Low Risk Classrooms

5. Learning Environment: The teacher fosters and manages a safe and inclusive learning environment that takes into account: physical, emotional and intellectual well-being.

A foreign language classroom can seem like a high risk environment, students feel put on the spot and pressured, have anxiety about how they answer and whether they are correct or not. When your understanding and capability of communicating is questioned and then assessed in a high risk environment, well you would rather not participate and squeak by with a passing grade instead of taking risk and being wrong. Communication is so key to human beings, when this is compromised with high risk, anxiety and grades, no wonder students prefer not to talk or participate period in a foreign language classroom. In my own experiences I have preferred to not participate for fear of getting the wrong answer and humiliating myself in front of my peers.

Therefore I have made a point in my classroom to lower this sense of risk and anxiety through different activities which take a team effort to complete. One such activity is when I do warm-ups at the beginning of the period. Students will take a daily quiz on their own and then shift into the warm-up, working on it alone and silently until everyone is down testing, then I give them a few more minutes to work on the warm-up with their neighbors, checking their answers and working through difficult areas. I try to have all my warm-ups take up about 7-8 minutes, no longer than that, we then come together as a class and work through the problems they may have had. I use name cards and randomly draw students who will the write their answers on the white board and then draw another student who will “scribe” with the help of the class to make corrections. Throughout this process I encourage students to make corrections through inquiry based strategies, making them the ones who are correcting and affirming the correct answers. This lowers the risk for students because even if they do get the wrong answer everyone else helps work t the correct one. This I believe has lowered the anxiety in answering and participating for my students but also has helped them in learning the language better through whole class participation.

Another area where risk and anxiety run rampant is in translation. I for one hated being called on and made to translate a sentence completely on my own. To lower the risk and anxiety for this I again use my name cards, randomly drawing people to translate and having the whole class as well myself help the student work towards a viable translation of a sentence/passage. I ask pointed questions and encourage them to seek assistance from their peers through “phoning a friend” or breaking down the translation into manageable pieces and then putting it back together. This activity has helped the whole class see where there can be confusion and how to work through these confusing areas.

In addition to doing this for translation I also like to put students into groups (no more than 4-5 people) to translate a passage together, this also reduces risk and anxiety for students because instead of facing the whole class they are translating with a team of sorts. Everyone has be on the same page in order to move on so everyone is working together to translate even if it is someone else’s “turn”.

These different strategies I believe have culminated into creating a low risk, low anxiety classroom where student’s feel safe about making mistakes and therefore really learning.

image:http://www.uncp.edu/academics/colleges-schools-departments/departments/english-theatre-and-foreign-languages/foreign

Assessments

6. Assessment: The teacher uses multiple data elements (both formative and summative) to plan, inform and adjust instruction and evaluate student learning.

In my internship this past year I give my students daily quizzes which are a formative grade and then unit tests which are summative. The daily quizzes are a great indicator for me on where my students are in regards to concepts and learning the language, this also encourages them to spend at least 20 minutes a night working on Latin. The quizzes range from morphology type to translation, even a mix of either with grammar based questions.

One unit, demonstratives in particular I gave a quiz that used sample sentences with demonstratives and had students translate the sentences.

Rubric:

1.     Basic: Student recognizes the demonstrative but does not pair it with a noun correctly and mistranslates 3 or more words.

2.     Progressing: Student correctly pairs nouns and demonstratives but mistranslate 1 or 2 words and does not correctly render the Latin grammar.

3.     Proficient: Student recognizes the noun-demonstrative pairs, renders the Latin grammar correctly except for 1 or 2 words.

4.     Distinguished: Student correctly translates the sentence, renders the Latin grammar correctly and recognizes the noun-demonstrative pairs.

Analysis of Assessment: In this assessment I was looking for two English translations, the first sentences being: 

1. Hi canes modo latrant
2. Hic lectus est sordidus.

And two Latin translations of the other two English sentences:

1. I will throw this ball to Sextus.
2. These boys are happy.

 

Subject of Sentence
Score	# Students	%
Four	17	63.0%
Three	7	25.9%
Two	3	11.1%
One	0	0.0%
total	27

 

The first two and the last sentence tended to be pretty easy for students and about 63% of the class correctly translated these three sentences, as shown in the graph and table above, all of whom earned 4’s (Rubric) on these three sentences, meaning they could identify the demonstrative-noun pairs, render the Latin grammar correctly and translate correctly. For example, all of these students had similar translations for the first sentence, “These dogs only bark” or “These dogs are only barking”. Both translations maintain the grammar, the noun-demonstrative pair and correct translation of the Latin.

 

Direct Object of Sentence
Score	# Students	%
Four	2	7.4%
Three	20	74.1%
Two	3	11.1%
One	2	7.4%
total	27

 

Yet 93% got a 3 or less (Rubric) on the first English to Latin sentence as expressed in the graph and table above. I was expecting these sort of numbers since that sentence in particular is difficult in part to being English and the students had to translate into Latin. The other spot of difficulty was in using the correct form of hic, haec, hoc. What these results show me is that students recognize and understand when a demonstrative is paired with a noun in the nominative case as well as its function in the sentence but have more difficulty translating and using the correct demonstrative when it is not in the nominative case and therefore the subject.

Those 93% also used the wrong gender and/or the wrong case. Students had seen and used the nominative/masculine case of the demonstrative in previous readings/lessons yet had not used the feminine demonstrative in the accusative case and would therefore try to pair “ball” or “pilam” which is a feminine word with a masculine demonstrative form in the nominative case. They would also correctly render “pilam” in the accusative case because it is the direct object in the sentence but would not make the demonstrative agree with the noun in case/number/and gender. This would result in a 3: “Student recognizes the noun-demonstrative pairs, renders the Latin grammar correctly except for 1 or 2 words”, instead of a 4 (Rubric) for this particular sentence. What this evidence shows me is that students recognize the nominative masculine forms of hic, haec, hoc but have not connected the fact that the demonstrative declines like an adjective and therefore needs to agree to the noun it is paired like a noun-adjective pair.

The remaining 37% from the original 63% ended up with 2s or 3s due to not translating correctly or not correctly rendering the Latin in grammar and vocabulary, such as using the wrong tense for the verbs, mixing up the singularity or plurality of words and/or missing the cases/functions in the sentences. One student who received mostly twos on her sentences did so because she did not render the grammar correctly, she translated the vocab but not the grammar or the demonstrative, like in the first sentence she put down “This dog was only barking”. Here the student did not correctly render the number of both the noun-demonstrative pair or the verb nor did she use the correct tense for the verb hence why she received a 2 (Rubric). A mistranslation such as this shows me how the students struggle with recognizing the singularity/plurality in the Latin and English and have to make the corresponding words agree.

The next steps for the whole class would be to using as many different forms as possible in sample sentences, both English to Latin and Latin to English so that everyone can have practice with seeing a demonstrative in a different case and function with a corresponding noun. To encourage the whole class to become more familiar with other forms of the demonstrative I will use more example sentences where the demonstrative is not used with the subject nor only in masculine forms. I use both Latin and English sentences to give them more practice with not only forming the grammatically correct demonstratives but also for each case/function in the sample sentences.

image:http://spanish-ab-initio.blogspot.com/p/language-ab-initio.html

Differentiation in the Classroom

3. Differentiation: The teacher acquires and uses specific knowledge about students’ cultural, individual intellectual and social development and uses that knowledge to adjust practice by employing strategies that advance student learning.

For this Criteria I am going to pull one example from my Latin 1 students, I have a number of students with either 504 Plans or IEP’s and have an array of accommodations. One student in particular has dyslexia and dysgraphia and so has a hard time with spelling and reading text. I and my mentor teacher have come up with a variety of strategies to help this student succeed in Latin.

For starters was how to help the student read the passages every week, the solution came in the form of audio books. My mentor teacher started recording himself reading the chapters and sending these chapters to the student before the week they were due. With this sort of tool the student was able to hear the correct pronunciation and learn how to read the Latin in the passage. This definitely improved her reading and comprehension of the text. In addition to doing audio books, I started giving passage based quizzes/tests to the student orally. This also improved the students scores and comprehension of the subject.

Another way in which I have helped the student in working with her circumstances was to revise the quizzes, formatting them to be easier to read.

As shown above this is a quiz that I would have given to all students but spaced out more and broken up into more manageable pieces. Instead of one big paragraph I broke the passage up by sentences and made the text larger, as well as put in a lot more space. I or my mentor teacher would take the student out into the hallway so that we could read the quiz to her, letting her hear the passage and then working through the translation on her own. We would repeat the sentences or phrases when needed and she would write notes down for herself.

Inside the classroom when we do group activities I try to place this student with other students who have clear speaking voices and can be heard easily, this also helps the student further in pronunciation and understanding the flow of the language.

This is a great example of differentiation in the classroom because having dyslexia and/or dysgraphia makes language difficult for anyone especially a written language like Latin. yet the really beautiful thing about Latin is how phonetic it is and therefore easily understood orally. With these new tools on differentiating my instruction and assessment strategies I believe I can build up more ways to assist students with situation like this student or others who may need accommodations in the classroom.

image:http://bie.org/images/uploads/objects/blog_differentiated_instruction.png