So, you’ve assigned your students Garbanzo lessons and – win for your classroom – they’ve completed them! But what should you do with the points they’ve accumulated? And how should you handle grades for the student who wasn’t in class for the summative assessment but was able to finish the Garbanzo lesson at home?
While it’s tempting to correlate Garbanzo points with a numerical score, it’s not actually the easy fix for your gradebook that you might think. Let’s chat about why Garbanzo is best used as a formative assessment across the board, and how restructuring your gradebook, if necessary, might be the best thing you can do for your students.
Garbanzo lessons are designed for learning, not assessing
Every Garbanzo lesson includes challenge questions.
After reading a portion of the text, students are asked a question about what they just read. When our authors design the lessons, they do not write quiz-style questions; they write processing-style questions. Here is the difference: a quiz-style question is intended to evaluate whether or not a student understood what they just read. A processing-style question is designed to help students understand what they just read.
Often, processing-style questions are designed to be obvious and easy to answer. Garbanzo uses many either/or and yes/no questions, which give students further language and content exposure.
After students respond to the question--and likely get it right!--Garbanzo provides feedback to affirm and repeat the answer. These are statements such as [in the language of the lesson], “Yes, the Nazca lines are in Perú. They are not in Chile. They are in Southern Perú!”
Garbanzo lessons, therefore, are a formative learning activity, not a summative assessment activity. They help students build proficiency in a new language by creating the conditions that allow them to acquire language.
Standards-based grading
In many World Language teaching circles, the goal of a language class isn’t to perfectly do every activity in class, but to build proficiency steadily over time. To reflect that goal, teachers use a standards-based grading system instead of a system that evaluates assignment completion and accuracy.
That’s the foundation around which we designed Garbanzo. And within that system, each lesson should be considered a FORMATIVE assessment.
The points system within a Garbanzo lesson isn’t for grading purposes, but more of a way to measure where a student might be in their reading comprehension. Did they mostly understand the lesson with just a few sticky spots, or did the entirety of the lesson go over their head?
From there, you can triage support.
Is a student consistently earning all possible points? They might need more challenging lessons that stretch their reading comprehension.
Maybe they’re consistently earning half to three-quarters of possible points per lesson. In this case, that student would be best served by completing lessons in easier paths (paths with lower numbers). These paths contain lessons with a more narrow vocabulary range and more simple sentence structures.
So, if Garbanzo lessons aren’t intending to be graded, with a reading grade, how should they be entered into the grade book?
We recommend entering Garbanzo lessons into the gradebook as completion grades in a low, or zero-weighted, gradebook category. Doing this will not only save you time (no more assigning a bracket of points to a particular grade), but it’ll help your gradebook become a more accurate reflection of students’ linguistic proficiency.
What happened when Martina switched to a Standards-Based Grading system
When our co-founder, Martina Bex, was in the early years of her teaching career, she used a more traditional grading system. Through colleagues and courses, she began to examine WHY she’d been using it (spoiler alert: that was the way things were done) and learned about what a traditional system actually measures.
In her own words, it wasn’t great.
It didn’t reflect the kind of classroom environment or approach to education and language-learning she wanted to foster in her students.
In fact, it often included factors that students had little to no control over, like test-taking skills and home/family situation.
When she switched to Standards-Based Grading system, she discovered 5 key things:
- Students had a clear, measurable goal for class, instead of a G.P.A. goal. This allowed them to release the desire for perfectionism and focus instead on proficiency.
- Grades reflected performance in the language instead of performance as a student. Not all children have the tools, support, or desire to be and do what an exemplar student does and that’s okay. They shouldn’t be punished for that in a class where the focus isn’t on work habits, but on language. Allow grades to reflect what students can do with the language, and nothing more.
- Students understood that their grades carried meaning, and weren’t just arbitrary numbers. Their grades matched up to the standards for the skill in that course.
- There were fewer Ds and Fs, but not fewer As. That’s because lower grades reflected that students simply didn’t understand the material. As students worked to improve their proficiency, they also improved their grades.
- The grading system communicated the student's place on the path to proficiency, not a completed task, which meant that students were inspired to meet the standard and push up to the next level.
When it came time to create Garbanzo, Martina was resolute that we’d do so with a Standards-Based Grading system in mind.
For that reason, Garbanzo lessons aren’t intended to be summative assessments. If you must put each lesson into the gradebook, do so for completion!
Learn how to assess for acquisition!
Want to take a deep dive into assessing for acquisition and standards-based assessment? The Comprehensible Classroom has several options available for study!
Teaching and Assessing for Acquisition workshops: Request a custom workshop for your district or attend one of the open booked ones.
