If you have been following the last few posts then you know what I’m up to. This was my (very basic) mini sports unit plans.
Step 1: Listen about Hispanic athletes. (Comprehensible input)
Step 2: Read about Hispanic athletes. (Wikipedia)
Step 3: Talk about their own Hispanic athlete. (Presentations)
What now? Measure for growth!
After presentations, I wanted a TRUE sense of what their abilities were. How well can they communicate about Hispanic athletes? What did they really learn?
So I gave them an unannounced “quiz”. They groaned. I smiled.
This is what I found.
They learned! They picked up vocab I was never going to teach them (bronze medalist?) and learned about a ton of Hispanic athletes! They talked about soccer players, boxers, baseball players both in and out of the US. I love the personality that the third student shows! That scenario got her fired up. She WANTED to show off and she did!
A few kids didn’t meet the goal. They wrote a few words and said they don’t like sports. I gave them a “no measureable effort” for feedback and gave them the option of studying and retaking that little assessment.
My friend Elena taught me that “learning is a process.”
Sometimes its smooth, sometimes its messy. Enjoy the experience!
The last two years I’ve been endeavoring to do the same. Giving them feed back by saying that they are Highly proficient, proficient etc..but I still need to give them a number grade. Is that what you do too?
Yes! It was tricky at first but our district decided on grades for each level. Here’s a post on how we do it! Hope it helps!
http://www.creativelanguageclass.com/idea-85-assigning-a-grade-to-a-proficiency-rubric/
I loved the prompt. 🙂
Me, too!
I love this. This is so much better than giving them a list of sports-related vocab to memorize. Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing!!!!!!
I also love the prompt, and I like the idea of having a oral/speaking assessment before a written assessment or exam. It’s a slightly sneaky way to get students to prepare without calling it “studying”!
I LOVE these posts through your journey with this new mini unit. Thank you so much for sharing your ideas and artifacts of your students’ learning! You should feel awesome about this. I also love how that student put personality into her writing. She did get fired up and got to use real language to express it.
Thanks, Emily!
You’re welcome! I just used your mini unit in my two Spanish 1 classes…I had the same feelings when they presented as you described in the post but I was ready to feel that way and kept thinking about how they aren’t used to presenting.
I just finish looking over their unannounced quiz and although some didn’t meet the goal…many did and they used words like “apodo” and it was awesome to see them use the words they learned (because they wanted to learn them for their presentation) in their writing.
I am hoping that this also helps them see another connection to in class activities and how it will help them meet the “I can” objectives. I saw new words and improved proficiency for the ones that worked on their presentations and contributed to their group presentation…some students didn’t do a lot. I can’t force them to learn so I am trying to find ways to engage them…so I really hope they can see the connections to learning and what we do in class through this mini unit. I use the “I can” objectives and stamp sheets which makes the learning goals clear to them but their in class engagement seems to be starting to curb…I need to bring some new things into class. Maybe it is that time of the school year…after you have been in it for a little while…I think the pavo song will be just the thing this week. 🙂
Poco a poco…vamos pa’ ya:)
Also, thank you to you and Kara for sharing ACTFL13 notes and tips through Twitter. I wasn’t able to go but thanks to Twitter and your posts I was still able to get some ideas. Thanks for sharing!
First off, thanks for all the great sharing you guys do! I am in my second year teaching, and your blog has been a VERY valuable resource on numerous occasions! I even developed a proficiency- based curriculum, adapting the work JCPS did. I do have a question about how you grade these writing assessments. I feel like I understand the proficiency levels fairly well, except when it comes to the errors students are making. For example, in the above “IL” assessment, there is an error of “es 24” instead of “tiene 24 años”; what role do errors actually play, or do they not matter so long as the student’s production is intelligible? Even glaring errors like “se llama es”. Is there a “rule” for assessing these errors, or are we really just looking at whether or not the writing is understandable, regardless of any grammatical problems? ¡Muchas gracias!
Did you use a rubric to grade the presentations?
If so, can you post a link to it?
Thanks.
Here it is!
http://creativelanguageclass.com/2012/04/25/idea-85-assigning-a-grade-to-a-proficiency-rubric/
“I gave them a “no measureable effort” for feedback and gave them the option of studying and retaking that little assessment.”
I know this was ages ago, but I’m really curious about this. Was this “pop” assessment also for a grade? If they chose *not* to study and retake, what, if anything, did you do?
@Melanie – (Sorry I’m just now answering this!!!)
It was a pop assessment. There are very few assessments that students prepare for specifically. Mine aim to our daily “can do” statement, but there assessment is usually a scenario they haven’t seen which gives a new “twist”. If a student doesn’t show he can complete the task, he/she can retake. I’ll usually grade that as a 50% until they do. I try to offer a time IN class to retake it later in the unit/semester. Very few refuse to try again.