Narrating Personal Stories, it might be something like this:

For beginners: to retell the events in a story For intermediate students: to retell the events and tell what the character(s) were thinking or saying For advanced students: to retell the events and tell what the character(s) were thinking or saying, and use a “narrator’s voice” to show why this was an important, memorable, or interesting experience.

About a Topic/Theme

Let’s move on to the final component of the lesson objective, “By the end of class, you will be able to do something in the language to execute a language function about a topic/theme .”

The “topic/theme” depends, of course, on the specific content that you will present and discuss in that day’s lesson. For Cycle One, Phase One, Describing Setting, in the lesson on Small Talk (calendar and weather) it might be something like this:

For beginners: to describe the weather today For intermediate students: to describe the weather here and compare it with the weather in various places in the francophone world For advanced students: to describe the weather today and yesterday, and predict what the weather will be like this weekend, in various locations here and in the francophone world

Sometimes the “topic” is the same for all levels, and the only parts of the objective that change are the “do something” and “language function.” For example, in Cycle Two, Phase One, Narrating Personal Stories, in the lesson on, all of the levels will be discussing the stories of good and bad trips, so the “topic” might be something like this, for all levels:

For beginners: the story of a good or bad trip that someone in class has taken For intermediate students: the story of a good or bad trip that someone in class has taken For advanced students: the story of a good or bad trip that someone in class has taken

Examples of completed learning objectives

In the example from Cycle One Phase One (Describing Setting): Beginners: By the end of class, you will be able to listen to a paragraph in French and sketch the sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) in a description of the weather today. Intermediate students: By the end of class, you will be able to listen to a (culturally-authentic, unfamiliar, multi-paragraph) video in French that gives more information on the weather in the French Antilles and sketch the sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) that you hear. Advanced students: By the end of class, you will be able to listen to a (culturally-authentic, unfamiliar multiparagraph, grade-level or adult-level) passage in French that gives the weather predictions for this weekend and sketch the sensory details (e.g. hot, windy) that you hear.

In the example from Cycle Two Phase One (Narrating Personal Stories): Beginners: By the end of class, you will be able to say words in French to retell the events in a story about a good or bad trip that someone in class has taken. Intermediate students: By the end of class, you will be able to say strings of connected sentences in French to retell the events, and tell what the character(s) were thinking or saying, in a story about a good or bad trip Advanced students: By the end of class, you will be able to say paragraphs in French to retell the events, tell what the character(s) were thinking or saying, and use a “narrator’s voice” to show why this was an important, memorable, or interesting experience, in a story about a good or bad trip

As Oprah says here, the goal is to equip ALL students with the ability to express and interpret meaningful communication in the course language. With our assessments, we have the power to communicate this truth to them. They can ALL do it. What a tremendous gift to our students: a new language and a new self-concept as a capable, successful language learner and global citizen!

In Part Two of this book, you will find detailed examples of learning objectives that align to the strategies and content in the cycles and phases in the “Foundational” sequence of cycles and phases (introduced in Chapter Five) as outlined with dark squares below.