Here we are, about seven weeks into the school year, and I just administered my first round of summative assessments! I AM SO EXCITED I HAVE DATA. I’m beginning to see what my students are needing, who is struggling, and who is excelling. This is SO important for so many reasons (not the least of which is that I have a “data” conversation with my evaluating administrator coming up next week…all part of the eval process…gulp). There are so many adjustments I can make to my instruction that will hopefully help my students be successful, and make that turnaround happen quickly!
Let’s backtrack: I use an approach to teaching Spanish that is centered around non-targeted comprehensible input. In short, I don’t plan what structures are going to come up in class. Instead, I just try to provide contexts for scaffolded communication, and leave the rest up to the gods of Spanish small talk.
My main activities to generate input at this point have been Calendar Talk, Card Talk, a questionnaire I gave on a day I was out, and One Word Images. (Already planning blog posts on each one, if you haven’t heard of these – and I’m going to try to make a list of links to resources from others explaining/showing these activities.) I pick a student’s card, or select a specific survey answer that piques my interest, and we riff on it as a class for as long as the interest is there. (Sometimes you have to jump ship – I watched some of my students astral project straight out of my classroom when Fortnite came up for the 1,000th time, soooo we dropped that real quick.)
After we have our conversation around whatever our context is for that day, I project a blank word processing document, and we Write and Discuss our conversation of the day. This repeats the input, and helps keep a written record for me/us. (As a hyperactive person with a terrible memory, it helps me keep track of what I’ve discussed, with whom.) Then we use that class-created text as a reading, doing translation work, further discussion and comparison with the text, and sometimes illustrating it in Mike Peto-style comic book forms.
The goal of all this is to provide rich, interesting comprehensible input to my students that builds their mental representation of Spanish, and one day allows them to express themselves effortlessly with the Spanish that will forever live in their minds. The word “grammar” hasn’t come up yet, and thank goodness. My eleven- to fourteen-year-olds have not a care in the world for such pursuits!!
In this assessment round, then, I got to see what has “stuck.” What did they acquire from this listening and reading? What can they understand? I made performance-based assessments that were light recombinations of things we had discussed in class, and used them to test students’ listening and reading comprehension. Overall, the results were very positive! Students are understanding these little paragraphs about their classmates, and by giving them more to listen and read, BAM secretly ninja’d some more input into their lil brains.
I was most curious as to how a writing assessment would go. I have done ZERO writing with my level 1 students up until now, and was nervous that they hadn’t had enough input, or that nerves would cause my students to devour their papers in despair and run screaming out of my classroom. But – hooray – they did some pretty cool stuff with their writing.
I prompted them to free write in Spanish for 10 minutes. No resources, just whatever Spanish they have in their heads. I provided a couple sentence stems for those who were really struggling (stuff like “He/she likes…” “He/she has…” “He/she is…”) so they could create little characters if they wanted. A couple kids in each class referred to them, but most just put their heads down and tried.
Most reproduced our little weather sentence stems pretty reliably. (“Today is Wednesday, the 17th of October. It’s cold. It’s cloudy. In my opinion, the weather is good.”) Some expressed some things that they like. (“Me gusta Fortnite. Me gusta Nike.” Etc etc.) Some tried to create a character of their own. All of this falls in the Novice writing range – memorized words and phrases in familiar contexts.
Now, if I were to look at my students’ writings from the lens of “this must be perfectly spelled and grammatically unassailable! They must describe three things they like, one they like a lot, and two dislikes from our vocab list!” then I would probably think, “This writing is trash garbage! Time to launch copies of [textbook name redacted] at them until they GET IT. SPANISH IS BEAUTIFUL.”
I’m not going to do that. Comprehensible input is the source of acquisition, and they’ve had…30 hours of it? (As if – we know how much English goes into the setting up of the school year.)
Instead, I’m going to look at the sometimes wild creations that my students put to paper as “developmental forms.” I love this term from Bill Van Patten (BVP), because instead of saying ERRORS, we’re recognizing that our students are developing mental representation of the language in our classes, and whatever they give back to us just shows us what they’ve got so far. There’s still more time for them to acquire and get to more native-like production, so I don’t have to freak out right now. And glory be – in their writings, my students are attempting to communicate something. (Plot twist – I see this as one of the most important goals of a language class. See ya, verb charts. You only communicate SADNESS.) So if they’re trying to communicate and sometimes I get what’s going on in their Spanish minds, boom. I’m happy.
I’m happy! I can see that my students would definitely benefit from some more reading. More reading is going to get them more comfortable with the written form of Spanish, and that will likely show up in their own writing over time. My focus for this next cycle of 6-ish weeks is going to be how I can create compelling texts with my classes that we milk for all they’re worth. I need to not be afraid of repetition, because while saying the same sentence a bunch of different ways feels boring for me as an Advanced-level speaker of Spanish, my students are (secretly) (so as not to defy the middle school norm of looking disinterested most of the time) lapping up the opportunity to understand something – again! Success feels good. MORE SUCCESS, PLEASE.
That’s all from me for now. This post was written, maybe in a fever dream, on a flight to Austin, TX for a long weekend. School has had me stressed with a zillion things going on, but it feels nice to have time to really reflect on my successes and challenges from this beginning of this year. I’m going to relish this opportunity – times for reflection have been few and far between, it seems. Plus, I’m also going to celebrate the fact that I finished all my grading on this flight before I wrote this post? Truly a miracle.
Have you done free writes? Do you want to know more about the process, or the “why?” Comment below!!! Or just say hi, you glorious flower of pedagogical excellence!