I am a Spanish teacher (while I think that some of these ideas are geared toward other world language teachers) who is constantly working to get assessment right. It’s SO HARD to know what and when to assess… and as I’ve said in my Assess with Finesse session, I think it may be the most stressful part about being an educator. I don’t think there is any one magic button we can press to make it easy, but I wanted to tell you about how I try to make it SUSTAINABLE.

1. Formative Assessments: I used to spend a lot of time grading my formative assessments… that was before I did not achieve National Board Certification in the first round. As I reflected on what had gone wrong, it really settled in for me that formative assessments reflect student progress, but they serve me best when I use them to guide my planning for the rest of the unit. Rather than give a 5 question follow up about a reading as a formative assessment and then put 4/5, 3/5, 5/5 in the gradebook, I have students submit their answers, we go over the correct answers together as a class (explaining why the answers are correct) and then I give all students a completion grade of 5. Of course, if someone has chosen to sleep rather than participate, that is a discipline issue and it lands them a 0/5 until they choose to come in and do the work on their own time.

I have THREE different lives I am balancing… full time teacher, full time wife-mom-dog mom, and full time entrepreneur at Somewhere to Share. I need my grading life to stay in perspective. What helps my students more: turning in a paper and getting 3/5 or turning it in or going over the answers for one more repetition of the content? For me, it’s the latter!

2. Staggering: If I am having the best luck ever, my assessments for levels 2, 3, and 4 end up separated by a week so that I don’t have 150 papers coming in within 5 days… on my bad luck weeks, the plans end about the same time in all three classes and I have to assess them in a short time period. Even in the short time period, I try to make sure that my assessments are not on the same day in different levels. Our last unit across the three levels I teach ended at roughly the same time. On Friday, I did the writing assessment with level 2. I graded these on my Friday planning period.

Then on Monday, they did Discussion Thursday (I know, the name doesn’t seem like it works when you do it on a Monday) as their speaking assessment (check out a clip here). That is an assignment that grades itself, so nothing to take home. Meanwhile, on Monday, Spanish 4 wrote and Spanish 3 reviewed and did a floor venn diagram. I was able to grade the first section of Spanish 4 tests during my plan and the second section during my 8th hour’s brainstorm time on the venn diagrams! Click here to grab the Meredith White idea that made my grading time drop to nearly NOTHING! Having students select the type of feedback they want keeps my heart from breaking as I watch a test that I spent 5 minutes correcting end up straight in the recycle bin.

On Tuesday, Spanish 2 (1 section) moved on to their next unit while Spanish 4 (2 sections) did a Discussion Thursday (I know, I know), and Spanish 3 (I teach 3 sections so this is my biggest group) did their writing. It was a little trickier to get them all graded because I have one before my plan (I did get those all graded on my planning period) and then two after. I was able to grade the earlier afternoon class while the later afternoon wrote. Since I wouldn’t see them until the next afternoon, I held those over to grade on my plan and didn’t bring them home. YES, grading took up my plan for 3 days, but now I have another 2-3 weeks before that cycle repeats (and this time the unit ends will be staggered by quite a bit).

On Wednesday, Spanish 3 did their speaking (let’s call it what it was… Discussion Wednesday) and the other two groups were already moving on to new units of study. In 4 days, I assessed two skills across six different class groups and brought nothing home! AND… I was still able to give meaningful feedback and see growth!

3. Expectations: This one is pretty specific to World Language teachers in some ways, but maybe you’ll still find a takeaway if you teach a different subject!

Some key data:

If you look at the Year 4 national data from the STAMP exam, you can see that scores in writing and speaking still hover between 4 and 5 (Intermediate Low and Mid) as the average for our upper level students. This is borne out in college programs where, unless they study abroad, many students are unable to break the Intermediate High barrier into Advanced Low. (Please don’t sue me ACTFL)

IF these scores represent the average of our students across the US, then we have to be careful not to expect Advanced level output from students who are still intermediates. That means… mistakes are still ok. Check out ACTFL’s performance toward proficiency descriptors here.

Once we know that students are going to likely top out in the Intermediate level after 4 years (unless they have experience from other places), it makes it easier to accept that “one thing to work on for next time” is a great way to give them feedback! If you’re still not convinced, check out Lyster and Ranta’s feedback study.

Explicit correction yielded zero student repairs!! Imagine how much time we would save if we would work instead toward elicitation: getting them to see a pattern and recognize it so they can correct themselves! Our time is valuable, the research says we are OK to not spend it on things that have low ROI (Return on Investment).

4. Summative: A summative assessment does not have to be horrible. This may sound controversial, but WHAT IF… when we gave a summative assessment, it was not the worst part of the unit for students. What if it left them feeling successful and seeing where they had grown (even if it wasn’t quite as fast as peers)? In my room (remember, I’m a world language teacher), when I assess, I offer things like choice boards, elevator pitches, shark tank style presentations, blog posts, and letters to important people as ways to “show what they know” at the end of the unit. Some students are going to be better at sponging up every single vocabulary word and grammar structures and others are only going to grab onto main ideas, but in a summative assessment that isn’t fill in the blank, the gulf between what they can say and do at “star student” and “struggling student” level closes a little. One student may write their first paragraph of more than 5 sentences and this is a BIG deal for this kid and another may use 30 of our new words and grammar structures in context… both have grown in this unit and I want them to feel like it!

Example choice board:
“I want a C” – Write ten bulleted sentences about the topic we have studied. (Not many choose this one but if it’s all they can do, they’re glad to have a home where they know they won’t fail.)

“I want a B” – I can combine 10-12 sentences into a paragraph that flows together and summarizes what we have learned in the unit.

“I want an A” – I can write a blog post or a letter explaining the content of our unit to a reader.

“I want an A+” – I can write a blog post or a letter comparing the content of our unit with something we did not discuss in class. Ex. Plastic Ocean – Compare with Blackfish documentary.

5. Frequency: You don’t have to assess once a week! You can use formative assessments, classwork, bellringers, and other small point assignments to make sure there are grades in the gradebook and then assess only when students have a solid amount of content exposure. If I teach them some new words on Monday, those may not have really broken through to long term memory by Friday. Assessing in 2-4 week chunks lets them have some time to marinate in the new material before they have to cook on the test!

What are your favorite ways to assess students?

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