#12 - Element 9: Proficiency-Oriented Assessments | 10 Elements of Proficiency-Oriented World Language Instruction

Hey hey hey, it's assessment day! This could be a giant deep dive. 
Today, we're focusing on how to switch mindsets from our assessments being an occasional to a REGULAR and CRUCIAL piece of the proficiency-oriented classroom. 
They help your students as much as they help inform you!

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Transcript

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What's up Kelo k E. Salut, world language teachers. Welcome to the practical proficiency podcast where we make the transition to proficiency oriented instruction in your world language class in a way that works for you, your unique context and teaching style, and doesn't sacrifice your well being along the way. I'm your host, Devin Gunning, the teacher author, conference host, curriculum creator and consultant behind La Libre language learning. This podcast is for the creative world language teacher like you, who's ready to ditch the overwhelming pressure of switching to acquisition driven instruction and CI overnight, you're ready to discover how using more target language in class can actually bring you and your students more joy. Instead of adding to your plate with practical, authentic and down to earth strategies that don't require reinventing the wheel or more training, we'll work together towards the magic of a community target language rich classroom rooted in the power of community and comprehensible input. Let's go. It's assessment day. Let's get right into it, y'all. Today we are talking about element number nine of the ten elements of world language proficiency instruction. When you are in an acquisition focused environment, this element is a crucial piece to success in your classroom because it's not only how you are going to measure the progress of your students, but also how your students see their progress. They need tangible expressions of how they are doing in your classroom. So this is proficiency oriented assessment. What this looks like in a proficiency oriented environment is that you assess at regular intervals in all modes of communication. So interpretive reading gets some attention, interpersonal communication gets some attention. Interpretive listening, presentational writing, and presentational speaking all get a nice turn on the wheel of the regular scheduled assessments that you have to collect data and information about your students throughout the year or the semester that you have them. Now, this is an important one to talk about, and for real, we could do an entire deep dive on all the different ways that you could assess. And let's do that for another topic or another episode for sure. For today's purpose, though, let's make sure that we're looking at assessment with the right frame of mind, because I think that we can, we can tweak this really quickly and easily in your class, practical style with just a quick mindset shift and a quick gut check. Here's the gut check. How many assessments do you have scheduled right now? How many do you have your gradebook currently? And does that reflect the actual amount of time that students have been in your class? What is the ratio of class time, seat time to assessments and is that reflected in your gradebook? Assessments are really important for students, and they're really important for you. And the best thing that you can do is, of course, to have high quality assessments that match your goals in your classroom and that are aligned with a proficiency oriented curriculum. But at the end of the day, what I find working with hundreds of teachers and districts is that world language teachers, because we don't have a standardized assessment, and because so often we work in a little bubble, we work on our own. A lot of the times, it's pretty rare that you find a large world language department. So a lot of the times, people are, a creating their own assessments, and b, those assessments are kind of sporadic, like they're not planned out in specific intervals like they would be if you were any other subject matter. And don't get me wrong, over assessing is its own detriment. However, students need to know how they're doing, and you need to know how they're doing. So here's how you can tell if you're doing enough assessments or if you, like, hit the golden nugget, the sweet spot with assessments. Could you tell me, like, off the top of your head, how well your students have mastered a certain skill, a certain communicative ability in your classroom right now? Like, if I ask them, let's say if you're in a level two italian class, and I want to know. Okay, well, in level two, one of the things that's really important to be working on in the level two classroom is clear, confident, fluent expressions of opinions and reacting to other people's opinions. So, how well can all of your students do that? If you have a really clear answer for me, like, oh, yeah, all of my students can do that, or I have no idea whether they can do that. And, of course, this would be like, imagine that you've already taught this, right? Like, you've practiced this a lot. Do they. Can you give me some tangible proof that they can or cannot function in this communicative skill? That they can talk? Like, it's got to be some sort of familiar topic. Like, it can be anything too. Like, this is another big misconception about proficiency oriented curriculum is that, like, you have a lot of options when it comes to the. The actual content that you could talk about. Like, it doesn't really matter if you want to talk about opinions with food or opinions with sports or opinions with hobbies, well, it's also sports, but if you want to talk about opinions with their school subjects, you know, but all of those things have in common that they're daily life, like, easy things for students to relate to in their own close knit world, you know? So that's how you know that we're in the novice sphere. For my actual people or for my CEFR people in the a one sphere, they're talking about their everyday, very familiar. I interact with this. This object or this idea every single day. So. And it's usually talking about, like, my own feelings and opinions about that object every day. So whether you can choose any of those categories, let's say that we're talking about, let's choose hobbies. So that's an easy one for opinions. Like, oh, I love riding bikes. But if you were talking to me like, I freaking hate bikes. I absolutely hate bikes. I hate bikes so much. It probably is because I'm so short, so I'm standing pretty at a nice five one. So I really don't like bikes because I have yet to find a bike where I can actually sit comfortably on it. Like, it is so uncomfortable for me, and I would much rather run anywhere. Anything that is sturdy on my own two legs, I'm in for it. So, if you asked me to talk about in italian, hey, do you like riding bikes? I would say, no, I hate it. And you would want somebody else in your classroom to be able to say, whoa, that's crazy. Whoa, that's intense. Why do you hate it? That's how you know they're level two. If they can hold that whole conversation right there. Very simple language, right? Do you like bikes? Yes or no? And you can say something like, I hate it or I love it, or it's okay, and then have somebody react, yeah, cool. Okay, me too. Or, whoa, why? And try and find out more. That's how you know it's level two versus, like, a level one where they might just be able to say, like, oh, I like it, or, no, I don't like it. This gives me a whole idea of how we should talk about, like, how do you know what level your students are at? I got you. Well, we can definitely do more about that, too. Let me know. send me a DM on instagram. I libre language learning if you want to do a podcast episode about levels, because we can. Oh, that is a whole. That is my favorite area of focus. But you use assessments in order to tell these things. Now, assessments also don't need to be fully fleshed out, formative paper and pencil things or, you know, Google forms type things. They can also be you going around your classroom. This is something I used to do often when I was still in the classroom. Is going around to each student with a clipboard and just checking off yes or no with like, a simple can do statement. I can react to somebody's opinions about their hobbies. Check. Yes, yes. But with some hesitations, like it's a middle ground or no, I can't do that yet. I would do that for every student with a certain skill that I was looking for, and that would. Then you'd have some paperwork, some data to be able to look at. Like, okay, I've got like half the classes there, but I need to work on the skill a little bit more. So we get to like 75%. That's what I'm talking about with assessment. So you need to assess at regular intervals so that you know where your students are at. If. And talking about, like, more formal assessments, that would be. That would be a formative assessment. Let's talk about assumative assessment. My recommendation and the current recommendation of actful at the point of this recording would be a IPA style. I do personally love ipas. This is an integrated performance assessment. And I have a full blog post that breaks down all of this as well for what an IPA is. But an integrated performance assessment does assess all three of those modes. interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational. It's wonzaful. It's also got authentic text brewed in the mix, but they're very time consuming to create, which is a huge issue with ipas. So if they're not your jam, anything that does at least get to a proficiency oriented communicative goal, that's fine. Like, whatever, whatever you got that's working for you is wonderful, but it needs to be in context, using proficiency skills to accomplish a task. Also make sure that you're routinely assessing, you're routinely checking in with students and then putting those things in the gradebook. The golden rule is, and, you know, change this up depending on how, how much seat time you have with students. The golden rule for a block schedule for my middle school and high school folks is that if you're seeing your students for 70 to 90 minutes, for example, every day, then you should be giving them assessment at least once a week, at least. Like, that's the minimum. And that doesn't need to be a big assessment every time. You could do like a cheeky little speaking quiz or like a little reading quiz every now and then, but that's weekly. If you see your students every day for 40 minutes every two weeks at the very bare minimum. But I would like to see it a little bit more often, if possible. And if you see your students, you know, twice a week, that gets tough. That gets really, really tough. because the length of time that goes between each class is, you know, that makes it hard to assess, for sure. I see you on that. That guideline. I would say check in with your. With your department, with your district, and with other people in your school and see what they're doing. Doing. But my gut instinct would be, every three weeks, do at least a quiz, and every six weeks to nine weeks, like what works for y'all and your units, then you should be doing a larger assessment at that point. I would also say as well, that an important facet of this is that you're routinely evaluating your assessments, taking some time to craft excellent ones, because your curriculum moves from that backward design of the assessment will determine everything that comes after it. So when you have this glorious, all encompassing assessment, the rest of your materials will be lasered in, focused on making sure that your students get great results on that assessment, which means that they get better grades, which is better for everyone. That's the whole point, right? School success. You also need to take time to craft these excellent assessments, and that is a whole thing in itself, because we all know that you don't have enough time to prep right now. So I would say, too, that you are viewing your assessments as very invaluable checkpoints and milestones for your students. Progress like they are informative for you. But not only are they informative for you and your students, progress assessments are essential for consolidation of information for students. You need these milestones to give students a point to. Okay, this is what I've learned so far. It's time to organize, synthesize, and consolidate what I know into a nice, packageable piece of information. It truly helps them to. When they consolidate their learning, they are relearning some concepts, understanding the gaps in information that they currently have, and actively filling those gaps in with whatever review that you are doing. And they are relearning as they are taking the assessment asterisk point here. If the assessment is good, if the assessment is truly working towards a communicative task, all this stuff is kind of moot. Point if you're working solely towards things that they could have just memorized. so, if your test is based off of things, let's put it this way. This is an easy way to tell if your. If your test is actually helping your students acquire more language and learn more in your class. You know, we know the word learning is a little bit different for world language teachers, but you'll know that your test is actually helping your students. If this is a test that your students can't really study for, if your students could theoretically learn the material without you, if they have good study skills just by going home and taking those, that vocabulary list home and that conjugation chart home with them, if they studied on their own at home and they could get a 100 on the assessment that you're giving them, then it's not doing anything for them for the acquisition of language, except for helping to add a couple new words to their lexicon. That's wonderful. but this is not helping them to acquire any new communicative skills. So all of that stuff about assessment helping them to grow their brains, to expand all of their neural pathways and networks and make that, all of those, all of those neural pathways and connections stronger between communicative skills and, you know, to repatch all that myelin on top of their neural networks and everything that does not apply with those types of simple memorization skills tests. So, routinely evaluate your assessments. Take time if you have to, you know, make those, those guillotine chop feeling cuts in your priority list, the assessments always stay on there. They are always top priority because they make such a huge impact for your students on their grades, which is really important to both them and you, as well as their actual, like, the quality of your class. So proficiency oriented assessment is a huge piece of this. Thank you so much for being here, and I'm glad that we could talk more about assessment. I love talking about high quality assessments that actually move your students forward instead of just, like, checking off and putting grades in your gradebook, as well as the frequency of assessments. This is a big point for world language teachers. So, in summation, here's what we talked about today. First of all, you should be assessing it regular modes, and it should be in all the different communicative modes. It should also be focused around a communicative skill. As often as you can, you know that your test is not really serving you well, formative or summative or even just little checks for understanding and clarification that you're doing around the room. If simple memorization skills are all you're looking for, that's not what we do in a world language classroom. So something important to keep in mind, too, is that IPAs are highly recommended at this point, but they do come with a with a time barrier. So, you know, do what works for you. Also, you should be routinely assessing both smart small and large assessments, and that assessments do help to consolidate your students knowledge and acquisition of language so far. That's why they're such invaluable checkpoints and data points for you. That's assessment, y'all. And with that, we are leading into the last element. Episode. I'm so excited to get to the end of the series with you. We will have, by this point, a complete picture of a world language classroom that is moving towards acquisition. So exciting. All right, I will catch you in the next episode. Thank you so much for being here. Share this with a friend who also teaches world language if it helped you, and get yourself some good karma. Thank you again for being here. I'll see you in the next episode. Ciao for now.