While the rubric shown as artifact one for Standard 4c Classroom-based assessment is adequate for grading learners of all language proficiency, I believe the modifications for assessment shown in artifact two are what makes this assessment adaptive for ESL Learners in different stages. This is an end-of-unit assessment and as such would be a necessary addition to a student’s portfolio, and allow the student to have continuous intellectual development at a level that is challenging and also engages them socially with other learners in productive ways.
The final assignment and grading rubric were parts of an interdisciplinary unit I wrote with two classmates in ESC 766, Teaching ENL across the Content Areas. We designed this unit for a whole class so it would include both students of average language proficiency and ENL students who had varying levels of proficiency from transitional to expanding and commanding. We all believe and agree that ENL students need to be held to the same high standards in content area classes. For this reason, every student had to solve the math equation and write a short essay reflecting on the connections between the math and science learned and how such knowledge helped the character in the book change the lives of people in Sudan. Working together in this class for this assignment made me aware of the spectrum of expectations for ENL students. I believed their primary obstacle was the extra time they needed to complete tasks and that is why I believed in modifying the final task by asking some students to create their own problem and solve others while some only had to solve. Ideally, the ENL students do do all the same tasks as other students, but this assignment made me realize it is not so common to modify the assignments to account for this. This assignment strengthened my belief in varying assessment so that English Language Learners content-area knowledge can be assessed independently of their language proficiency.
Given the difficulty of the task both in ELA, Earth Science, and Geometry, I felt that the trifold brochure, a suggestion of one of my classmates, was a good adaption of classroom tasks to account for varying stages of ENL development. All students would produce a brochure, but, given the extra time needed for ENL students to write, it was only fair that they spent less time creating their own math problem. This was a fun assignment but I believe I can only grow more by seeing it done in the classroom and finding how students achieve the tasks.
If I were to do this project again, I believe we also could’ve been helped by having an earth science teacher to bring additional techniques to inform classroom instruction that would be specific to that content area. The strongest part of our work was how it was focused on academic production of writing and math, but, by having students share their brochures and solve each other’s math problems, students could be assessed across intellectual and social development. I have been told by many teachers that ENL students should have the exact same rubric as other students. While I think that’s unfair, this project made me reflect on how this is another case where as an ENL teacher I could provide an additional rubric on top of the one for the whole class that emphasized whatever language goals I was working with the student on at that particular point in the year. One area that I would like to grow in professional is in how to still maintain the legal mandates of standardized testing, but finding the technical ways in which I can legally provide a balance to give more accurate and fair measurements that don’t have the effect of marking Emergent-Bilinguals as academic failures for too large a portion of their school careers just because they struggle with language proficiency.
