TPRS year 2 - Student made quizzes

I met with my principal this morning as we discussed my two evaluations from last semester.  He commented how impressed he has been with me as a Spanish teacher: both in the rapport with the students I have acquired in a short time as well as the Spanish abilities he has noticed with students.  I would assume that students didn’t speak it as much before (except the Native / Heritage speakers which make up about 40% of the school). Thanks to the sneaky teaching of TPRS, they are acquiring the language without realizing it. J

While we were talking, I mentioned something that has been a breath of fresh air as well as a great addition to my teaching this semester.  Over Christmas I bought BenSlavic’s TPRS DVD set for only $35, which I thought was a really nice deal after reading both of his books last year.  It really helped flesh out some of the concepts he talked about in his books.

I noticed that Ben has his students write 8 question quizzes in one of his classes to have an assessment at the end of class.  So students are not required/expected to write anything during class.  They are expected to watch, listen, and answer (as well as act when necessary). 

The idea of students making the end of class quizzes for me though is… GENIUS.  So I tried it out during these weeks and students actually do a great job.  They get to listen to the story all of class and then write out 8 questions (either that I have said or of their own creation).  Then at the end of class, someone passes out little pieces of scrap paper I have (thanks to extra worksheet copies and such) and they take the sí/no quiz.  Some of the questions have been awesome!

The best part, all I have to do is grade AND I have a record of what we have been talking about for future games in which I want the students’ stories as the driving force for the game.  (For example, see my caramba game for my eighth graders last year.)

I think this is a winning idea for the following reasons:

• I am often tired at the end of class and in the last five minutes, I can’t think of five questions, much less eight.
• Using eight questions is good since quizzes/tests are 50% of their grade. This offers a good buffer for their grade in case they miss one or two every once in awhile.
•  Students who make the quizzes must pay more attention to how I am asking questions (since Spanish is different with no usage of Do(es) / Did at the beginning of questions, it’s good to make them conscious of how to write questions in Spanish by listening to me.
•  Students get ownership of something in class that affects the rest of the class
•  It seems to build their confidence
•  the quiz writer has to pay more attention than otherwise
•  it establishes a routine for Spanish class unlike any other; in the last 8 minutes, someone passes out the sheets of paper and we take the quiz, go over the answers and have 2-3 minutes at the end
•   I am able to praise students for awesome questions

Additional notes

• it’s funny how students almost always have a question (in Jr high) about if the teacher is a loser: ¿El profesor es un loser?  to which the answer in class is “Sí.”  (I model that I would rather that they make fun of me than each other in class.)
•  students almost always volunteer for this surprisingly
•  they still have to take their quiz after writing it, but shouldn’t they get an easy A?
•  If no one volunteers, I have each name on a popsicle stick for each class and I just draw that name. Once they go, their popsicle stick cannot be drawn until everyone’s name has been drawn.
•  if a question is poorly worded (and 20%-30% or more miss it, I throw the question out / offer it as extra credit)

Día - 152 - speaking of quizzes

So it's in my nature to want to know how my students are doing!  Sue me.. wait... don't really.

In my district we have these wonderfully useful days (notice the hint of sarcasm there) where we have professional development built into the school year and we have the first Wednesday as an early out and then stay until 3:30 doing professional development.  It might be nicer if there was an actual language program I could meet with and hone our skills together.  Instead, we might have a speaker talking about different things we have to do as educators in Missouri.  Before, it was all about the state testing.  Ay ay ay

------end tangent-----

 So we have these short days and I decided that since I only have 20-25 minutes with my students on those days, I should give a quick quiz.  Yeah.  I know, right?  I should have done this years ago.  Well at least earlier on in the year.  I give little pop quizzes on the stories where the students have to use the language to answer the questions.  However, I wanted to see how well they could do on identifying the structures and using them.

I had two parts.  The top was 20 or so structures we've been using a lot this year almost in every story and matching them to their English counterpart.  These were in the past tense, like our spoken stories.  The second part was a story we'd gone over before and I blanked out some of the words with a word bank  These were in the present like our written stories.  In all, there were 32 points.

Ever since grading them, I've wanted to kick myself.  I had students score as few as 7 and some score as high as 32.  But how were some of them capable of scoring 7?  The diversity of the grading helped me realize that I had been failing them in not assessing their understanding of the structures.

It's such a "DUH" moment too.  I assumed way too much from the quizzes that I had been giving.  Somehow, I figured out that there were some students really struggling with the information.  What is most frustrating is they weren't letting me know that they didn't understand!

What does this tell me?  More quizzes over structures and much more accountability with eye contact to students.

Día 128 - Quizzes

I don't think I've talked much about assessment yet this year.  The problem is I don't really know yet how to create a wonderful summative assessment tool.  I have so far decided to use formative assessments.  For those of you not familiar with the terms...

A summative assessment is basically the assessment we do that shows the students have learned from the unit, such as a test, a paper, or a presentation.  It's a big assessment.

A formative assessment is what we use along the way to track the students' progress so we can possibly help them before the summative assessment (test, paper, presentation).  These could be quizzes, worksheets, classwork, or anything that gives the teacher an idea of how the students are progressing with the material.

Well, I really like the formative assessments.  I am the foreign language department at my small rural school.  As a result, I haven't been too worried about creating massive tests for my students.  Instead, I have been giving 3-5 point quizzes constantly.  I try to do at least 2-3 a week when possible.  This is so I can constantly chart the students progress.  Another formative assessment in TPRS are the writing assignments for students to write in the language.  This has proven helpful to see how students are doing as well.

I like these assessments because they are realistic and as I chart my students' progress, I am able to go back and help on things that they aren't quite grasping yet.  The silly thing is that the quizzes I give are over the stories that we talk about in class.  As a result, the quizzes are so silly because our stories are often silly.  This also helps the students to succeed on the quizzes because they are able to remember more pointless information such as the names of silly characters or why they looked weird or what their problem was.  The best part though is that it's sneaky teaching because they think that the quiz is incredibly easy and forget for a moment that the whole thing is in Spanish.

I love when students tell me that a quiz was easy.  That means they were paying attention to the meaning (and not worrying about the language which is naturally being acquired).

I should do a few summative assessments though throughout the year.  I hope to worry more about that next year.  This year I might try and give a test over the main structures and some other vocabulary we've gone over to make sure they're getting it.  But the quizzes reflect the learning from the students and that's good enough for me to defend myself.