Are you a World Language teacher looking to understand how to set up your Spanish gradebook? Most of us have online grading platforms now like PowerSchool, and in these platforms, we are allowed to create our own categories.
In some schools, the district tells us what categories we need to have and what weight they must carry. In others, we have the freedom to choose what works best for our students! Here are some ideas for you to consider.
Are You Standards-Based?
If your school is grading students on proficiency standards, your gradebook might look different than someone who is grading more traditionally.
The most common Spanish gradebook setup here is to have at least 4 categories: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening. A lot of teachers weigh each of these categories equally, at 25% each.
Pros:
*Students and parents know exactly where strengths and weaknesses lie.
*It can really help teachers to be sure they are hitting all 4 skills relatively equally in a marking period.
Cons:
~There’s no space to document practice and participation.
~It can be hard to convert standards-based grading into a numerical grade of 87%, 64% or 95%.
Traditional Grades?
If you can set up your Spanish gradebook any way you want, some teachers tend to go with the more traditional categories in their gradebook. Here are some common categories:
Tests
Projects
Quizzes
Homework
Participation
Usually, teachers will weigh each category differently, with tests and/or projects weighing the most heavily and homework weighing the least.
Pros:
*This type of system may encourage students to participate and do work outside of class. Many students find that Spanish gradebooks that don’t count homework at all is demotivating, and they stop doing things that they don’t get a grade for.
*It’s easy to create a “paper trail” of what students are doing to practice and learn leading up to an assessment.
Cons:
~This may require a lot more data entry for teachers.
~Grading participation can be subjective, and leave teachers open to challenges from students and parents.
Work-Arounds for District-Required Setups
If your district or department mandates your Spanish gradebook setup, here are some things the teachers in my department do to make things closer to our ideal.
To give context, in my district, our gradebook must be set up with only 2 categories that carry weight:
80%: Assessments that are graded with a rubric
20% Other graded things (a quiz, an Edpuzzle, an exit ticket, group work, projects)
As you may imagine, this Spanish gradebook setup carries some challenges. The idea is that what students know and are able to do by far outshines the smaller, less cognitively challenging tasks we might ask them to do along the way.
We find that the interpretive skills of listening and reading are often assessments that students can more easily get a higher grade, since they are not producing their own Spanish. Therefore, when we enter those scores in our 80% category, we weigh those assessments as half weight. The production assessments of speaking and writing are weighed as full weight. This ends up giving a clearer picture of a student’s overall proficiency and skill.
We also can create a category that shows their participation and practice. It does not carry any weight towards their quarter grade, but it allows us to create that evidence of how students are performing in and out of the classroom to show them and their adults what they are, or are not doing, to move the needle on their learning and proficiency.
**In my school, some teachers have stopped entering scores in this category entirely. They find it to be time-consuming and it’s one of the things they’ve let go in our perpetual time crunch. Other teachers continue to use it as a way to qualify students to do a re-take of an assessment. But I will admit, since this change, the amount of times I give homework has gone down drastically due to the fact that so many fewer students do it. I focus more on entering grades of completion for the practice activities we do in class.
Spanish Gradebook Setup Decisions
The decisions you make about your gradebook are important! And sometimes they require trial and error. Step one is to talk to your department supervisor to find out what, if anything, is required. And then it’s a good idea to talk to your department members. It’s a good idea to have a similar system in place amongst all Spanish teachers, particularly of the same level.
For example, if Spanish teacher 1 has 6 tests and 8 quizzes, but Spanish teacher 2 has 2 tests and 4 quizzes, you can see that students in the first teacher’s class have far more opportunities to show what they know and/or improve one bad score compared to the students in the 2nd teacher’s class. This can lead to unhappy parents and students, and an unfair disadvantage for students in the second class.
It’s important to remember that students in high school will someday be using their GPA for things like class rank, Valedictorian and Salutatorian, and more importantly, merit scholarships for college based on GPA. We don’t want to falsely inflate their grades, but we do want to make a fair system of grading.
Resources
AP Spanish Week 1: Everything You Need to Get Started!
Why Learn Another Language Scavenger Hunt for Spanish, French, Italian, German
Spanish Back to School Survival Pack for Middle and High School
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