>> This assignment comes as we are reading-- this is Dutch again but I don't have any Dutch
for you, so its in English this time.
We were-- we had read an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet written with-- for Dutch--
learners of Dutch as a foreign language with the word-- frequency list and it was very pedagogic.
But one of the scenes in the middle of the play was, had just one line and it was the priest
to a page saying, "Give this letter to Romeo" and there's nothing about that.
There's nothing about the letter in the play.
The letter just stays in the envelope and we don't know what's in it.
We assume what's in it but there's no text so the assignment is write the letter.
So as a prewriting activity, several prewriting activities--
I had done up a rubric, a table matrix sort of thing.
And so in the first column I had, we're talking about characters, we're talking about actions
and we're talking about any other ideas they might have.
The first thing to do was to brainstorm some general relevant ideas
about the characters, about the actions.
So one of them would have been that Juliet was rather desperate
and hopeless-- in a hopeless state of mind.
Another one would have been Romeo is gone.
We know he's been banished.
What I wanted to get them to do first was to associate their paraphrases,
their perceptions about the characters, about the text with actual places in the text.
And so I wanted them to, this is a way of making a connection to find the place where she says,
"Oh there is no hope anymore now that my Romeo is gone and I have to marry Paris"
or that Romeo says, "I must away to Mantua and there I shall remain," et cetera, et cetera.
So this is a way of sort of collecting ideas, collecting--
refreshing your background knowledge, any number of things.
And then the idea is to take all of these things and put them into the letter,
to contextualize it, to keep it relevant to the text and all of these things.
Now, as far as assessment, there are a number of possibilities.
First of all, this sort of thing keeps very-- keeps content very salient, very prominent
and actually brings us-- it's a way of directly assessing content
to have you make these connections in the letter.
Another possibility is to do assessment for learning like we learned last week
in the previous module where because we had worked so closely with these elements
and analyzing content that the students should be able to come up with important points,
important points to include in a rubric.
One of the ways that we thought about doing that was first to brainstorm,
to read the letters and rate them.
Rate your top ones.
Then go back and say okay, now why did you rate them this way?
What went into your thinking?
What rationale did you have?
And then guide that discussion into the formation of a rubric which then we can use
in the evaluation of these things.
[ Applause ]
>> Great. Is it-- before you take off your mic, are there any questions or comments?
What is the level?
>> This is the-- it's about the sixth week of intensive second semester
of the course so it's about halfway--
>> So you're getting towards end of--
>> -- third semester.
>> End of third of semester.
>> Exactly, yeah.
>> And so it is an activity sequence that goes over a couple of days?
>> Yeah.
>> And the assessment for learning I like, that's fantastic idea.
Would you make it holistic?
Would you make it primary traits scoring?
Would you make it analytic?
What do you think fits the objective best here?
>> I think primary traits.
First of all, we have one or two content traits to identify and then I
as the teacher was concerned about their subject verb agreement
and the placement of the finite verb.
>> So it would be an analytic primary traits score.
>> Yeah.
>> For content but you're focusing on two or three issues.
>> Exactly.
>> And that's it.
>> Just one more thought with the rubrics though, I think very curious
to you see what the students come up with.
Because what if their evaluations are more holistic or what if they're
like you missed a comma and you missed this period there.
It'd be curious to see what they decide is the most important.
>> I think there's a paper in there.
[ Laughter ]
>> Yeah, definitely.
>> Yeah.
>> Definitely 'cause it would be really interesting to know
where the students are coming from.
And to what extent our expectations are met by their expectations.
Are they converged or not.