Minimum page requirements

I assign minimum page requirements to stick it to my "do-as-little-work-as-possible" students.  They get back at me by making me read what they write.

No, really, though.  My students always want to know how little they can get away with doing.  (I say "my" as if it's unique to me.  Everybody's students want that.)  In most of my formal writing assignments, I tell them a minimum of 3 pages.  I specify margins, acceptable font sizes, spacing requirements, everything.  That's what my high school English teachers mostly did; that's what I do.  I tell them that when they get to be crack journalism students, they will be able to write comprehensively about a topic in fewer pages, but for now, just do it.

Students go to extraordinary lengths to hit the page requirement, without actually doing any more writing.  It's amazing.  Instead of a punchy conclusion, the last line of the paper is occasionally a drawn-out, run-on monstrosity with more clauses than a sack full of catses.  (I've been waiting years to write that joke.)  I imagine that that's why the model shifted to the introduction--3-body-paragraph--conclusion model; that way nobody has to care what the page requirement is.  (Weirdly, though, everyone still does.  Evidently, this includes the people who assess the ACT writing section.)

Once I get an efficient system for turning papers in digitally (Google Docs, Moodle, I'm looking in your direction), I can use a word count system as a way of judging minimum lengths.  But the point is that I hate that kind of nonsense.  It's stupid game-of-school stuff.  There's nothing magic about three pieces of paper with ink on them, especially if the third one has exactly seven words printed on it; there's nothing magic about 1500 words, especially if 400 of them are "very".  It's just that most students stop thinking far too soon without some kind of minimum requirement.  The minimum requirement doesn't seem to be any help, either.

Maybe in the future, when I get better at teaching and grading by rubrics, I'll be able to show students that a minimally good paper will probably take up 3 or more pages, but that I'm not grading by weight.  In the meantime, I have 35 pounds of papers to grade.

Readers:  How do you ensure that your students put an adequate amount of thinking into your writing assignments?  I'm talking Tier-I, fully functional, basically good high school writers.  Everybody knows that some students will never do that, and some will only do it when people sit next to them and say, "Get back to work" every 15 seconds.  I don't mean them.

Workflow management

1.)  Establish a learning goal.  Have a mechanism for communicating the learning goal.

2.)  Develop learning activities.  Write rationales, which include whether the students will be learning procedural or declarative knowledge, and whether or not the activity is intended as a formative assessment.  Communicate the activity's objective, necessary materials, procedure, parameters for expected final product, and, if necessary, grading rubric. 

3.) Have a system for communicating the results of the activity.  Provide feedback on both the results and the process of the activity.  If it's an assessment, have a method for recording the results.

4.)  Hand back student work.  It does nobody any good sitting in the bottom of your briefcase.

You have 23 hours.  Go.

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.