"Standardized" testing in Spanish

My 5th graders this week get to do something that no other 5th grade class has done before in Lake Bluff. We are taking online computer assessments, in Spanish! (They were not pleased with me when I told them that was the surprise for class this week haha.) The test is called the STAMP4SE (for grades 3-6; grades 6-12+ take the STAMP4S) and you can find more information on this website. Basically, it is just a way to measure language proficiency in our school. Since this is the first year, there are still working out a few technicalities in the assessment so not everyone finished everything but it will be taken every spring from this year forward. This is not an assessment that needs any studying ahead of time and it doesn't count for a grade. It is just a way for the world language team to see how much Spanish our students are soaking in.  There are 4 parts to this test; reading, writing, listening, and speaking, however, I am only giving the last two sections this year. In the future, 5th graders may take all 4 sections, who knows. The data we get this year from the assessments will be used to help in the redesign of the curriculum over the summer. Here are a few things that I've noticed about the test:


1. It takes almost 15-20 minutes for elementary kids to get logged in to the test after testing the headphone/microphone, downloading the directions documents from my dropbox, and entering the test codes, passwords, and usernames. And it really helps to have the tech person or just an extra pair of hands to help during this set-up.
2. The listening section is like 20 minutes. (The number of questions varies on how much Spanish you know.... the more Spanish you know, the more questions you take.) But the sound cuts in and out so the kids can't always hear the whole question. After day 2, we figured out that you can just refresh the page but sometimes that doesn't even work.
3. You can't go straight from listening to speaking. Instead, you have to log out of the test, quit safari, turn the airport off.... then turn it back on and log in again. Otherwise, the test stops working during the first speaking question. This si weird and annoying but something I can deal with now that I know it happens.
4. Kids get nervous during the speaking sections. They speak super quiet into the microphone because they're afraid of speaking in front of their peers even though we do multiple speaking activities every lesson.
5. Some kids asked me if it was okay that they spoke a little bit of English during the speaking section because they didn't know a word.... I just shook my head and sighed. 
6. New pages (questions) take forever to load. Sometimes it just stops loading and you have the quit and turn the airport off to pick up where you left off.




I'd love to give this test at my new job but I have no idea how the curriculum and/or budget works at NHA. That'll be something that I have to figure out this summer or next fall. I like the idea of giving this national test because it is aligned with the ACTFL oral proficiency targets. (I'll do a post about those a little later.) 


I am excited (and nervous) to see the results!

We made it to the next step!

I have had two curriculum meetings in the past two weeks with the foreign language team in my school district. We met last week just as a team of 4 to continue creating can-do statements and thematic webs for  each of 6 units in every grade. We've been stuck on this step for awhile - since the fall - and it's been a little frustrating. We come up with something we think is awesome and then we look at it the next meeting and hate it. So we change it. And then change it again. We spent a lot of time of elementary units, which made me feel a little bad for the middle school teachers. You can't know what to teach in middle school though if you don't know what you're teaching in elementary school so it was necessary to start from the youngest grade and work our way up. However last week, we finally got to middle school! And I must say, the middle school units look pretty awesome. There's one on communication, both face-to-face and with technology (ie learning how to text in Spanish :) ), and there's another one of love and relationships, and another one on how to communicate with medical professionals.... just to name a few. They all sound like so much fun to teach and will actually be useful to students if (hopefully when) they ever go abroad.

Yesterday was our second meeting and we finally finished all (well, most of) the overview of the units! We also had the smiling approval of our wonderful curriculum consultant, Helena Curtain. We finally made it to the next step in the curriculum process. At the end of yesterday, we wrote essential questions (EQ) for almost every grade; we just have grades 3-5 left. Our next meeting isn't until late May but at that meeting, we'll finish the EQs and then get a refresher course on how to write a UPI (unit plan inventory). After that, we need to go through the current Spanish 1 and 2 curriculum and make sure we hit all the grammar points in the new curriculum. Then, we can start writing assessments, creating lessons, and gathering materials! There's definitely still a lot to do, but we can see a light at the end of the tunnel now. It's been a long, slow process but is totally worth it. Even the small changes we are currently making in our classrooms are showing such a difference in how our students can communicate orally. They have so much more confidence now than at the beginning of the year and it makes me so proud to me my students succeeding in the ways that they are.

But they're talking so fast!

One of the things that our consultant is teaching the foreign language team at my school is to start every unit plan with a "hook" - something super interesting that it can't help but get the students engaged and ready to learn about the next unit. Some examples of "hooks" are books, songs, pictures (not the flashcard kind though), and short video clips. Most of my experience is with books but I decided to branch out and use some video clips for my next units with 5th grade (Help! I don't feel well) and 4th grade (Let's play sports!). Surprisingly enough (well, not really) there aren't really any video clips already out there on the internet that I could use with my students so I decided to create my own. I used two different websites: xtranormal and goanimate. I found out about xtranormal from my mother actually (thanks mom!) because she used it in one of her graduate courses to become a principal. I'll talk about this website first. 


Here is the first video I made about a doctor's office using xtranormal. It's fairly easy to use. The main idea is that you just type what you want the characters to say and then they'll say it. However, if you want your characters to move, walk, look at each other, look at the camera... that takes more time. All those little details can be fairly time consuming depending on how intricate you want your video to be. It gets easier with practice, I promise. The website itself allows a max of 2 characters per video. However, if you download the desktop version (which I did) you can have as many characters as you want. The desktop version is pretty much the same. You still need to be connected to the internet to use it but otherwise it's very similar. The only other con to this website is that you have to "pay" for each new character and each new scene that you use with points. There are a couple ways to earn points. You can just buy thousands of points with a credit card. You can also earn points for free, but I haven't been able to figure this one out. There is an educator monthly package discount if you feel like you'll use it all the time. Also, with this educator discount you can provide "tokens" to your students so they can use it for free. There is also a business package but I'm not really sure what that does because I didn't look at it. I just used the free version, which starts you off with so many points to buy your characters and settings. So my video is kind of boring but if I want to use it more in the future, then I'll think about buying. When you are finished, this video downloads to an .avi file so you need windows media player (or an .avi converter program for Macs) in order to view the program. 


The other website is goanimate. This is so quick and so easy to use because you literally choose your scene, type your lines (10 max for the free version), and hit publish! The catch? You can't really choose your own characters or settings (or at least, I haven't been able to figure that out). You have to choose one of their presets. But since I wanted to talk about sports and March madness is going on right now, I was all set. Here's my video. This one took probably 5 minutes to create. 


During the actual teaching of the video, we watched it straight thru one time. At the end, I mostly heard "They talked so fast!" among the whispers of my students. Then we took a break and did some TPR with vocabulary both in the video and just about the content in general (body parts for 5th grade, sports for 4th grade). After this break, we watched the video again. A few students did ask to watch in English, which I obviously denied (it's SPANISH class...) but most students were excited to figure out more of the video. This time, I stopped the video every now and then and asked some clarification questions. Yes, unfortunately, I did make them translation questions but in the future I plan to try and keep even their answers in Spanish. By the second time around though, they were understanding quite a bit and could answer most of my questions! They loved the videos and I think the videos definitely "hooked" the classes in!

Curriculum, curriculum, curriculum

One thing that is really cool (and stressful and overwhelming) at my school right now is a redesign of the entire K-8 Spanish curriculum. I was hired last summer and am fortunate enough to have been a part of the redesign from the beginning. We worked about 6 days total in the summer and have met once a month since school started. "We" means me, the teacher for whom I'm subbing, the K-2 Spanish teacher, the K-2 Spanish long-term sub, the 6th/7th grade teacher, and the 8th grade teacher. Every now and then our curriculum director will drop by the meetings for an update. She is just an interim this year but is fantastic and very supportive. Also, we have been working with a wonderful consultant by the name of Helena Curtain. She is so passionate about her work and her beliefs. Her energy is contagious and we've been working very hard to create a new curriculum that will make not only her, but also ourselves, our curriculum director, and our community, proud. The work that we are doing is a lot like the unit plan projects that I had to do in my undergrad education at U of M. However this time, someone will actually be teaching/learning the final products! This certainly makes it much more nerve-racking than when I was just working for a grade (although that grade was basically on what my entire methods class was based). Here's a quick shout-out to my professor... thanks for having us do all that work! Those skills are definitely paying off in the real world, as I'm sure you knew it would :)


To bring you up to speed on our process of redesign, we started by learning all about the art of communicative language and speaking in the target language. Helena gave us multiple mini lessons in German (which none of us speak) to put us back in the shoes of a novice language learner with a teacher that speaks 90% or more of class time in the target language. To get a better idea about what we learned and discussed, click on this link. 


During our meetings this year, our goal is to move the entire Spanish 1 curriculum into grades K-5. Obviously, grammar cannot be the focus here because much of the grammar is not developmentally appropriate. So essentially, we are focusing on the topics of vocabulary and transferring those into new thematic units. We are also teaching different phrases of grammar that connect to the thematic units so that the students will learn to speak in different ways. By doing this, we aren't explicitly teaching the grammar behind why they speak a certain way, but the students still get the practice of speaking in full sentences. We started by creating thematic webs (about 4 for each grade) and then developed "I can..." statements as the detailed objectives of what we want our students to be able to do by the end of the unit. The step on which we are currently is going back and matching the thematic webs to the "I can" statements. This process is taking a long time as we improve each thematic unit. We've added more units so that we now have about six different, 6-week units per grade. We've spent most of our time so far on grades K-3 which is slightly frustrating because we cannot seem to progress to any upper grades! However, it is impossible to plan for the higher grades when you have not yet planned the younger grades. And actually, our thematic units for the primary grades are looking really awesome. We're meeting again in March, so I'll give an update then as to how far we've come.


I'm sad that I'm only at this school one year (remember, maternity leave = long term sub) because I would love to teach all of these units. I am very proud of all of the work we have done so far.  I am really enjoying redesigning curriculum and it's even made me think about getting my masters in curriculum instruction. However, I think my heart is still set on bilingual education (that's a whole other post).