However, in the past few months, I started a Saturday teaching job at Milton Academy, I accepted gigs as the accompanist for three musicals, and it all kind of fell onto me at once. This always happens to me around this time of year, but this year felt WORSE. However, this week has been a wonderful reminder that I always get through it.
The sad thing is that I really let it get the best of me this year, and my students suffered a bit. I took a really long time to get one of my classes their speakings back, and I am still full of guilt because of that. But here's what I learned:
I go out of my way to give really strong feedback on every assessment--especially on speaking assessments. I always type out what they say and then give them feedback on what to do to move to the next level in proficiency. The reason why I was taking so long to give them their speaking assessments back was because I wanted desperately to still be able to do that. Eventually, I realized that, sometimes, I just can't go that in depth, and that is ABSOLUTELY OKAY. I always have the students do self assessments anyway, so it really wasn't necessary for me to be doing all the work. What I ended up doing was just assessing them on the rubric and jotting down notes. I got it done fairly quickly, and then we spent a class period for them to evaluate their own proficiency. I did not feel like it was much less meaningful, and it got the job done. I wish I had given myself a break sooner.
On to the next topic! Despite my busy schedule, I was taking the time to work on developing more interpretive tasks and assessing them. This year, I feel really great about giving the students feedback on their proficiency on performance assessments and interpersonal assessments, but I was totally guessing when it came to reading and listening. I tried to look at the ACTFL descriptors, but it just wasn't enough for me. I started to hate giving interpretive assessments because my feedback was just not strong enough.
I realized I am writing about this in the past tense, but my struggles with interpretive feedback are definitely not over. What I have been doing is meeting with the wonderful Sarah Marsden in my district because she is a reading specialist and I mean it when I describe her as savant; she has such a brilliant mind and is so dedicated to her students and her teaching.
Anyway, I have learned a lot from Sarah on the different skill levels with regard to reading, and I have tried to tailor that to my teaching/assessing in my classroom. I showed her the ACTFL template for interpretive assessments, and we were basically able to pull out the most important skills and how they relate to students' proficiency. So, as of now, I am focusing on these four areas:
Main idea
Supporting details
Inferences
Interculturality
Sarah taught me that recognizing the main idea and making inferences (I tie interculturality into this) are higher-level skills and supporting detail detection is a lower-level skill. This makes sense, but it raised the question for me: why are my first-year students able to always recognize the main idea, then?
The problem was the template that ACTFL uses for interpretive assessments (which is an amazing template, and I am not bashing it!). This template is fantastic for helping students work through texts; it truly is. I was just trying to use it in the wrong way. I spoke with my department head and he said that the template is just that: a way to help students work through a text, but is not necessarily showing us their proficiency. This makes sense to me because my students were doing supporting detail questions and then moving on to the main idea. In other words, my supporting detail questions were giving them the answer to what the main idea is.
So, I will still be using the template, but I am going to give the students two assessments: one will give them the reading/listening and then just ask them to identify the main idea. If they are able to do so, that shows me a higher level of proficiency. Once they finish that part, then the second part of the assessment will include the supporting detail detection. I think this is going to help me give the students better feedback on their proficiency.
I recently did this with a listening assessment that I developed on www.edpuzzle.com. I gave the students three assessments all with the same video: one with just the audio and no visuals, one with the audio and the visuals, and one that stopped and asked questions in the middle of the video (supporting details). At the end of the first audio, I asked for them to identify the main idea. At the end of the second video, I asked them to identify the main idea to see if it was a bit easier for them once they had the visuals in the video as an aid. And the last one was supporting details and inferences at the end. I feel like I was finally able to give the students some meaningful feedback on their proficiency in the interpretive mode.
The other problem, however, was the rubric that I was using. Like all rubrics, there were aspects of it that I loved and others that I hated. However, I was finding that I hated more than I loved about this rubric. I set off on developing my own.
I am putting myself out on a limb here by sharing it with you all. It took me about two days to develop this week, so it is brand new. I have only used it once and made many adjustments to it in the past few days, but, although it is not perfect, I think it is more helpful for me than the rubric that I was using.
Here is the link to the rubric I developed this week.
I would really appreciate any feedback on how to improve this, and any feedback if you like it too! A huge thank you to Kim Talbot, Carlos Brown, Ronie Webster, Tim Eagan, and Jorge Allen for being the first people to take a look at it!
Thanks for reading!
Timothy
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