Andy+Daitsman



April 26, 2013

Learning Objectives:


 * 1) Spanish 3CP1
 * 2) Students will be able to form the past participles of regular verbs in Spanish and of ten irregular verbs.
 * 3) Students will be able to demonstrate their knowledge of how to use past participles as adjectives, forming sentences with correct agreement between adjectives and nouns.
 * 4) Spanish 4CP1
 * 5) Students will be able to demonstrate their knowledge of chapter vocabulary, using it to answer open response questions.
 * 6) Spanish 3H
 * 7) Students will be able to summarize a story in Spanish, within the context of a provided narrative frame.

Target Language Use: I was low this week, maybe 30% across the board.

Student-centered learning In Spanish 3H and Spanish 4CP1, most of class time was student centered, probably 70% or so. In Spanish 3H, I used a reciprocal teaching procedure, in which students working in small groups took turns leading discussions to summarize, question, clarify, and make predictions about short segments of a longer authentic text. We started the activity on Tuesday and will continue it probably through Tuesday of next week. In Spanish 4CP1, students learned new chapter vocabulary, related to job seeking, and spent the bulk of class time working with that vocabulary to discuss their own job seeking and career preferences. While there were teacher directed segments of some of these activities, most of the time students were writing or speaking with each other in the target language about the jobs they would and would not like to have.

In Spanish 3CP1, most of the class time was teacher directed, as students were learning how to form past participles in Spanish and how to use them as adjectives. While they had ample practice opportunities, the nature of the lessons tended towards a teacher driven model.

Authentic Assessment Many of the Spanish 4CP1 activities, related to describing and talking about their ideal jobs, were authentic in that students used the target language to communicate with each other and with me their actual career preferences. The reading in Spanish 3H will culminate in a target language written summary of the text we read. This strikes me as an authentic assessment, in that interpreting written texts is a real world activity and in order to write their summaries the students will have to interpret the text. The past participle unit for Spanish 3CP1 culminated in a cloze exercise quiz, which was not authentic.



April 20, 2013

While I'm still working my way through Marzano, et al, I came across this bit that struck me as very interesting. It's from Chapter 8, "Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback." (This is from the book Linda McCann came through the building distributing to all teachers about two years ago.)


 * 1. Instructional goals narrow what students focus on.** One of the more interesting findings in the research is the negative effect that setting goals or objectives has on outcomes other than those specified in the objectives. Specifically, in his analysis of 20 studies involving instructional goals, Walberg (1999) reported that they have an effect size of -.20 on "unintended outcomes." This means that if a teacher establishes a goal, for example, that students understand how a cell functions, students' understanding of information incidental to this concept, but still addressed in class, might actually be less than if a specific goal were not set. In fact, an effect size of -.20 indicates that the average student in the class where specific goals about the cell were set, [sic] would score 8 percentile points lower than a student in a class where these goals were not set, //in a test of information that did not pertain to the cell.// At first, this might seem counter intuitive, but with a little reflection, these findings actually make a great deal of sense. This phenomenon might occur because setting a goal focuses students' attention to such a degree that they ignore information not specifically related to the goal.

Robert J. Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock, //Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement// (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2001) p. 94, emphasis in the original.

Marzano, et al, do not reject goal setting //per se//, but they offer a couple of caveats about how they should be used:


 * 2. Instructional goals should not be too specific....**


 * 3. Students should be encouraged to personalize the teacher's goals. **

All this might just be turf war between Marzano and RBT, but taken together these recommendations do seem to run counter to the approach we have been using to write our learning objectives and present them to the students. I'm not saying we should change our approach, but I do want to throw this out there so we can be conscious of the divergent opinions.



April 12, 2013 Learning objectives this week were the same as last week. They will change for the week after vacation.

Target language use: I was about 50-60% in my classes this week. Student centered learning: Authentic assessment: The 3CP and 3H took cloze exercise quizzes at the end of the week, which were not authentic exercises. The 4CP class had to present brief oral summaries of their ideal and least desirable careers. The assessment was formative, but involved communicative use of the language and was authentic.
 * 1) In 3CP, students worked on cloze exercises and open response questions practicing the preterite-imperfect distinction. Learning was not communicative, in that students were not asked to exchange meaningful information, and it was teacher-directed, but students had ample time in class to work collaboratively on difficult grammar topics.
 * 2) In 3H, the week's activities involved a fair amount of direct instruction of verbs regarding mental states (//to know//, //to meet//, //to want//, //to be able//) that change meaning in the preterite and the imperfect. Students had time to work in pairs and groups to express ideas using those verbs, including in cloze exercises and in open response questions.
 * 3) In 4CP, students were presented and worked with review vocabulary. They worked collaboratively to recall meanings of the vocab terms, and then we worked in large group to fill in the meanings they could not recall on their own. After some direct instruction on the present and past progressive tenses, they created original sentences to discuss their own career desires and to answer canned open response questions.

Over the vacation I plan to re-read bits of //Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen// by Lee and VanPatten, and to read through //Classroom Instruction that Works// by Marzano, et al.



April 8, 2013 Two learning objectives: 1. Students will be able to demonstrate understanding of the preterite imperfect distinction writing complete sentences using both tenses. 2. Students will be able to recognize review vocabulary and to use it to create original sentences. Weekly goals Target language: unmet Student centered learning: In 3H and 3CP, students spent much of the week working independently on written (3H) or oral (3CP) presentations, with assistance and guidance from the instructor. Most of the work in both classes was student centered. In Spanish 4CP, students reviewed for and took a chapter test. The review sessions were primarily teacher-centered activities. Authentic assessments: In my estimation, the oral and written presentations were authentic assignments. The chapter test was not.