Sunday, September 25, 2016

PBLA with Literacy Learners

Do you teach at a school that uses Portfolio Based Language Assessment (PBLA)? At my school, we have been ramping up for it for quite some time. We've had lots of training, have attended workshops and webinars, and have implemented many parts of PBLA to some extent. But this winter we are expected to have it all up and running. It is both exciting and overwhelming! My colleagues and I are happy to see that there are still more PBLA workshops and webinars being offered through Tutela.

To make things easier on myself, I am going to have to find ways to be more efficient. First and foremost, I have to get well organized.  One thing I did on Friday was start a new section in my file cabinet for blank rubrics, blank inventory sheets, etc. This way when a new student enrols, I can send him/her out with the teaching assistant and one of each of the portfolio pages that the student needs catching up on, such as the "My Story" page, an inventory sheet at the beginning of each section, and so on.

Meanwhile, I continue to build the FREE RESOURCES areas of my website. I've made some progress over the past couple of weeks beginning to build a separate LITERACY area where my free worksheets and activity packs are arranged thematically. There are still many more themes for me to upload, but it's a start.  Take a peek and tell me what you think. It is my hope that the layout makes it easy for you to quickly find what you're looking for.

This brings me to the main reason for today's blog post. In getting ready for PBLA for literacy, I have been developing my own very simplified rubrics that literacy learners can understand. Svetlana Lupasco gave me the idea to use graphics of a growing seedling to represent the concepts of initial, developing and adequate competency on a task. I am considering uploading rubrics such as this one as I develop them and including them either in the activity pack or with other resources on that thematic page.


What do you think? Would that be useful to you?

9 comments:

  1. Great idea which may be modified. Am looking at adopting it for French class.

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    1. Thanks for the feedback, Caribbean! All of my free resources are in MS Word and can be edited.

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  2. Several readers on Facebook expressed an interest in this rubric, so I have for now housed it on the ASSESSMENT page under FREE RESOURCES. Future rubrics will go with the appropriate module / theme. Scroll to the bottom of this page and look for "Sample Literacy Rubric."http://www.kellymorrissey.com/assessment.html

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    1. Hi, I'd love to see your rubric and use it, but I'm having trouble with the link. Can you help? Thanks!

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    2. Hi, Unknown. If you go to FREE - ASSESSMENT, you should find that all links to literacy rubrics are working. I just tried them all. https://www.kellymorrissey.com/assessment.html
      Kelly

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  3. The seedlings are a fantastic idea. Many teachers are using happy and sad faces for literacy rubrics. I hear some students are traumatized to learn the teacher is sad or upset with their progress.

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    1. Nancy,
      Good point! I had never stopped to think about it that way, but that is another reason not to use the faces--in addition to the fact that our learners are not children. My colleague Maria Margaritis uses a traffic light (red, yellow, green) system and has managed to convey to the learners that they are giving HER feedback on her teaching!

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  4. Dawn Torvik-Wahba5/14/2017 9:26 AM

    THANK YOU! So many low-level teachers say, "Ah, Kelly's Joy of ESL"

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