assessment
May 14, 2024
Because I write about good ideas on the internet, it’s easy to assume I’m full of good ideas (lie: most of them I stole from someone else). Let’s be open about some of the bad ones. I’ll go first. It’s nearly the end of the school year and as the good proficiency-focused language teachers we […]
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September 23, 2019
One thing at a time: Step Three
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So you want to become a better language teacher, and that’s awesome! You’ve laid a good foundation in getting to know some sound research principles involving how people acquire and learn languages thanks to Steve Smith. You’ve figured out what to expect kids to build as they continue on their journey to being proficient in […]
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May 21, 2019
You teach, you input, you provide experiences, you assess, you re-assess, you plan and prepare and teach again. At some point, I think we all wonder deep down – what if someone else were assessing them? What would the results be? Not here to #showyoumine I’m adamantly against such middle school showmanship reflected in tactics […]
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September 5, 2017
My husband bought me emoji stamps for my birthday. Really, he did, because I’d put them on my Amazon wish list. Why? Because a teacher needs emoji stamps, of course! Actually, this purchase stems directly from me being a homeschooling parent. Checking my daughter’s math is on my list of favorite things to do right […]
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July 20, 2016
When I graduated from my master’s program in Linguistics with an emphasis on Second Language Acquisition, I suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding. I thought that there was a consensus on the general principles guiding how language acquisition works, what that means the second time around, and what that understanding ought to mean for the classroom […]
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June 13, 2016
Here’s a question for your summer: Can you dare to go YONG? At the end of the 2013-2014 school year, I was finishing a seven-year stint at a particular school. In a nutshell, the school had a new administrator that year and had swung from what some might call a little too much chaotic familiarity […]
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December 31, 2015
My old rubric served me well for four years, but it was time for a change. A clean slate, a lot of websites, a lot of feedback, and a lot of collaborative brainstorming later, I finally had something I was willing to put out and test out. Check the post below – the links go […]
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December 19, 2015
The third and fourth most popular posts of 2015 were very close, but with the benefit of a few extra months the post on task completion on rubrics barely edged out the #4 post to take the bronze medal. I’m so glad I wondered about task completion and its importance in life and in rubrics […]
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December 17, 2015
December found us doing our first formal assessment of the semester. That is my reality this year, and I love it. We go at our own pace and make our own rules and I don’t see my students enough to warrant spending our precious class time on assessment instead of engaging ourselves with the language. […]
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October 15, 2015
Disclaimer: No red pens were harmed in the making of this episode. Here we confront a continual dilemma in language teaching. As language teachers who are good at the languages we teach, every error grates on our ears and eyes. We want to correct. We want to cross out the masculine ending and write the […]
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August 24, 2015
This might be my most important resource release this year. First, you can read here about all the things that frustrated me about that snazzy 2011 rubric that I used to use (and that got downloaded from this site a lot). Some of them probably frustrated those of you who used it, too. So I decided to […]
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August 13, 2015
What would homework choice look like for elementary students? I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me to ask this question earlier. I knew this year I was going to have a group of students ages 6 to 10 but I thought I’d just give them the same options sheet as my older group. Ha! […]
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