Over the weekend I attended a great workshop at the Kentucky World Languages Association 2007 Fall Conference called: Putting the Spotlight on Student Performance(s). Susan Marnatti and Thomas Sauer were the presenters.The topic is nothing new. Teachers have long been encouraged to use performance events for assessment in place of traditional tests. This workshop made compelling arguments why they should in fact do so– student achievement increases dramatically! –and provided a handout with prompts for actual events (or as students refer to them: projects) that Susan has used in class. Participants were also advised on ways to begin integrating performance events into instruction. How to begin? According to Susan, one should begin ……at the end.
If you begin planning a unit with the end in mind, i.e. what should students be able to do after they have completed the unit, you can easily create an “event” through which the students can demonstrate their newly acquired abilities. Susan and Thomas recommend writing down a list of “can-do” statements as a way of determining what those abilities should be. Once the event is created, it becomes the focal point of instruction. Everything else falls into place.
What about grammar?
Well, how much grammar will be needed for students to successfully complete the performance event? Do they need to have the ability to use a number of verbs, say about 10-15, in the past tense? If so, then during instructional time students should have ample amounts of practice using 10-15 verbs in the past tense. Everything proceeds in anticipation of the culminating project when students can show off their skills.
There are many advantages to concentrating instruction around such events. One advantage not to be underestimated is that students seem to be AWARE of them . In fact according to Susan they actually LOOK FORWARD to performance events and afterwards even REMEMBER them. Susan related that she frequently hears a comment like “When can we finally do the Doll House project, Frau?” and never one like: “I can’t wait till we take that test on dative prepositions!” After the performance project is completed, the whole class should complete a short list of open-ended statements that the teacher has prepared beforehand. In this way students “can reflect on what they have learned and where they are headed.”
I had seen Susan present a couple of years before about performance assessments and how they tie into the Linguafolio. The newer session had a lot of the same core material from that earlier presentation. The message and discussion are so important however. We need to continue to revisit this topic . Especially so since I would guess that most foreign-language teachers today still use pencil-and -paper, classroom-isolated tests. It’s understandable. After all, a teacher carries such a heavy work load as it is. Additional tasks are heaped on every day…how can they be expected to create curriculum and assessment pieces on their own too?
That question brings up one of the most fundamental messages of the workshop, I think: that the teacher should tailor the performance assessment idea to his or her teaching. Susan stresses how these events should be incorporated into the curriculum one at a time (perhaps one year at a time?!!) Otherwise we risk the danger of teacher overload. We don’t need more work! We need more success! Do one of these a year. For the following year, revisit and tweak the original and try to add another for a different unit.
If performance-based assessment is so good—and I believe it is–the question is how can we get all teachers to integrate it into instruction? Certainly there must be a push from the state and district level. Teachers should be expected to include more and more performance measures in their courses. And yet I would have reservations about steps that imposed teacher compliance all too firmly or in a sweeping manner district wide.
In Virginia, Fairfax County Schools have taken the lead nationally in embracing performance measures by developing a vast resource bank of performance-based tests over the years, the well-known Performance Assessment for Language Students (PALS.) There are two basic types of PALS: written and spoken. For each level of language study, students are expected to complete one written and one spoken PALS for every quarter of the school year in addition to two summative PALS(one spoken, one written) at the completion of the course. Fairfax teachers are encouraged to submit their own PALS prompts according to a template in which proficiency categories are listed: level of discourse, comprehensibility, vocabulary, etc, etc… The pool of ideas is awesome –perhaps FCPS can be convinced to go “open source” with it? (smile) Think how many learners would benefit!
Because the Fairfax County school system is so gigantic (the 13th largest in the country with over 164,000 students) the decision to go with PALS as a district requirement was a massive–and bold– undertaking. But I wonder if a slower approach that leads to gradual integration and teacher ownership would somehow be possible. I know that some Fairfax teachers grumble about the PALS requirement. Large school systems have so many complicated and thorny issues to deal with and I am not presuming to know the answer.
How to incorporate performance events in a K-12 distance-learning curriculum? With the help of technology, there are more possibilities than ever before. I will be drawing up some concrete plans in the next weeks.
