assessment
May 1, 2013
Last year I had one of those ideas that was a game changer for me. I completely abandoned any type of testing a few years ago, but I was still trying to control an awful lot of my assessments. But student choice was working so well in other areas that I decided to extend it […]
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April 13, 2013
This post is a comment that will be published in an upcoming article on 21st century skills and assessment in The Language Educator, the bimonthly publication of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Multiple choice was the death of critical thinking. Multiple choice questions train students to look at problems in one […]
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April 2, 2013
Reporting like kindergarten
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My daughter is in preschool and actually takes tests and gets a report card. Her tests consist of her teacher asking her to cut or draw something or identify letters or colors. When I get her “report card” it tells me whether she is satisfactorily completing a series of developmental and cognitive tasks like “counts […]
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March 15, 2013
This is the fourth set of tips to avoid burning out in communicative teaching. Check out “Burning out or burning bright?,” “More tips on avoiding burnout,” and “Still more tips on avoiding burnout” for more help on how to stay sane and effective at the same time. Organize your bookmarks. A few weeks ago our […]
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February 5, 2013
More than two years ago, I wrote a popular post about one of the activities my students do instead of homework, free-topic blogging. In the past month I’ve received a flurry of requests for information on how I grade student blogs, specifically what rubric I use to grade them. Clearly, the idea continues to gain […]
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January 30, 2013
Spot-checking conversations
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In order to learn how to converse with someone, students need to hear conversations, plan conversations, and participate in conversations. So, if we’re giving students a lot of opportunities for interpersonal communication in class, which we should, how do we grade these conversations? Don’t grade. My first bit of advice is to resist the temptation […]
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January 21, 2013
Paragraph form
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The rubric I use to score all performance assessments (which I almost completely stole from colleagues) has an entire section called “function/structure” that I use to identify how proficiently students communicate in “paragraph length.” Indeed, the AP rubric (from 2007, which will be changing for 2014) talks about “paragraphing,” and for speaking uses words like […]
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January 8, 2013
More choice every day
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One of my most popular posts ever – and most popular conference topics – is about giving students choice in their homework assignments. After a while I thought, well, if giving students more choice in homework is so motivating, why not in other assessments? Why not in their final exam? And so I moved my […]
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September 23, 2012
More student choice in homework
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Are you using or considering using the weekly student choice homework idea? Check out the 35 awesome new options suggested by attendees at my recent session The Choice is Theirs at the fall conference of the Kentucky World Language Association. Have students talk to Siri or make travel reservations online (up to the payment part, […]
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September 22, 2012
Here is the Prezi for my presentation about student choice in homework and assessment for the Kentucky World Language Association’s Fall 2012 conference. For more information, see the original post It’s time for them to use their time, as well as Design your own final exam and the Google doc of my class’s weekly activity […]
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September 17, 2012
At the beginning of the year I was curious what problems or dilemmas people were facing this year. @lintperez commented her current challenge is “trying to get ready for standards-based grading and everything that comes with it!” What standard are you using for your lesson planning and assessment? Here are some “standards” I have used […]
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March 19, 2012
Design your own final exam
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This year as I contemplated my final exam for Spanish 3, I didn’t want to do what they did last year, because I like the PhotoPeach reflection much better as a relaxing ending to AP Spanish. Since my most popular blog post ever is about student choice in homework, I thought, why not the final exam […]
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