Friday, December 5, 2014

Keeping the Love of Latin Alive...During Exam Prep.?

Exams can mark a nerve-wracking time for all of us.  Younger students (I teach middle school.) need
Blechhhy, Wikimedia
to be walked through their studying more than older ones do.  For years I simply gave a nonstop regimen of quizzes the two weeks before an exam.  They did help measurably, but no one could describe the process as engaging, and it certainly did little to foster the love of Latin!  Sure we sang a bit too, but we had a lot to cover, and one aspires to more than chocolate-covered broccoli, right?

Then I stumbled upon the idea of review via composition.  At first, I was thinking of efficiency, not passion.  I could hit all of the grammar (and much of the vocabulary) in ten to twenty carefully-written Latin sentences.  This did seem to be more authentically challenging, and it actually did work well for my top students.  

My struggling students, though, could get overwhelmed as they self-corrected that action-packed page.  It was too much feedback for them to take in all at once, and there was nothing they could immediately do with that onslaught of information... except hope to do better next time!

Doing this in Linguachet did improve things a good bit:  students got specific immediate feedback as they were working. They could learn from their mistakes. Furthermore, that immediate feedback

really motivated them...even when I was simply grading completion!  

For highly challenging, cumulative exercises, though, this motivation occasionally became a bit of a problem: struggling students struggled too hard, and occasionally I would find an exercise 1/2 done to total perfection with a massive amount of time expended.

From talking with my students through this process, I began to realize that - for many of them - making more than 10 attempts per question often amounted to brute-force hacking.  Formative feedback drew them deeply into battle, but - in certain situations - Pyhrric victories were more likely to result than meaningful learning.  Ironically, I had built Linguachet partly to enable differentiation, but seeing my own students' learning data from it was what fully convinced me.  Students' attention and effort are precious, limited resources, and I had to start learning to steward them.  This may even be more true during exams, when many students also need to catch up!

From there, I began to watch Linguachet's results tab data differently.  My goals began to change: from getting everyone through the same work to keeping each student in a state of flow so he or she could progress.  Armed with live data and plenty of ready choices, I began to improvise differentiation a bit.  I began encouraging certain students to use the skip button, not to avoid challenges but to select just a few of them.   I began to experiment with assigning the concept-dense review exercises to my strongest students while targeting concept-specific units for the struggling ones.  I also experimented with self-prescription, having students look at a recent test and choose 3 weak areas to target in Linguachet.  Knowing the homework was targeted to help them individually did put more of the focus on learning for some.

Everybody loves a Cinderella ending.  All my C students became A students.  That didn't happen.  Writing 12 sentences doesn't make every single vocabulary word magically stick either, but it definitely helps with grammar.  My steps were tentative.  I still gave the same exams.
What else happened, though, was far, far cooler in its own way.  More of my students began to get the idea that they could DO Latin.  Some started working ahead in Linguachet.  One first-semester Latin student, in the peak season of exam stress, decided to translate "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" into Latin, frame it, and present it to me for Christmas.  In January, my Latin students crashed their school's talent show by performing "Free Bird"...in Latin.  On at least one occasion, my assigning Linguachet homework was met with a classroom of...cheers?

I still don't believe in a holy grail of education.  My classroom has often been a lab but never a test tube.  I was simultaneously experimenting with oral Latin, embedded stories, comprehensible input, and TPRS, and I think all of these things buoyed students' enthusiasm.  My students were also watching ME risk, improvise, and learn, which probably added to the energy.  Perhaps anything that makes you risk, improvise, and learn from your mistakes is going to catalyze a growth mindset.  I hope that Linguachet will do that for a lot of students...even during exams...perhaps especially during exams!

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