Middle school Spanish grades: Big picture musings and small scale plans

It's August! Not only that... it's the end of August! Teacher week starts tomorrow. I meant to post more during the summer. I have been doing a lot of planning and reflection this summer, but none of that translated into blogging. We've also been moving into our brand new building, which is very exciting (and very time-consuming!)

I've been meeting with the middle school team this summer to plan for the year. We have several new teachers on the team, a brand new building, and a lot of new changes to plan for. We've been talking about grades, and I've been trying to figure out how to align our school-wide policies with my Spanish class policies.

My big-picture grading philosophy can be narrowed down to the following:

Grades should show students, teachers, and parents what students have learned and what they need help on.

That's it! Despite our educational system today which is very focused on numbers and scores, I don't believe students should be narrowed down to static numbers. My teaching shouldn't be narrowed down to numbers. And yet so much of my time is spent on numbers. During those marathons of final grades, I lose myself as a teacher and even as a human, and become GradeBot - typing numbers into little boxes. I want to make sure those numbers are at least meaningful.

GradeBot is usually fueled by coffee. So much coffee.

Here are a few of the big-picture grading questions I've been asking myself:

• How can I make sure my grades allow for and show growth across all language levels in my classes? My classes include a wide range of students - bilingual students who are also biliterate, native speakers with little exposure to the written word, students from immersion schools, students who I had last year, students who are brand new to Spanish, students who are pulled from half or all of my classes due to IEPs, and everything in between. I want my students to grow from wherever they are at, and I want my grades to reflect that. 
• How can I make sure my grades reflect what students know and can do in Spanish, not just completion and effort? Participation, effort, and work completion are all very important in language learning. I think it's important that students are rewarded for hard work. However, when students earn points based just on whether they've attempted, it doesn't give anyone (teachers, students, or parents) a very clear idea of exactly what skills they have mastered. Last year I was doing a lot of research and thinking about Standards Based Grading. I think it's important for grades to show what students can do in Spanish, and SBG seems like a logical way to do that. I also would love to see a shift away from letter grades and percentages to grades that show how well students have mastered specific objectives. (Our elementary grades use the Common Core 1-4 grading scale, for instance.) However, as a team we aren't quite ready to make that jump, at least not this year among all the other big-picture changes that are happening. So in middle school, we'll be using a more traditional point system again.
• How do I make sure assignments are meaningful and not just empty points? Homework in particular is tricky in this sense. I want students to practice outside the classroom, but it's hard to regulate that. If homework or classwork is not meaningful, only the students motivated by those points will do it - and might not be learning much from it anyway.
• How can I make sure grades are easily understand by both students and parents? At the end of last school year a disappointed parent was unhappy that her daughter did not get perfect grades in Spanish. She commented that she thought I must be giving the good grades to "all the Hispanic kids." I'm trying to use my gut-punch feeling as impetus - I want to have a very clear vision and justification for my grading system, that I can share with parents and students. (In reality, as a general group my native speakers had a wildly varying range of grades.)
• How do I best use my grading time? I'll be teaching eleven different classes this year, across grades 3 through 8. We've increased Spanish time in all grades - which is wonderful! - but that means that my schedule is pretty packed. I need to use my grading time wisely. I don't need to grade every single thing my students do. How do I plan out exactly what I will be grading in a smart way that lets us all (teacher, parents, students) know what students can do?
• How do I teach from a textbook in a meaningful way? This is a little bigger than just a grading question. This year is the first year I will be teaching with a textbook in middle school. We just got Avancemos (Level 1) for middle schoolers. I'm excited about the structure and resources it offers - after seven years of making everything from scratch, from curriculum maps to daily lessons to assessments, K-12! However, I want to use the textbook as a tool, not as a crutch.

As I've been pondering these things, I've had some great insight from other language teachers:

• Creative Language Class - How many grades?
• Musicuentos - Meaningful homework incorporating student choice

So how is this going to play out this year?

In middle school, we've agreed on three weighted grade categories:

• Homework/Classwork (30%)
• Assessments (20%)
• Projects (50%)

For me, this is what that will look like in my middle school grade book:

• Homework/Classwork: Participation is so important in a language class - and a tricky thing to keep track of! This year I'm trying to focus my participation grades in two ways:
• Objective Stamp sheet: For each unit I'll have a stamp sheet (again, thanks to the Creative Language Class.) Here's the one I've created for Lección Preliminar in Avancemos. I'll collect it at the end of the unit - I'm not sure yet how long that will take, since the curriculum is new to me.
• Weekly Homework: Inspired by the choice-driven homework at Musicuentos, students will choose from list of options for homework. Here's what that list of options looks like currently.  Edit: Here's how our homework has evolved!
• Assessments: I like that Avancemos has a variety of differentiated assessments for their units. I'm not sure how many of these I'll actually have - I'm still waiting on the curriculum materials. I like that this is only 20% of the grade - I prefer to see what students can do through projects, but it's nice to be able to hone in on specific skills too. This is a good category for students and parents to see a breakdown of specific skills.
• Projects:We are a project based school, though this is definitely an area of growth, especially in middle school. We are still trying to figure out how to create meaningful cross-curricular projects, and I think we'll be spending a lot of our professional development time on this. (We have half days every Wednesday to leave PD time in the afternoon.) I have ideas that I'm excited about, but I'm not sure how much planning time I'll get with other teachers this year. Within middle school Spanish classes, however, I will have a variety of projects. Because this is 50% of their grade, a lot of things will fit under this umbrella:
• Planning activities
• Project check ins (to check student progress throughout the project)
• Final project grades (with a rubric connecting the project to our objectives)
• Presentations
• Reflections

Now... how to put this into a syllabus in a condensed way...

Stress-free assessments: Two strategies

I'm not a fan of quizzes and tests. They are boring to create, boring to take, boring to grade, and often not an ideal way to assess students' language skills. In the current American educational climate, standardized tests are very much in the spotlight. They are the measuring stick used to measure students, teachers, lessons, and schools.

I have plenty of opinions about high-stakes standardized tests... but those are rants for another time. 

Among all these tests, I try my best to teach and assess through projects and communicative practice. I do use vocabulary quizzes on occasion to check student mastery of the words we have been studying. I try to make them quick, focused, and never worth more points than communicate and project-based assessments. At the very least quizzes are an opportunity to teach kids how to take assessments, especially when it comes to managing test-taking anxiety.

I always introduce the first quiz with a short cultural snapshot. I ask kids about good-luck tricks, and show them some pictures from Salamanca, Spain.

At the Universidad de Salamanca, one of the oldest in Europe, students have a tradition of searching for la rana hidden somewhere in the intricate decorations on this building. Finding the frog is supposed to bring good luck on exams and in life. I let my students give it a try - with a slightly zoomed in picture, because trying to find it on a small version projected on a screen is even harder than in real life!

Can you find it?

Una pista: La rana está en una calavera.

We talk briefly about good luck and whether it exists, and I remind them that being relaxed and calm before a test is important - maybe even just as important as preparing and studying beforehand. We share tips and ideas for how to reduce anxiety before testing.

Any cultural lessons about good luck charms are a good opportunity for addressing anxiety with students of any age (for example, my favorite lesson on worry dolls, or the chanchitos in Chile.) Superstitions aside, feeling calmer and more confident is always beneficial.

Another strategy I've used for years is to give students something to color after they finish. My quizzes are usually only one page, so I always put something on the back. (Middle school kids sometimes love coloring even more than the little ones.) At first I did this to reduce boredom, not anxiety, but as it turns out, there has been some research on using mandalas to reduce testing anxiety.

I usually allow students to choose an image from the stack of tests, which also helps randomize my selection of quizzes a little more. I use mandalas, or sometimes images from this book of Mexican Folk Art.

(This is also something colorful to display at home, if the grade itself isn't quite fridge-worthy.)

Gracias a mis alumnos por sus colores.

Any other ideas to combat test anxiety?