Reflection: Letting Students Take Ownership

For this post, I will reflect on two questions.   The first one is the following:

What do you do help students take ownership of their own learning and therefore become more self-regulated and independent language learners? 

   This is definitely a facet of my teaching that I could improve on.  I feel that I've taken some baby steps in this direction in some ways.   I have a series of four questions I ask students to answer when they are either doing corrections for an essay or writing down what they said on a language lab, and grade themselves.   The questions are, in reality, complete-the-sentence responses, and they are as follows:

  On this assessment, I did well with...

I had trouble with...

      Therefore, to do better in the future, I will...  (OJO – don´t just say “to study” – be specific as to what you´re going to do, or what you´re doing to do differently, and how frequently you´ll do that)

Señora M can help me get better by...

    I want the students to acknowledge something positive in their work, and also to identify where they had trouble, and lastly, to come up with a plan for addressing that weakness.   I read these and comment on their responses, either agreeing with their choice for strengths or, with regard to weaknesses say something along the lines of "You actually did pretty well with [skill A], but you might want to focus on [skill B]."   I also enjoy reading their responses to the last question, as sometimes the students will request specfic activities which I can then provide either individually, or we can do as part of an activity in class.

     For some classes, in particular for 4th or 5th year levels, I'll have them create a rubric, which is what I'll then use to grade them.  But in the end, I'm the one doing the grading.   For the other levels, we also have rubrics, but I’m the one who grades them.  There is a lot of emphasis on producing clear and consistent feedback, especially between teachers, which is why we are required to use them.

Can you share two or three self-assessment strategies that you have tried or would consider trying with your students?  

     Firstly, in an attempt to find the happy medium between department-required rubrics and giving the students more ownership of their learning, firstly, I’d be completely willing to take a day to review the rubric with the students, and “translate” it from the current (perhaps opaque) English wording to language that makes sense to them.  We could then look at some sample paragraphs and grade them in groups, and then compare their responses so we can pinpoint what really is an A in terms of vocabulary and, for example a B for grammar.  

     I also found this to be a very helpful video, as it helped me focus on what self-assessment is (and isn’t).   While my students are not at the point where they can find their own mistakes (such as whether or not they correctly choose between the preterit and the imperfect),  it is very easy for me to read through a bunch of essays and limit myself to circling mistakes.  After I’ve done that, I could give the essays back to the students along with the rubrics.   I love the idea (from the video) of using colored pencils to highlight the evidence of the different skills being used.

   Though my initial reaction to the “can-do” statements wasn’t very complimentary, I think that they might provide clear goals for the students at the start of each unit, and be good ways to check-in with the students to see how they are progressing, also, to give the students a moment to pause and reflect on how they’re doing with their own grasp of the material.    I think that also, if I add one or two of my questions to the bottom of a “can-do” statement sheet, (“to do better I will…” and “Señora M can help me by…”) they’ll be able to come up with a a plan to do better (which may or may not receive suggestions by me) and I’ll still get that idea of what the students would like to do more of in class.