How I assess with exit quizzes

This blog post will be broken up into the following sections for quick reference:

1. My go-to classroom jobs 
2. How I might set up a story 
3. How I assess with the exit slips

Part 1: My go-to classroom jobs

I’ve learned to use classroom jobs over the years to enhance engagement from students, add a bit of buy-in for others and help class run more smoothly so I can… well… teach more effectively. I longer listes of things poorly and shorter lists of things well. I haven’t invented the idea of classroom jobs. They’ve been around for quite some time, and here are some of my essential ones each day:

Scribe: I generally have a classroom notebook for each class where a scribe will write down in Spanish what we have discussed.

Quiz writer: Depending on the class, there might be one student who is a faster processor who enjoys having control over the questions for the quiz. They will write them based on constraints outlined below for me so when I get to the end of class, I don’t have to think as hard.

Some ways to tweak this job are:

1. to draw straws or have random picker pick a student. 
2. Have them write on little slips of paper that you can scramble 
3. Have them write 10 and you choose the best 8 
4. Obviously there would be times I would have to change their questions if they weren’t well worded or if they weren’t good questions 
5. I would normally tell them to write most of the questions about the words on the board that we were practicing (if we were telling a story) 
6. Some might do comprehension quizzes in English. I’d rather do it in Spanish since it’s not really a “gotcha” type of thing. I have translations in English on the board. And if I have been going slow enough and repetitive enough, they’ll be fine and many won’t even look at that point. 
7. You could have a few kids each write a question to spread out the participation 
8. If I don’t get to the quiz at the end of class I might start with it as the warm up (but now multiple choice) and with the structures still up on the board.

Quiz alphabetizer: I also would have in some classes a student whose job would be to alphabetize the quizzes. This was great. Especially for grading and entering in grade book. Saved me so much time! And extra bonus if I had students check their own quizzes with a collection of colored pens I had before turning them in.

Quiz passer: Other job if the class was ok with it, was for a student to pass them back out once they were graded. It’s all about saving me time and getting them involved!

If you’re interested in using classroom jobs, I recently helped TPRS Books design some new handouts. Here is one on classroom jobs for FREE. Also be thinking about what are things that would make class run more smoothly if you didn’t have to deal with it and a student could handle it for you.

TPRS year 5 - Agentes Assessment

So I was looking at one of the assessments for the Spanish 1 book Agentes Secretos y el mural de Picasso.  Let me be clear in that I felt quite rushed in the book this semester with block scheduling.  And I personally got tired of having an entire quarter revolve around the book and not have as much fun with storytelling.  But I think I know what to do to improve that next semester when we do the Piratas book.

The way that we assessed was in four areas: Reading, Writing, Listening, & Speaking*

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.