Speaking Assessments

Many very intelligent people have said that it is important to administer a variety of assessment types for each skill set. This will give you a deeper, more meaningful understanding of your students’ proficiency in that skill area. For some speaking assessment ideas, please see this post!

Regardless of which speaking assessment you choose to administer, I have a trick (that I adapted from Laura Terrill!) for grading them with ease. I plopped a bunch of mini-speaking rubrics on a sheet of paper, printed them out, cut them apart, labeled them with students’ names, and sorted them by class. Click here to download the rubrics that I use!

Anytime students are completing a speaking task that I want to count as an assessment, I look at the top card on the stack, find that student, and go eavesdrop (or have them come to me). I mark their performance on the card, move the card to the bottom of the stack, and then find the next student, the one whose card is now at the top of the stack.

Typically, I will only get through 3-6 students per class period–and that’s okay! I pick up where I left off the next time that students are engaged in a speaking task. My goal is to cycle through the stack three times per grading period, so that students have three speaking grades to go in the gradebook. Each time I go through the entire stack once, I enter all the grades from that round in the gradebook (on the same day).