“If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do…”

The term is half over. In fact, the entire school is going on a ski trip tomorrow, so there are really only six classes left. It’s not a lot of time. This was a recurring theme at the mid-semester meeting last Friday. Agatha and I met with the other Intro teachers (speaking/listening, grammar, and writing) to discuss the students’ progress and strategize for the remainder of the term. Over and over I heard them say things like, “At this level, having class twice a week just isn’t enough. We need to see them every day.” “There is no way we can meet all of the objectives in this amount of time.” “We’ve barely even gotten to know the students and the term is already half over.” “If they’ve missed class even once, we’ve only seen them six or seven times ever. That’s more like tutoring!”

It’s looking like three students (of the group of eight) won’t be ready to move up to the next level at the end of the term. And the other five are questionable. Can any of them really “use the structures covered at this level in extended oral and written discourse with reasonable accuracy and some ability to self correct?" Probably not, if we’re being honest.

So, how do you help your students meet their learning outcomes when there just isn’t enough time? Cover everything and hope that they are (really) quick studies? Just focus on a few things? Assign more out-of-class work? Count on them getting a review in the next level? Hold them back for another term?

If only there were more time...

Assessment

The school where I’m teaching generally uses an outcomes-based assessment method. In order to advance at the end of the term, students need to have learned the skills and content that the current level is designed to teach. It’s Agatha’s* (and, to some degree, my) responsibility to assess whether or not the students display these outcomes, but it’s not always easy. For one thing, our textbook doesn’t include any assessment materials, so anything we use has to be found elsewhere or created by one of us.

Sometimes Agatha assigns homework that can be collected and graded, but many of the students don’t turn it in. They also tend to work with their friends, so it’s difficult to get a true read of how each student is doing.

Tests are another way of assessing, but they take up already-limited instruction time. In three weeks of class, Agatha has only given two “formal” in-class assessments. There was a vocabulary test a couple of weeks ago, and Thursday’s class started with a reading test. They were given 15 minutes to complete it, but only two of the students finished. The rest begged for more time. I think it really shook their confidence. Tariq*, in particular, was having a lot of trouble. Several of the students were “using the dictionary” on their cell phones until Agatha asked them not to, but Tariq couldn’t let it go and had to be asked several more times. Once he gave up on the phone, he resorted to looking at Mustafa’s* test for help. Agatha asked him to please just try on his own, to which he replied, “I can’t thinking. I feel… I feel…dumb.”

Agatha also has a great way of assessing the students without their knowing that it’s happening. She created a simple grid of the student’s names and some of the outcomes we’re looking for. This could easily be adapted for other contexts. While one of us is teaching, the other is listening. Any time we hear a student hit or miss one of these outcomes, we add a check or an X to the grid. Though it’s definitely not the only kind of assessment we should be doing, I love this method because:

1. It doesn’t take away from instruction time 
2. It isn’t as stressful for the students 
3. It’s relatively easy, especially with both of us in the classroom 
4. Because we do it during every class, we have a good sense of where the students are, what we still need to work on, and how much they are improving. 

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.