Anyone who has known me for a decent amount of time will be able to tell you pretty quickly that I can't draw. Really at all. All my stick people have giant eyes and look the same, my third period spent twenty minutes coaching me to draw a box so we could have a gift drawn on the board, and I generally have to 'hire' students to be artists, rather than just doing it to give them a job. My handwriting is a disaster, and my kids come in at the beginning of the year, see my decorations and say, "Aww, that's so cute! Here, let me re-do everything for you." It's thoughtful.
Enter postermywall.com. I am not being hired or paid to do this, and in fact, I don't think they know I'm writing this, so take it in that spirit.
I want a couple posters this year. I've had them posted on my wall in the past as large, Sharpied sheets of butcher paper, but they were hard to read from across the room and did not look good. I'll explain them below for anyone who wants to read about them.
I spent a lot of time researching custom poster companies, cheap and expensive, and found that most of them require you to have an image file already prepared that you can upload. My computer isn't fancy, and, as we already know, I can't draw, so I don't have an image file. I also don't know how to make one. I wanted something where I could type in words and go from there. Postermywall offers me a LOT of background options, a number of fonts and colors and choices, I can customize, type whatever I want, have a variety of sizes, and have a portrait or landscape poster. They charge based on size and not number of design elements, and they ship pretty quickly. My 24x36 posters are 24 dollars, but I get a 10% discount because I told the facebook universe about my them. :) Sometimes, they offer decent coupons as well.
If you need some posters made and, like me, cannot draw, postermywall.com seems so far to be a pretty decent resource.
The Posters
One of these posters lists nine expectations of my students - be on time, sit up straight, keep eye contact, be positive, only Latin during Latin time, etc. Bob Patrick calls this the DEA; I call it ut bene succedat - so it goes well.
The second poster gives them a scale on which I assess their progress, if you will.
There's been something going around on Ben Slavic's blog for quite a while that they refer to as jGR (Jen's Great Rubric), and people develop their own with their own tweaks. Mine's a five point scale beginning unexcused and absent and going to volunteering, emerging and original unforced output, active participation. Most kids get a 3 or a 4 most weeks. Some get fives. Few get less, and those are the students I need to talk to.
I know if I hand out this rubric, children will lose it, and I will be printing things for the rest of my life. If I put it on my wall, it makes it easier both for me to assess them at a glance and for them to assess themselves when I ask them to (at the end of class each day). We go over what each of the terms means. At the end of the 'unit,' they turn their sheets in, and, I can look at my scores for them and their scores for them and see where we are.
The third poster is a four-finger scale. I frequently ask my students to show me on their fingers how well they understand something. If I don't have a real scale on which to measure that, I don't really have any idea what their responses mean. So my scale goes like this:
1 finger = I have no idea. 2 fingers = I think I get it, but I need help. 3 = yeah, I pretty well get this. 4 fingers = I could teach this.
I aim for mostly threes and fours most days, and this gives them something to base their understanding on. This is based heavily on the Marzano scale.
When they assess themselves at the end of class, I also ask them to include their Marzano score and the score on any assessments or assignments we had that day. It truly allows me to track their progress, which is enormously important (really, at this stage, more so than accuracy) in a language classroom.
Comments