assessment
September 27, 2011
Spanish 3 assessment documents
premium
Sometimes I feel like I’m reinventing myself every year. Do you ever look back on something you did and think, “Why on earth did I do it that way? What a bad idea! Here we go again.” I feel like I do that every year! So even though I completely redesigned my Spanish 3 class […]
premium
August 21, 2011
Got the rubric!
premium
**Update August 2015** After four years of scoring assessments using this rubric, I overhauled it to attempt to highlight the areas I loved most and fix the ones that really bothered me (and others). Please see the new post for the new rubric I am using, updating, and working to improve. I’d love your feedback […]
premium
August 18, 2011
At last I’ve turned to working on my own classes (after looking at Spanish 1 all summer for our new teacher) and I’m (once again) re-doing my Spanish 3 units. This year I’m trying to make them more realistic. I’ve been heavily influenced on this by a particular #langchat last year on making assessments authentic. […]
premium
March 31, 2011
If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say this post is about dismantling myths, go back and read this post. Photo by T. Hart Myths 2 & 3:2. Learning about language is enough (Or, “I don’t have to speak the TL in the classroom”). and its cousin 3. Grammatical terms are actually […]
premium
February 11, 2011
There are a lot of problems with current world language teaching in the U.S. I think the biggest problem is that we’re trying to teach it the way we teach everything else, when language used for communication is not learned or stored the way other subjects are, and the answer is to look back at […]
premium
January 27, 2011
Instead of the vocab quiz
premium
@SraSpanglish commented on my post “Kick the vocab quiz“: “I feel like I can’t do this with Spanish I, and it’s hard with Spanish II. Also, what are students graded on instead?” At this point, I only teach very early elementary, who only receive a grade of “excellent/satisfactory/needs improvement” once a quarter, and advanced students. […]
premium
January 25, 2011
Ah, the vocab quiz, I remember them well. I used to have all my students do what I had to do in college- put all the new vocab on spiral-bound 3×5 cards, English on front, Spanish on back. I would drill myself and drill myself for that dreaded weekly (or whenever) vocab quiz, the one […]
premium
January 18, 2011
Earlier this month was the deadline for proposals to be submitted for the 2011 conference of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. I have never been to their conference–indeed, I’ve only ever attended one national conference (TESOL 2007)–but one of my new year’s resolutions was to at least attempt to go, and […]
premium
January 13, 2011
Last year my AP class was a bit happy-go-lucky. They had a sort of attitude that went like this: “Well, I understood that pretty well, that was awesome!” “I didn’t get that at all. Oh well! What’s next?” This year, not so much. This year’s class is more like: “I understood that, cool!” “I didn’t […]
premium
August 7, 2010
About three years ago I finally obeyed the inner voice that was yelling at me that textbooks were terribly unmotivating and out-of-date as soon as they were printed and we closed our textbooks forever and haven’t looked back, in Spanish 1 through 3 anyway (we do use a workbook some in AP to get students […]
premium
July 29, 2010
The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in May passed a new policy statement on the use of the target language in the classroom – 90% or above at all levels. It’s about time that we as language teachers realize that 1) language education in the US doesn’t work because we don’t speak […]
premium
March 9, 2009
Today I gave my 3rd quarter story test in Spanish 3. It’s about a peasant and a princess who get married despite the facts that they just met and her father doesn’t approve. It uses a lot of the vocab we’ve worked on in Spanish 3 this quarter. There’s a mistake on the question part–I […]
premium