highlight your confusion

Multi-day Assessments

/ magisterp / Leave a comment
I *cannot* find a source for this, but Google Images came to the rescue when I knew I had seen something like it before in a textbook. Know it? Let me know!

I now get to see a decent amount of teaching by pre-service students, as well as current teachers in the field—something every educator would benefit from, yet is almost never built into teaching schedules, sadly. One thing I overheard last fall was something like “after writing your conclusion, be sure to submit your lab; I’ll be reviewing these over the weekend,” and then the class began a brand new unit.

It occurred to me that the teacher wasn’t going to finish reviewing students’ work for days—outside of contractual hours, no less—which means the teacher wasn’t going to discover any struggling individuals (or groups) until long after anything could be done, like the two boys I saw in the back of the room who had fairly blank lab reports. In other words, this isn’t an example of timely feedback that would have otherwise improve learning, which affects both teacher and student.

In this particular case, when the teacher found out that a certain number of students didn’t understand Unit 1 content, what was the plan? Pause the current Unit 2, then go back?! Why did they go on to Unit 2 in the first place?! I found myself wondering: “what could be done with the lab report to avoid all this? How might we break up the assignment so that all the feedback is timely, and there’s no moving forward only to fall back?” Let’s take a cue from some graduate work…

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CI Assessments

/ magisterp / Leave a comment

I was recently asked a very good question about how to change one’s assessments to align more with CI. By that, we’re talking about comprehension-based language teaching (CLT) that prioritizes comprehensible input (CI) in the Latin classroom. First, it helps to think in terms of what standards were being assessed beforehand, even if they weren’t explicitly called “standards.” These old standards were mostly discrete skills you’d expect to find in tests accompanying popular textbooks, like vocabulary recall, derivative knowledge, grammar identification, and cultural trivia. New standards based on CI—whatever they are—will have meaning at the core. My suggestion is to focus on assessing comprehension of Latin, because that’s more than enough to ask for. One benefit of this standard is that is that it has those old discrete skills embedded within something larger and more meaningful that you can assess (i.e., comprehension). Let’s look at how each one of the old standards is contained within assessing comprehension…

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