Some of my friends at my birthday party last night are teachers. While we were talking about around the campfire, we spitballed some ideas about how we can have our students collaborate. On the surface, it seemed like a daunting challenge. What could middle school math students and high school English Language Learners (ELLs) do together?
From that, I developed this assessment to test my ELLs ability to communicate math.
(One of the five Colorado English Language Proficiency Standards is "English Learners communicate information, ideas, and concepts necessary for academic success in the content area of Mathematics.")
I've been recently crafting assessments for a course I'm taking as part of my Master of Arts in Educational Technology. Within the framework of that course, here is how I categorized some of my choices for the assessment
Content | Communicate Math in English |
Technique | Video |
Structure | Oral |
Technology | |
Response | Narrative Feedback |
Design | Meaning for Students |
Data & Results | English Language Learners (ELLs) |
Here is the assessment I would give to students:
This part of the handout would explain the task.
What's sweet about a middle schooler selecting a problem they got wrong on a recent math test is that it will give them space to reflect on their recent test and seek support from a different source than their math teacher.
This will be great review content-wise for my ELL high schoolers as well as give them an opportunity to practice their English in an authentic and meaningful way.
This is the other side of the page I would handout to students. It outlines what I will be giving feedback on in the narrative feedback video I make for them on Flip.
This will help serve as a guide as students listen to my video to support their comprehension of my speaking.
Why this way? I chose for students to create a video and orally explain to support their English skills in speaking. There's lots of ways to communicate. Speaking is one of them; one that students will encounter often in their day to day lives.
Having the prompt come from a middle school student in a different district creates both an opportunity to practice listening skills in English as well as create an authentic audience for the task. This is also helpful in that it lower the stakes for some. This video creation isn't for peer but someone who they will have more of a mentoring-like relationship with.
I'm choosing to respond to students with narrative feedback in the form of a video on Flip to further give opportunity for students to practice listening skills. I intentionally crafted the second page of the handout to help guide students through that listening comprehension practice.
This has really been shaped by this excerpt from Alfie Kohn's The Case Against Grades where he describes that:
"It’s not enough to add narrative reports. 'When comments and grades coexist, the comments are written to justify the grade' (Wilson, 2009, p. 60). Teachers report that students, for their part, often just turn to the grade and ignore the comment, but 'when there’s only a comment, they read it,' says high school English teacher Jim Drier. Moreover, research suggests that the harmful impact of grades on creativity is no less (and possibly even more) potent when a narrative accompanies them. Narratives are helpful only in the absence of grades (Butler, 1988; Pulfrey et al., 2011)."
Overall? I'm stoked about this!
I'm eager to see how students interact with this prompt and what it tells me about their ability to communicate about math in English. I'm eager too to make tweaks based on what my students do.
Sources:
Butler, R. (1988). Enhancing and undermining intrinsic motivation: The effects of task-involving and ego-involving evaluation on interest and performance. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 58,1-14.
Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. Alfie Kohn.
Wilson, M. (2006). Rethinking rubrics in writing assessment. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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