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

Writing Workshops in a Latin Classroom

Would the writing workshop approach work in your discipline? How might you organize a workshop?

Incorporating other disciplines into ones subject area is difficult, not necessarily in relation but giving adequate time that other subject to strengthens students skills and knowledge (Content Area-Writing; Daniels, Zemelman, Steineke). Writing is an essential aspect of language, especially Latin, yet this writing happens in Latin, not English. So for my classroom I would have to be deliberate in how I go about doing a writing workshop. I have a few ideas as to what sort of projects we could do but the hard part would be to encourage strong writing while at the same time relating it to my content-area.

One possible project would be writing a response to one of the Pliny the Younger’s letters. This would be great practice for students to first translate the letter and understand what is being said. I would give instruction on how to write a formal letter to a friend. The response would be in english but students would have to follow the typical format for letter writing. I would have them take this a step further and have them delve into what is happening in the letter or response. Perhaps start research on the Mt. Vesuvius eruption, what sort of place Pompeii was, what a historian might write about about this incident. I see a lot of other projects stemming form this reading and singular workshop on writing letters. I would follow this day up with another letter writing workshop but instead of letters between friends, a business letter. Possibly one between senators. I would expect my students to use their prior knowledge they have, from pervious lectures, on Roman elite society and the senatorial politics.

Another possible writing workshop I could do would be on an ancient artifact, a research paper that could be published in an archeology journal. I would first start the students by letting them choose an artifact ( vessels, clothing, coins, etc) and then have them research the background of that particular artifact. This would be a workshop that extended beyond a day or two, probably a final project/paper. I would create deadline benchmarks for students, when to have the background info by, when to have your argument for the usage of the artifact by whom, a thesis and intro, primary and secondary sources, a rough draft and then a final draft.

Writing workshops can be daunting but starting with singular projects, taking a day or two to complete is easier to swallow and will not interfere too much with current lesson plans. I find this somewhat exciting and I look forward to using these same ideas in my classroom.

image:http://quemdixerechaos.com/2012/12/04/translatingplinypt4/

Standard 5: Learning Environment

5.1 Component 2a: Creating an environment of respect and rapport

5.4 Component 2d: Managing student behavior by establishing expectations

Classroom management does not sound very interesting, fun, or all that important besides laying down the law in the classroom. Taking my Classroom Management Class and actually reading and defining classroom management has proven these preconceived ideas as wrong. Classroom management is:

“Classroom management is the act of creating an environment where the teacher can teach and the students can learn. It is the way a class is organized, not the way it is disciplined. A classroom that is effectively managed provides students with opportunities to succeed because of the procedures that are in place.”

Management is not about punishment or consequences, that plays a part but it is not the end all, be all. No, classroom management from what I have gleaned from readings and class is an atmosphere and relation. Teachers need to cultivate a relationship with their students so that those students needs are met, easy enough right? Not really, but this is where the true passion and joy of teaching comes into play. Putting in the effort to build up a relationship with your students will demonstrate to the students the sort of classroom you want. This in turn will help make the healthy, thriving atmosphere all teachers should strive for. A place where learning takes off, discoveries are made and successes are celebrated. This is the sort of classroom I want to foster and am now confident I can build after actually defining classroom management. I definitely have a lot more to learn but I know I am headed in the right direction and look forward to continuing this learning in my own classroom with my own students.

image:http://www.sharemylesson.com/TESAssets/SML/Images/classroom%20management.jpg

Learning Latin is like Learning Art

My Teaching Statement:

Teaching and learning have been the same thing for me since I started pursuing a career in education. The instances where I am the teacher in the classroom are few, but I realized that when I am in the teaching mode, I am also in that learning mode. An idea that I have held onto for a long time is “you know what you know when you can teach it” a paraphrase of another quote that my high school art teacher said to me. It has been something that I never truly understood until I got to step into the teacher role.

There still is a difference between teacher and student; one has knowledge on the subject, and the student needs to learn that subject. In my case that would be Latin. Yet from my own experience as a student and as a teacher, the students can teach you just as much in the classroom. I want to make it a point in my classroom to listen to my students, their frustrations and successes, their passions and curious inquiries. My hope for my classroom would be one that fulfills all the requirements of a traditional foreign language classroom but also a classroom where students are comfortable and excited.

Teaching a foreign language is very different from teaching other subjects, like science or music or PE. I will admit that Latin is an odd foreign language, but it also a classical and respected language. Latin was used for a long time and though some would consider it “a dead language” I would beg to differ. Not all subjects are the same that is for sure, but language is all about communication. In this case the communication happens a lot in reading and writing, but there are also times when speaking Latin has a great effect. We see this in everyday life when we say things like, “Carpe Diem” or “non sequitor”. I want to ensure that my students understand that even though there is more reading and writing it is still a form of communication, one that we still use today and we can still get our points across. With this in mind I want to encourage my students to communicate in this way, using their knowledge and readings to communicate new ideas and bring attention to old views.

The only other subject in school that I have come close to relating language with is art. As a student I could never figure out how my art teacher graded our art. How do you judge someone’s artwork against another? How finished is it? How well executed the subject was done? How much skill does the does the student have in rendering the piece? These are a sampling of questions that my art teacher would ask when critiquing our work. She always graded us against ourselves, our progress, never against another student’s skill. I liked this idea of grading our current work against our past work and the progress we have made. There was this constant link between what we have learned and what we are currently learning. Where we are constantly comparing our knowledge to where we started to where we have come. It is a form of communication between the progresses we have made, our teacher, and us.

I found myself asking the same questions in my language class. How do you grade a student on their speaking of a language that is no longer spoken? How do you determine the correct way to formulate a sentence when word order doesn’t matter? How can you pick just one translation when the words have many other options? And this is where I saw that art was like Latin. As in art where there is communication going on between the artist, the art piece, and the viewer, there is a similar communication set up in Latin between the speaker, the language used, and the listener.

In these same art classes we did a lot of group critiques, which at times were painful but after a really good group critique sessions, well my art got better or at least my future art did. We were graded on our current art in comparison to where we have come from. That’s what I want to implement into my classroom is a level of comfort that allows for easy communication and critique. I want there to be growth by introducing hard concepts and slowly working my students through it. I want to introduce them to great writers, people who we have come to see as classic writers but were visionaries in their own time; they wrote about things that were anti-government; they were the rebels of their time, by bringing issues to the public’s eye and making people think. I want to give my students many different perspectives of the Roman people and of those who were affected by them.

Latin allows a lot more freedom in its use because of the lack of its contemporary use. I want my students to see that freedom the language allows. There are rules, but those same rules allow for interesting degrees of freedoms within the language. There are special endings and conjugations, but because of that you can arrange a sentence however you want. Most Latin words have multiple meanings so you can have two very different translations based on the same reading. For example the phrase “brutum fulmen” (Pliny the elder) is translated commonly as “senseless thunderbolt” but the adjective “brutum” has many meanings: dull, stupid, irrational, heavy, etc. And the noun “fulmen” could mean crushing blow, flash or lightening. So you could translate “brutum fulmen” as “stupid crushing blow”. This is why I love Latin; it reminds me of the freedom I experienced after reaching a higher level in art. After learning all the structural aspects of art, learning about shading, light distribution and proportion I got to change things around. I got to rearrange the sentence so to speak. Instead of making picture perfect paintings I twisted my subjects or deformed my still lifes to something that I found interesting and new. I did the same in my Latin classes; I saw the prearranged sentences and thought that it was boring, but then realized that I could change it all. I want to help my students realize this. Like art, Latin has some freedoms to it after learning all of the rules.

In my classroom I will treat it like any other language classroom, there will be communication, there will be culture, and there will be a level of interpersonal comfort. As a future Latin teacher I will not only be held by the World Language standards but also by the Classical Language Standards, both making points about communication, community, culture, comparisons and going beyond the classroom. With the ideas mentioned above I believe I can meet those standards.

image: Gustav Klimt, Pallas Athena, 1898

Using Error Correction with Sequencing in a Latin Classroom

When building a foreign language lesson plan, Brandl has a simple chart to follow: Input: instructional period, giving students the tools to do the intended task Assimilation: Working on examples of the task and putting the new informational to practice. Includes language exercises verbally, reading and writing. Application: Students putting the information practice by themselves, possibly through homework or in class work in the communicative language.

This chart is an easy enough outline to follow for lesson planning. Although when I first read through this chart I was confused with the terms “input” and “assimilation” but after I read over what these words meant. When writing up a lesson plan on a particular Latin chapter in The Essential Latin Textbook I found the chart to be helpful in breaking up a class period for instruction and work time. Another concept I cam across with Brandl was the error correction methodology. For foreign language there are a lot different ways to go about correcting students in a verbal setting. There is positive and negative feedback, I am big supporter of positive feedback, encouraging, praising, confirming and repetition for the benefit of the rest of the class; such feedback is essential to inform students when they saying something right and that they are grasping the material. It encourages myself as a future teacher to make effort to listen an pay attention to my students not only when they make a mistake but also when they correctly speak the language.

The way in which I would implement this practice the most is during the assimilation point in Brandl’s chart. After giving my students the new information, based off of earlier material they have already learned, I would have them put it into practice. For example, if I instruct my students on verb and noun agreement I would give them a phrase and ask if my construction of the phrase was correct, if not, then why was it wrong and how I should have constructed the phrase.

Puella ambulant.

It should be: Puellae ambulant, or Puella ambulat; depending if I want the noun to be plural or the verb.

After my students tell me what is wrong I would have them write the wrong and the write phrase down. This sort of self correction encourages my students to take on the role of teaching and put the material into their own words. After this sort of exercise I would have my students form a series of phrases using the new and old vocabulary then partner up and correct each others sentences. This sort of exercise would also allow them work with both English and Latin.

Another exercise that I could work use correction in would be doing a “mad lib” type exercise, having my students create a story using past and new concepts. Written correction is something I would see in grading homework or tests, which is kind of hard to do in a language classroom, I want my students to hold onto the knowledge for the long term instead of cramming the night before for a test. I would probably do pop quizzes, without warning, so that my students are always mindful of the material. The homework would most likely be only to assess how well my students are grasping the material, it would probably be a way to tell what my students need to look at more. i would circle or mark the wrong answer and point them towards what they need to look at, and leave them to try and determine the problem and solution. On quizzes I would just give them the correct answer and have them write it out multiple times with the explanation as to why my correction is the solution.

My end goal in all this is to make sure my students are getting the information and placing into their long term memory. I want to see my students succeed in “knowing” the language, verbally, written, and in reading.

image: http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/Communicative-Language-Teaching-in-Action-Putting-Principles-to-Work/9780131579064.page

Latin Textbooks and How They Measure Up to the Standards

Comparing the dated textbook (1988), Traditio: An Introduction to the Latin Language and Its Influence by Patricia A. Johnston, to the more recent Disce! An Introductory Latin Course by Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr. and Thomas J. Sienkewicz, one can obviously see how different the two are.

Traditio is like many other traditional Latin textbooks based purely on grammatical and translation instruction. The book has few pictures, including (and limited to) the cover and a small map. This particular textbook does not talk about culture in historical sense or literary. Each chapter starts with a basic grammar overview of the whole chapter and is then broken down into specific parts. Although an interesting development of the textbook is that the beginning goes into great detail on phonological aspects of the Latin language. Yet typical of any classically written Latin textbook, the first chapter focuses entirely on the verbal system, including not just the present but also other tenses, and states the first two conjugations. Another interesting aspect of this textbook would be that on instruction, a student exhausts a grandiose amount of learning on verbs before chapter 6.

This textbook is an ironically classic example of the common route many Latin teachers take on instruction in the classroom. When looking at the classical language learning standards, the only standards this textbook covers are 1.1 and 1.2. The other four goals, aside from communication, are not at all present in the textbook. These other four goals being culture, connections, comparison, and communities.

The second textbook, Disce!, is aesthetically pleasing to the eye and similar to Traditio, and puts just as much emphasis on phonological instruction. Yet in addition to the written phonological instruction, this particular textbook has an audio component. This feature is important for students to get an idea as to what a Roman accent may have sounded like. With this in mind, students are delving that much further into the Latin culture. This textbook also spends the first chapter explaining the alphabet and two different families one may have seen in Ancient Rome. Disce! breaks up the verbal system even further by focusing purely on one person from one tense in a single chapter. This instruction allows students to fully understand each person in a conjugation and its purpose.

In accordance to the classical standards, Disce! can easily be used to address all five goals. This could be done with little supplemented lessons for goals on communication, culture, connections, and comparisons. This textbook puts a lot of emphasis on the culture, going as far as teaching the students through two pseudo-Roman families.

Between the two textbooks, I would prefer to use Disce! over Traditio due to how much less supplementing I would have to do, in regards to the standards. As well as encouraging my students to have a well-rounded understanding of the Latin language. The visual aspects of the textbook also makes for a more interesting learning experience.