Benchmarks in Spanish Class: Benefits and Challenges

Does your school do benchmarks for Spanish class? Our school does benchmarks in the fall, winter and spring. We track our students’ interpersonal listening and speaking proficiency. It presents some opportunities for reflection and evolution as well as a number of challenges. How about you? Do you do benchmarks in Spanish class?

Finding the Purpose For Benchmarks in Spanish Class

A benchmark is supposed to be a measure of a students skill or proficiency measured from their starting point until their end point, with the hope of gaging progress throughout the school year.

Benchmarks can be useful when the results and data gathered are used to inform instruction. For example, if we find that 30% of our students are at a Novice High proficiency level for speaking at the beginning of the year, the target for those students can be set at Intermediate Low by the end of the year.

We also might be able to reflect on what practices and activities actually help move the needle on improving proficiency by looking at data and asking questions. Sharing best practices can be really helpful!

Ways To Administer Benchmarks in Spanish Class

There are several ways teachers can design and implement a benchmark system in Spanish class. I will mention 2, but I would love to read comments or receive emails from readers who may have other ideas!

Standardized Tests

A Standardized Test: One example is the AAPPL Test by ACTFL. It’s a computerized test that comes in 2 versions. Students are tested on their reading, writing, listening and interpersonal speaking skills. The test is designed to start at one proficiency level and as students move through the test, the difficulty of the tasks increase. Wherever students stop being successful is the proficiency level at which they score. *Important to note: It is possible to order only the listen and respond section of this test! (Or any other individual section of the test.)

Advantages of this kind of benchmark:

-someone else does the grading for you! (Some sections are auto-graded and other sections are graded by trained AAPPL Test scorers)

-students are rated by proficiency level

-the test is already created (meaning teachers don’t have to do that step)

Disadvantages:

-teachers have no control over what their students will see on the test

-districts would have to pay for this testing

-often, when districts pay for a standardized test, it becomes required to use this data in a teacher’s yearly goal-setting and evaluation plan

Teacher-Created Benchmarks

Another option is for teachers to create their own benchmarks. In our school, teachers collaborate to create the prompts students will hear on our benchmarks.

We also created our own spreadsheets and rubrics to score and record our data.

Advantages:

-full teacher control over what students encounter on the benchmark

-full teacher control over grading

Disadvantages:

-teachers had to find time to create and score all of these benchmarks 3 times a year (VERY labor intensive)

-despite numerous attempts to perfect our rubrics and norm our scoring, teachers had a really hard time coming up with the same score for students. (For example, if we all listened to student A, there might be 3 different scores by 3 different teachers.)

Logistics of Benchmarks in Spanish Class

Colleagues, in my original blog post about this subject, I had a long section on the challenges of benchmarks in Spanish class. But, I am now in my era of finding the silver lining. I’m going to share how I have met some of the challenges in the hopes that it will help others.

Challenge 1: Teachers Who Don’t Agree on Score

Solution: We asked our department chair to add “look-fors” onto the rubric in student-friendly language. She even included some examples of what students might sound like.

I have also given myself permission to make my own interpretation of what each proficiency level sounds like, and apply that fairly to all of MY students. It still bugs me that as a department we are not always aligned with scoring, but it’s out of my control.

Challenge 2: Call Students up vs Have Them Record

Solution: For YEARS, I had students record, to my own detriment. I spend hours and hours of unpaid time listening and filling out rubrics. No more.

Now I create a meaningful activity for students to do in their seats while I call students up individually. It takes almost a week. It’s painful. It bugs me that students are doing seatwork without a lot of help or guidance from me.

My latest iteration of a meaningful activity is to give students a giant “choice board”. There are something like 9 activities, and they can pick the order in which they complete them, and they have options. In the winter, I do this right before midterms, and the activities are designed to help them review for the midterm exam. Same in the spring- right before finals or another big test.

Giving the students something relatively meaningful and somewhat personalized makes me feel better about not being actively with them for those class days. And I have made my peace. If the district wants me to score benchmarks several times a year, they will be done during contracted hours.

Colegas, I’d love to hear from you about benchmarks! Feel free to leave a comment on this post or email me at contactspecialtyspanish@contactspecialtyspanishgmail.com