Become a more confident language teacher.
If you are already feeling confident about your language instruction (the why, what, and how of Comprehension-based teaching), but not so sure about assessment, then we have just the thing you need. Assessment for Acquisition Boot Camp, starting soon! ASSESSMENT FOR ACQUISITION BOOT CAMP (A-ABC) is a two-week, self-directed learning experience designed to introduce you to…
Read MoreThe outcome of an assessment is never entirely dependent on student competency. There are a bazillion factors that influence student performance on an exam, and truly very few of them give us information about how well the student knows the material. With regard to assessment, it is our responsibility as teachers to limit the influence of those…
Read MoreLearning the difference between Formative and Summative Assessment has been an important part in my journey to rethinking how to assess and grade students. What is Formative Assessment? Formative Assessment is assessment that happens during a learning period. Formative assessments are like progress checks, and they are intended for the teacher to gather information about…
Read MoreAlong with the holidays come something else that all teachers and students anticipate…end-of-semester assessments!!! While midterms and finals are often viewed as burdensome and intimidating–both for the students that take them and the teachers that create, administer, and grade them–they certainly do not have to be. What should semester exams in language classes look like? Let me…
Read MoreSo #langchat tonight was crazy. We celebrated “Throwback Thursday” by using the old “free-for-all” format in which a topic is given at the beginning, but the conversation is not moderated. #langchat has grown significantly, and while I prefer the free-for-all format to the moderator Q – participant A format, it was clear tonight that there…
Read MoreIn a Comprehensible Input classroom that uses Standards Based Assessment, we must format our question-based activities differently based on whether our goal is to provide further repetitions of the text and the structures that it contains (a ‘reading activity’) or to assess whether or not a student comprehended the text. If the goal is to provide…
Read MoreOpen House is tonight, and I’m feeling the pressure to have grades for my students’ parents to see. My first year kids only have one grade in the books so far, so I gave them a listening assessment today so that they could have a second one. But as I’m sitting here looking at them,…
Read MoreI was thinking this morning about how challenging it really is to design accurate assessments. There are so many variables that affect a student’s performance on any given assessment that it is really quite difficult to control all but the one that you wish to assess. Because I use Standards Based Grading (since it gives…
Read MoreMy Cooperative Learning class had an awesome all-day session with Laura Terrill yesterday. It was a bit overwhelming in that she touched on so many different topics–assessment, cooperative learning, course structure, social emotional learning…it was a lot to take in. I was pleasantly surprised because she is not “officially” a CI/TPRS teacher, but almost everything that…
Read MoreI administer four kinds of summative assessments to my students: Reading comprehension assessments Listening comprehension assessments Presentational writing assessments Presentational speaking assessments (Read here about why I don’t administer summative Interpersonal assessments.) Each quarter, I try to get three or four grades in the book for each of the first three assessment categories. I adopted…
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