Encouraging Academic Skills in ESL: Grade Tracking

After a harrowing day, one can crawl in a hole and hope to die or try to make it better for the next time.

At my school, teachers have a fast turn around.  Final exams are done one day and the next report cards are to be handed to the school.  This happens monthly.  So the turn around is quick, the learning curve is high for students and teachers.

This last Friday was a little rough.  We always have had teachers give the report cards directly to the students.  This can be a great time to give feedback and even congratulate the people who passed and are moving on to bigger and better things.  But for the students who didn't do well, this is a time to place blame and confront the teacher one on one about the reasons they need to repeat the class.

The tricks for dealing with the upset students are many: remind them that learning any language takes time, that it has nothing to do with intelligence, it takes some people longer to acquire English, etc. In a perfect world you move on and council the student the specifics to improve and succeed next month.

In a not so perfect world, tempers rise.  "Why did you fail me, I did everything right!" "My teacher failed me."  The students blame the teacher; the teacher is forced onto the defensive.  It now becomes the teacher justifying everything they have done in the last month, not what the student should do to improve.  This puts the teacher in a rough spot to say the least. This is when the shouting matches begin, when teachers decide to leave the profession.

What to do? Well, crawling into a hole sounds good but...

The Idea

Let's bring the responsibility back to the student while encouraging building academic skills.  The idea is for students to keep a grade book of their progress.  In this blog, I'll share a digital version.  It doesn't need to be; you could print it out blank and pencil in the numbers.

This will help students to not be "surprised" about their final grade while taking some of the bureaucratic weight off the teacher so that they do not have to fill out endless warning forms.

The end goal is to encourage students to take responsibility for their learning, plan and be on the right track to improving their English, not being worried about numbers and grades.

What to do

However you calculate your grades, make it simpler so everyone can understand it.  Make thing point based, have a total where all the quizzes add up to that point.  Or only work in percentages and average.  Whatever you do, just make it simple enough for a student to work the numbers.  I teach adults, adults know math.  They can figure it out if you give them the information in a comprehensible form.

Work in your rubric to your form. For example, one rubric I follow is split into four categories: 25% for participation/homework, quizzes, speaking, and the final exam respectively.

Next is the spread sheet.  Leave room for students to write.  Leave room for yourself if you need to "pull an audible" and add or subtract items as you see necessary.

I used Google Docs and created a spreadsheet that holds all my grades.

Examples

Feel free to view the spreadsheet here and copy/download it for yourself to modify.  This is what you could send to students so that they can put in the numbers.

What to do next

Feel free to copy or download and modify my examples as you see fit.  For me, I would share the form with my students on the first day of class and have them save it for themselves.  As grades come in, help/encourage students to record their grades.  This way they can see how well they are doing and what scores they need on tests to succeed in the future.

Other Applications

• Keep track of all the grades for the students. Give them numbers so their identity is secure.
• Administration sets up the E&E and watches as grades/attendance come in.  They can assist with warnings.
• Link in with other grades and have an up to date total class average.  
• Give teachers laptops/tablets. Teacher fills it in an shares with the student so they can watch.  
• Websites that track student grades.  You could do this with Edmodo or Engrade just to name a few...Maybe a blog for the future :)

What do you think?

Any ideas on how to encourage students to take responsibility?  Help them succeed in their work?

Community Clips for Written Feedback

Do you ever have students ask questions, questions, questions, when they receive a writing back?  I've always found that giving constructive feedback for my students has been a balancing act: Try to give them as much information as I can about the writing and yet not spend half an hour a paper.

Solution? Record yourself looking at a student's paper.

So in conjunction with the macros I have set up on my Word (go here if you would like to do it for yourself), I decided to try using a screen-cast, something that records my computer screen and voice, as I look over a paper.

The Idea

While you are giving feedback, however you give feedback, record the paper and your voice.  This way you can show they what is wrong and how to fix it while you are doing it.  You then make the video available to the students.  They can go over and fix their mistakes at their own speed.

This can not only save you class time by not having to spend as much time assisting individual students, but also the students can watch the video as much as they need to make the corrections.

You can do this in conjunction with how you already give feedback.

How to

Set Up

Set up a way for students to send you their written work.  You can use something as easy as email for this.  This is a perfect time to use Edmodo however.  It is a great tool and really easy to use.  You also don't have to worry about organizing things, searching through your email, or even giving away anything personal.

Get a Program

Download something to do a screen-cast.  I like CommunityClips.  It is easy, it does everything I want, and it does it for free.  There are others though, such as ScreenCast-o-Matic, though it leaves a watermark.

Record

While you look at the writing from the student, record yourself speaking the comments and how to fix it (or whatever you like to do).  Try to to have too much dead sound while you are doing it.  I try to read the paper out loud to them if I found myself silent for a time.  Community Clips (and I assume others) has a pause button, so you can take breaks or give yourself time to think.

Send back

Email or upload back to the students.  With Edmodo, this is super slick.  You can create an assignment and send it back to them really easily.  Other options would be to put on Youtube or some other share site.  The disadvantage here is that anyone can see it.

If you can think of any other good vessels of delivery, please write a comment!

Example

If you would like to set up the buttons (macros which make the grammar comments without me having to type it in), read this older post.

What would you do?

What do you think? Are you scared about the amount of work it would take? What kind of variations would you make?  Make a comment!

Another Great Tool: Socrative

Want your students to use a smart phone for good, not evil? What kind of things could you do with instant feedback from your students? Socrative is an interesting web site which hosts questions that students can answer using any device that has web access, such as a smart phone.

The Idea

Create a couple of comprehension check questions that you would like to ask while giving a lecture, or a quick quiz to check up on your students.  Use the feedback to help steer the class or even to aid error correction.

What to do

Create a Socrative account.  Your account now controls a "classroom".  Now, create a quiz or even just one or two questions you would like to ask your students during a lecture.

Give the students the code to enter the classroom.   They can use their phone or any device that has Internet access by going to m.socrative.com and answering the questions that you ask.

You can then use the feedback to help you gauge how much time to spend on the topic, which students need more work, what kind of mistakes people are making, etc.

Example

Go to http://www.socrative.com/ and create a teacher account.  Follow the directions on how to use the site.  Make some questions or quizzes.  If you would like to try one of the quizzes I made, use the codes below. I'll try to add more quizzes.

If you would like to see what it is like for students, join this class: 261381.  Take the quiz.

What is really nice is that you get an email report of the answers at the end in the form of a spreadsheet.  I really like printing this out for students the next day and having them correct their own and other's mistakes.

What is really neat about this report is if you have a projector, or better yet smart board (I have an Eno board), you can project the wrong answers on the screen (without the names) and correct mistakes right then and there.

Here is an example worksheet I made with real responses from the students.

Try it!

What would you like to see done with this technology?  What are some good quiz ideas you have?  What are some other ways we can get our ESL students to use their smart phone smart?

Writing Macros to Aid Written Feedback

The Problem

I was running into problems with printers and students. For some reason, students keep thinking that it was okay to not turn in their work on time giving the excuse that they don't have a printer, or the school printer was down. This would lead to getting the writing emailed to me. It was then on me to print out the essay. I got a little upset about it.

This lead to using a site like Edmodo so collect student essays. They send it to you this way and you don't have to get your personal email involved.  Plus, it is just really nice to have it all organized for you. This worked well but I kept running into the time issue: too much feedback. I was writing endless comments and a lot of them ended up being similar, or the same idea.

So I started making comment macros for Microsoft word. 

The Idea

So the idea is a make a comment that you use often, highlight the problem, and click a button; BAM! There is your comment already written out. 

Comments vary from "Can you think of another example?" to "Make sure the subject agrees with the verb. Example:They is...->They are...". Students are questioned about there work, mistakes pointed out, and good work is praised. This saves time as well as makes your comments consistent. Students can become more aware of the types of mistakes they make and how to fix it.

It is a little work to set up, but here is how. This set up is for Microsoft 2007 or later, though it may be easier with earlier versions.

Cheat!

If you want to download my macro script with what I already set up, here it is. Though you need to troubleshoot it and set it up. Ignore this if you don't know what I'm talking about.

What to do

1. Write your comments

It works best to get all your comments written out first so that you can just work on making the macro later. I have my comments go into two groups, content and grammar.  I also tend to have the students write two drafts of essays. I give the content feedback first and after they correct it, I give grammar feedback. I find it works well.

Here is a list of my comments (The grammar ones are mine, the content ones are borrowed/adapted from this excellent article on feedback). It may be easier to do this with this information directly in a word document.

2. Make a Macro

First, you need to "Record" a macro. What this does is save all the subsequent things you do (clicking, typing, backspaces, forward spaces, everything) until you hit the stop recording button. So first, highlight something (it can be anything, but for me, it will be the comment I want to make).

Next, you need to name your macro. Use something you will remember, otherwise you won't know what it does until you click it. Click okay.

Now you click "New Comment" and type, don't copy and paste, your comment.

When finished, go back and stop recording your macro.
Now go through and do this for each comment.

*Complicated Time Saver

If you don't want to retype each comment, you can go through and edit each comment after words. Just Name all your macros without highlighting anything. When you finished just naming macros, click "View Macros" and then Click "Edit". You then have the macro editor. Under the title of your macro copy this script:


Selection.Comments.Add Range:=Selection.Range
    Selection.TypeText Text:="The comment you wish to make."

In the macro editor then, you can actually go through and copy and paste what you want to say.

3. Create Buttons

Now right click anywhere on the top part of Word, the thing called the "ribbon". Click "Customize the Ribbon" (Or go to File, Options, Customize Ribbon).

It brings you to this window where you can then make a new "Ribbon". Call it whatever you want, but this is where you customize how you want it to work.

Create a "New Tab" by clicking on the bottom. This will be your work space for making comments.

Right Click to edit the name of the tab. I like "Proof Reading. Edit the group for the type of comments you want, e.g. "Comments", "Content Comments" and "Grammar Comments". Add new group under your tab to get these groups. This starts to get messy, you may want a separate tab for different types of comments.

Start to add your macros by:

1. Select "Macros" from the "Choose commands from"
2. Select the macro you want to add
3. Select the group you want it in
4. Click Add

I now looks a little messy and hard to pick the one you want. At this point you can rename the macro from something like "Normal.NewMacros.clear_thesis" to "Clear Thesis". When you rename something, you also can change the icon the macro is associated with. This makes it easier to use later on.

You may also like to have a command to just make a regular comment on this tab, so go back to "Choose Commands from" and click "popular" then find the comment button.

Now you have a customized tab that looks something like this:

4. Profit!

If you did all this work, all you have to do now is highlight the student work, click the button, there is your comment. Happy grading!

Improvements

What would be great would be websites with grammar lessons and exercises that students could follow up with either linked into the comments, or as a comment sheet added to it. Same thing with the content. A real example to go along with it would be great. Any thoughts? I'd love to hear.