Portfolio assessments / The quantifiable components of communication

Every year, I think, "This year, less of my learners' grades will be based less on a written final exam and more on a portfolio of artifacts, encompassing their communicative achievements throughout the year."  And every year, I understand a little bit better what that means.  I have a list of contexts (and, by extension, some vocabulary sets) I'd need to see represented; I have general communicative modes that learners need to master; I'm working on a list of specific communicative tasks that learners would have to be able to perform; and some examples of activities that students can do to cover these contexts in those communicative modes are forthcoming.

But what I've still managed to avoid learning is how to assess all of this.  How well does a 1st-year high school (or this year, 8th grade) learners need to speak Spanish?  How much culture (and how many cultures) do they need to know?  How many comparisons between language and cultures do learners need to make?  How much do they have to bring connections from Spanish into their other classes, and vice versa?  And how on Earth do you assess a learner's role in her communities?

So we'll start with communication.  What components of communication can an outside observer accurately assess?  Well, there are the communicative skills, of course: speaking, listening, writing, and reading.  And there are the communicative modes: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational.  So far, so good--I can watch all of these things happen.

What's in all of those things?  What follows is me making stuff up.  It seems like I should have had an easier time finding these things in research, but I haven't yet.  If anyone still reading this knows where I can find some research on this, please let me know.  Even if you can make something (reasonable) up that I haven't yet, chime in.

Interpersonal communication
Equal participation--Engage in both parts of a conversation--listening and speaking, or writing and reading--in equal measure, and participate evenly with the other members of their group.

Responsive to communicative situation --Asks clarifying questions, responds to questions, makes sure that listeners are following the conversation, modifies speech as necessary.

Interpretive communication
Comprehension--Fairly straightforward.  Indicates an understanding of the language in some manner.

Vocabulary recollection--Remembers studied vocabulary in context.

New vocabulary learning--Uses a variety of strategies to determine the meaning (and importance) of unknown vocabulary. 

Presentational information
Erm...stage presence?  Appropriate illustrations, maybe?  None of these are necessary to the communication aspect, but are important nonetheless.  More information forthcoming.

Speaking
Fluency:  Speaks without undue pauses.  Everybody has to take a breath to think in mid-speech-stream.  Long silences are just awkward, and hamper communicative tasks.  In addition, sentence structure varies in order to keep the listeners interested.

Vocabulary:  Word choice is appropriate for the communicative task.  Advanced speakers have a variety of word choices, and can pick the most appropriate.

Syntax:  Word order aids communication.  Novice-high or better level speakers can change word order in order to change sentence meaning.

Pronunciation:  Speaker sounds similar to native speakers.  There is some evidence that this can only be taught up to a certain point.  Experience tells me that this point is the introduction of new sounds--the rolling 'rr', the flipped 'r.'

Listening
Comprehension:  Indicates understanding and asks for clarification where necessary and possible.

Application of strategies: Uses a variety of strategies to understand new vocabulary.

Writing
 Similar to speaking: Vocabulary, Syntax, and Fluency.


Spelling:  Written words follow accepted, standardized spelling.


Reading
Comprehension:  Indicates understanding of an age-appropriate, skill-appropriate text.

Application of strategies: Uses a variety of strategies to understand new vocabulary.

Pronunciation, reading out loud:  This is not exactly a vital communicative skill, but we seem to do a fair amount of this in English, so it bears some examination.  Sounds that come out of reader's mouth accurately reflect the letters written on a page.

Okay, getting sleepy.  More soon.

It's all about the students

This blog post is directed at my students, but it's part of a broader conversation that all of us should spend a lot of time on. It's a continuation of some conversations we've had about school rules, why we have specific school rules, and how, when, and why to work to change them. Students, this post turned out a lot longer than I meant. If you want to skip the essay and just leave your thoughts about our school's rules, policies, and expectations, just go straight to the comments. Please remember to be respectful; I don't want to have to delete comments for inappropriate language. (Imagine you're, maybe not in school, but at least in the parking lot outside with our principal standing nearby.)

Our school board sets the school rules; these are the things that are included in your planners that we go over at the beginning of each school year, and that the school-based adults should be reinforcing all year long. This includes the school cell-phone policy (you don't have one on school; if a teacher needs you to have one for a project, give it to that teacher before school starts and pick it up after school ends), the dress code (nothing distracting; no sleeveless shirts for men, no shoulder straps thinner than 3 inches for women, no shorts or skirts that come up higher than the fingers), the tardy policy, the graduation requirements, etc. The school board consists of people who have a stake in the performance of the school. In our case, it's mostly your parents, but it can also include local business officials, education professionals (usually ones who don't work for the school), and others. Their motivation in setting the rules is to keep you safe in school, and to provide you with the best education possible. They usually work with the schools' administration to make the rules.

We also have a set of school behavior expectations--Be Safe, Be Respectful, Be Responsible. (If you poke around in the archives, you'll find out more about how these came to be than you ever wanted to.) The Bobcat Code is another way of repeating the same basic ideals. Every community has rules about appropriate behavior, and these expectations are intended to tell us all what those are for our community. It's not just to tell students how to behave. It's also to tell teachers and staff how to behave, what to celebrate, who our good citizens are, things like that.

Each teacher has their own set of guidelines, too: rules, behavior expectations, and classroom procedures. The purpose of these guidelines is to codify how teachers and students interact. You can tell a lot about a teacher by their classroom guidelines.

All of these different levels of "rules" and "expectations" have one objective: to make school the best learning environment for you possible. In order for that to be true, the following things have to happen:

1. The rules have to be directed towards improving your learning experience. (That's why we don't have a "Buy American" clause in the policies--it's got nothing to do with your learning.)
2. You, the student, as well as we, the teachers, have to know what the rules are, what they're for, and what the consequences of following and not following them will be.
3. The staff has to apply those rules consistently, re-teach them regularly, and be prepared to explain (in an appropriate time and place) what the educational value of a rule is.

Changing rules isn't easy, especially at the "school-board" level. I think the best way to do that is to work through the student senate, or failing that, through the administration. The school-wide behavior expectations are a little more flexible. Talk to me or send me an e-mail for more information about changing those. At the classroom level, the teacher has a fair amount of discretion with her own expectations. She still has to enforce school rules and support school-wide behavior expectations, but "good citizenship" is a little bit different in each class, for each teacher. If you think a teacher has expectations that are detrimental to your learning, talk to her. There are ways of getting REALLY harmful classroom policies rescinded, but we all want you to be in the best learning environment possible. Try talking to us first.

In any case, with any rules change, be prepared to justify how the change will help your education. Once, I asked students what they thought about school policies. One student responded, "There should be a boxing ring where students who aren't getting along can beat each other up." We asked how it would help their education to get into fights. The response: "It wouldn't. But it would be fun." Whether it would be fun or not, it would be at the expense of the safety of the students, it would take away from learning, and it wouldn't work as well as more productive, non-violent means of problem-solving. So that's an example of a bad policy change.

SO....after all that, what do you think about our school policy? What works, what doesn't? What could work better?

Traits of great teachers

One of the "Try This" points of Chapter 3 of Jackson's book is (paraphrased): Make a list of the 10 most important attributes of great teachers. Cut that down until you've only got 2, the 2 most important traits of great teachers.

Here's what I came up with, in the order they occurred to me:

• A passion for the subject matter
• A passion for teaching
• Love for your students
• Communication
• Organization
• Planning and following plans
• Teamwork
• Intelligence
• Presence of mind in the classroom
• Sense of self-improvement

The second list looked like this:

• Passion for teaching
• Love for students
• Communication
• Teamwork
• Sense of self-improvement

The final list boiled down to:

• Passion for teaching
• Love for students

I did this list yesterday over coffee. These all seem a little generic; important, yes, but important in the way that "optimism" would be important. If I were to do this list this morning, I'm not sure it would look the same.

How about it? What do you think are the most important qualities of a great teacher?