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Here is another Disney Award Question I've been working on for a few days. As I said in a previous post, I'm putting my essays (both the keepers and the ones where I had misread the question and thus needed to toss the essay) here on the blog site because I think that such reflective essays can be valuable if seen and discussed, not just kept for an award application. This is, after all, a learning opportunity.
My initial problem with this essay was that I had misread/misunderstood it. Then I was feeling frustrated that there is no "in lieu of" for most of us--we have to test. But we don't have to test everything, do we? And that is the point. So here's the actual question:
"In lieu of high stakes testing, how do you remain a creative teacher while still following approved curriculum and accountability guidelines?"
Unfortunately with the advent of No Child Left Behind I think it is highly unlikely that teachers anywhere in this country are able to escape high stakes testing altogether. We are all too aware that our students at some juncture are going to face testing, whether it’s in the form of TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills), Advanced Placement exams, or even the National Latin Exam, and thus we must prepare our students to perform well on such tasks. In addition, we middle school Latin teachers are cognizant that we are only one part of a cooperative effort to provide students with the equivalent of at least two high school years of Latin. Thus my students must be able to do the traditional sorts of things that other Latin teachers require, and this includes being able to perform well on certain styles of tests, whether I believe these things to be best practices or not.
This does not mean, however, that I totally conform to what is traditionally required. I am constantly aligning what I do to meet two needs: what I believe to be truly the best practices in regard to second language acquisition (as opposed to traditional drill and kill Latin instruction) and what I perceive to be the needs of my students. Creativity in this instance manifests itself as an ability to think outside of the box coupled with the ability to make Latin accessible to a larger audience without diluting quality and rigor of the course.
I do not, for instance, use the traditional noun charts of morphological endings for the majority of the two years I have my Latin students. Declining an noun is devoid of meaning and becomes nothing more than a demonstration of rote memory. Instead, I teach a set of model sentences which demonstrate the morphological endings within the the context of a sentence so that the syntactic function of the endings are immediately obvious. (A more complete explanation can be found in “The Principles of Learning in the Middle School Latin Classroom” www.txclassics.org/PrinciplesOfLearningInTheMSLatinClassroom.pdf.) I then help students to make connections from the words in a story to the words in the model sentences. I constantly reinforce the application of these morphological endings in the context of reading by teaching specific reading skills for Latin including what we call metaphrasing. My tests, therefore, do not require the demonstration of rote memorization (though I do reward it via extra credit on tests) but instead require the application of rote memorization—the application and demonstration of understanding the syntactic meaning of those morphological endings.
In regard to culture, I try to design lessons that engage the students with the culture section of the chapter instead of treating it as the subject of a reading comprehension test. We have reenacted what a day in the life of our main character, Caecilius, would have been like. We have made a living map of Pompeii, with students making up the city gates and important buildings. I’ve had students write fictional stories which require a demonstration of the layout of a Roman house, or had them take the role of a slave and describe their lives from when they became a slave until they were freed. Such activities are often far more effective for mastering material than testing rote memorization of facts.
I believe the purpose of studying Latin is to read real Latin. To this end I have created a short unit from Vergil’s Aeneid of unadapted Latin poetry for the 8th graders. It is the scene involving the sea serpents attacking the priest Laocoon, who has just said that he doesn’t trust Greeks bearing gifts. We learn snake terminology (and practice different styles of movement with some of my son’s rubber snakes), work through the lines several times, break into groups and write a “film scenario,” act out lines to help understand and interpret the Latin, analyze the famous statue of Laocoon and his sons being attacked by sea serpents, and finish with essays. While I feel I cannot escape testing given current federal and district restrictions, I do strive toward alternative forms of assessment where appropriate, such as with my Vergil unit. The film scenario and the essay provide me with ample information to assess the learning that has taken place without having to resort to yet more testing.
My initial problem with this essay was that I had misread/misunderstood it. Then I was feeling frustrated that there is no "in lieu of" for most of us--we have to test. But we don't have to test everything, do we? And that is the point. So here's the actual question:
"In lieu of high stakes testing, how do you remain a creative teacher while still following approved curriculum and accountability guidelines?"
Unfortunately with the advent of No Child Left Behind I think it is highly unlikely that teachers anywhere in this country are able to escape high stakes testing altogether. We are all too aware that our students at some juncture are going to face testing, whether it’s in the form of TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills), Advanced Placement exams, or even the National Latin Exam, and thus we must prepare our students to perform well on such tasks. In addition, we middle school Latin teachers are cognizant that we are only one part of a cooperative effort to provide students with the equivalent of at least two high school years of Latin. Thus my students must be able to do the traditional sorts of things that other Latin teachers require, and this includes being able to perform well on certain styles of tests, whether I believe these things to be best practices or not.
This does not mean, however, that I totally conform to what is traditionally required. I am constantly aligning what I do to meet two needs: what I believe to be truly the best practices in regard to second language acquisition (as opposed to traditional drill and kill Latin instruction) and what I perceive to be the needs of my students. Creativity in this instance manifests itself as an ability to think outside of the box coupled with the ability to make Latin accessible to a larger audience without diluting quality and rigor of the course.
I do not, for instance, use the traditional noun charts of morphological endings for the majority of the two years I have my Latin students. Declining an noun is devoid of meaning and becomes nothing more than a demonstration of rote memory. Instead, I teach a set of model sentences which demonstrate the morphological endings within the the context of a sentence so that the syntactic function of the endings are immediately obvious. (A more complete explanation can be found in “The Principles of Learning in the Middle School Latin Classroom” www.txclassics.org/PrinciplesOfLearningInTheMSLatinClassroom.pdf.) I then help students to make connections from the words in a story to the words in the model sentences. I constantly reinforce the application of these morphological endings in the context of reading by teaching specific reading skills for Latin including what we call metaphrasing. My tests, therefore, do not require the demonstration of rote memorization (though I do reward it via extra credit on tests) but instead require the application of rote memorization—the application and demonstration of understanding the syntactic meaning of those morphological endings.
In regard to culture, I try to design lessons that engage the students with the culture section of the chapter instead of treating it as the subject of a reading comprehension test. We have reenacted what a day in the life of our main character, Caecilius, would have been like. We have made a living map of Pompeii, with students making up the city gates and important buildings. I’ve had students write fictional stories which require a demonstration of the layout of a Roman house, or had them take the role of a slave and describe their lives from when they became a slave until they were freed. Such activities are often far more effective for mastering material than testing rote memorization of facts.
I believe the purpose of studying Latin is to read real Latin. To this end I have created a short unit from Vergil’s Aeneid of unadapted Latin poetry for the 8th graders. It is the scene involving the sea serpents attacking the priest Laocoon, who has just said that he doesn’t trust Greeks bearing gifts. We learn snake terminology (and practice different styles of movement with some of my son’s rubber snakes), work through the lines several times, break into groups and write a “film scenario,” act out lines to help understand and interpret the Latin, analyze the famous statue of Laocoon and his sons being attacked by sea serpents, and finish with essays. While I feel I cannot escape testing given current federal and district restrictions, I do strive toward alternative forms of assessment where appropriate, such as with my Vergil unit. The film scenario and the essay provide me with ample information to assess the learning that has taken place without having to resort to yet more testing.
