choice
August 18, 2013
Choice in homework, updated
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The homework choice approach is probably my most popular idea ever (it’s a toss-up between that and the YouTube commercials quizzes). Read about the original idea and browse lots of updates using the choice tag. I just updated my list and its format (and stole a name for it from Bethanie Drew @lovemysummer). I used […]
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June 12, 2013
Guest post: Coaching with choice
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This semester I was blessed and honored to teach an amazing group of kids who were coachable. Coming from an athletic background, this concept of being “coachable” is one of the most valuable traits that a coach can have in a player. The coachable player is one who may not have the best skills or natural […]
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May 16, 2013
This post is cross-posted on the new blog for the Teacher Effectiveness in Language Learning (TELL) project, an initiative of Advance Learning. For schools all across the country, the day is rapidly approaching for us to tell our students goodbye. It’s time to go on vacation, to run to the ice cream truck, lather up […]
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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 5, 2013
One of my top two most widely-used ideas ever is abandoning homework in favor of a weekly “fluency” activity involving a whole lot of student choice. [Incidentally, the other is the YouTube commercial cloze quizzes – in 2.5 years about 60 teachers have joined this project.] Basically, the concept is that instead of you assigning students […]
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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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February 1, 2013
If someone asked me what motivated my students the most -to continue learning on their own, to more vocabulary, to greater accuracy- my answer would certainly be music. Just this week one of my Spanish 3 students who is struggling the most with any level of verb accuracy identified forms of conseguir and what they […]
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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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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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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 […]
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