Gluttons for Punishment?
October 28, 2010Just some personal thoughts…
So, I know that a number of kids in my school complain because the Spanish program is too easy. I can react and say, “Well, that’s just ’cause I’m doing my job well. I make it easy for them to learn.” But I’m in a private college prep school and many kids don’t respect a teacher who has an easy class. And my pride doesn’t like to hear these comments.
Yesterday, I asked them to list the teachers whose classes were their favorites and most interesting. I noticed, in their responses, that the favorite classes were the many of the classes that they listed as their most difficult classes. I think this is because these are accomplished teachers who can effectively help their students arise to the challenges they give them.
I feel like I want to make my class more challenging. But is it just because I want my class to be more challenging, so that the kids will respect my class? I don’t feel like that’s all. I feel like kids don’t engage or pay attention enough in class because they aren’t worried about their grades. I also feel like they feel bored when it’s not challenging enough.
Maybe this is all because I need to work on my teacher skills with circling, personalizing, etc. It may be that if I were a better teacher, they wouldn’t care about how challenging the class was. But right now, my intuition tells me that many students are unhappy with the challenge level.
On the other hand, I have some students still who are struggling even with the current level. I fear that by moving ahead too fast I will leave them in the dust.
I think in my school, 40% of the students may be “4%ers,” and this presents me with some issues in the curriculum I offer and my assessment.
I guess, as a second year teacher, I’m still really processing a lot of what I do, and what I believe about teaching.
I’m still trying to set my class up in the most beneficial way myself, trying to work with strongly textbook oriented teachers who come after me… so, not having figured it all out yet, one of the ideas i have considered is proficiency based grading. Maybe you could have your current goals for the class be worth a B and then for an A, students have to go beyond. So you could have enrichment vocabulary words and when they use them in their speech, and writing and can identify them on vocabulary tests, they bring their grades up to an A. That way everyone has confidence in their skill, but it gives them room to excel. The extra words could come from thematic lists or they could be words that you have used in class but not circled into acquisition for everyone. They could even come from the students’ private vocab list of interesting words found while reading. You could have them do more speaking and writing so they have a goal to reach for.
Scott Benedict has a workshop on this. And Michele does a version of it. Donna Tatum Johns would probably also have some really good ideas, because she teaches in a private school too. I never hear her chime in online, but she’s at some of the summer conferences. An example of a French exam of hers is posted at http://www.susangrosstprs.net, and that may give you some ideas.
Someone online did something that seemed to work for her… she took the opposite approach to typical TPRS and she showed the kids just how much they didn’t know. Then they realized that they had something to learn and they tried harder. This would take a certain amount of finesse to be successful. And there’s a lot of room for failure, so use with care…
I have a similar issue because I typically get the more advanced kids in my school. So I’ll be interested in hearing how you handle the challenge issue.
Thanks for the comments and suggestions Carla. I heard Scott Benedict this summer, and he is probably a big part of why I’m thinking about all of this. Also, thanks for directing me to the examples on Susan Gross’s site. I haven’t looked at those in a while.
So…Stephen, how did it go? I’d love to hear whether you went for Carla’s suggestions. I’m still struggling with the same thing — partly because I have so many levels in a room but I don’t want to always have to make different quizzes. I’ve been looking at the proficiency guidelines a lot lately. I had thought that I could track where kids were on the guidelines, and if they reached above their level in some meaningful way, that would mean they were earning higher grades. On our semester oral, I did point out after each group what kids had done well, and after the fact realized that I could have had them all sitting with the guidelines in front of them so that I could show how some kids were reaching.
Of course, none of that is what makes the class “harder.”
As you probably know, I’ve worked a lot with embedded readings, and I think those do a great deal to give the upper-level kids a challenge by the time that we’ve finished reading through all the levels of a piece.