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...

Culture in 3 Acts: Rethinking how I teach culture

This past week during our weekly professional development afternoon, a colleague demonstrated Dan Meyer's "3 Act" math tasks, or math stories. These inquiry based, student driven math explorations seem to be a great resource for flipped classroom models and for the kind of authentic tasks and higher level thinking that the Common Core is now requiring. Thanks to the magic of modern technology, math teachers can now find and share their own "3 Act" Math tasks, with links to prompts, standards and suggested questions.

As a Spanish teacher, I immediately began thinking of my culture lessons in 3 Acts. I already try to hook students with a fascinating image or video related to what we are learning about, and I always encourage guesses, questions, and discussions... but then I usually give them the questions that I want them to answer. If those questions were things they were actually interested in, they were driven by curiosity... and if not, they were driven by the grade carrot on a stick, if anything. In re-imagining these inquiries, I was drawn to the idea of having students drive the inquiry themselves.

I would like to adjust my culture lessons and apply some of the ideas behind the 3 Act math tasks:

• Act One: Introduce the central conflict of your story/task clearly, visually, viscerally, using as few words as possible.
• Leave no one out of your first act. It should be comprehensible to all levels. It should, as Dan Meyers says, get all students "right in the curiosity bone."
• Elicit questions from students, rather than handing them a list of questions.

In my colleague's demonstration, she categorized the questions elicited from students (in this case, teachers) by how much interest each question generates. Teachers can also try to pull out questions that fit with  specific objectives or standards. For culture lessons, I might leave it a little more open ended than in a math lesson, since culture standards are so broad. With that list of student-generated questions, there are some options. We could choose one question for students to focus on as a class, assign different questions to differentiated groups, or have students choose from a few selected questions that will address specific objectives.

• Act Two: The protagonist/student overcomes obstacles, looks for resources, and develops new tools.
• What resources do your students need to answer their questions? What tools do they need? What language do they need to answer their questions?

Teachers can try to anticipate student questions and prepare lists of resources (I often try to create differentiated lists of resources for various language levels and learning styles - I have shared some here on this blog.) However, in authentic inquiries, students need to look for information on their own. I might help students come up with authentic (and not-so-authentic) sources of information. We might brainstorm search terms in the target language. I might introduce Act 1 in the classroom, and then set students loose to answer their questions, in the computer lab or at home.

• Act Three: Resolve the conflict and set up a sequel/extension.
• The resolution should be a satisfactory payoff for students. (In Meyer's example task, he highlights the difference between actually seeing the basketball go through the hoop, and reading in the answer key - "The ball goes in.")
• Have students share the answers to their questions, and their process for finding those answers.

Using the  list of student generated questions from Act 1, and further curiosity generated by their investigations, this could easily open up extension activities and "sequels."

Many teachers are used to handing students questions, along with some set tools and formulas to answer those questions. In flipped classrooms and inquiry-based lessons, it is up to the students to select the tools they need to meet their objectives... and when students generate the questions themselves (after being motivated with a fascinating hook) they will be much more eager to find the answers. As a language and culture teacher, I want to develop independent language learners... and students who can independently find new information about other cultures, fueled by genuine curiosity.

I already am scheming up some new culture lessons in this format... I'm guessing my next attempt will be some inquiries about Semana Santa, perhaps starting with this great video. I'd love to hear from others, and perhaps collaborate on a database of resources. (Math teachers aren't the only ones who can collaborate!)