Beyond the Red Pen: Adaptive teaching in MFL as a tool to reduce "formal" marking

Happy belated Easter! As the end of the Easter holidays approaches, I want to reflect on the power of adaptive teaching and how, when it is applied skilfully, it can reduce the time we need to spend on more formal marking, because, adaptive teaching is all about constant formative assessment of students' performance, is all about constant checking for understanding and how we react to this in order to close gaps, tackle misconceptions and stretch all students, via skilful scaffolding. 

Adaptive teaching should take place at all stages of the language learning journey. Following Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction and the foundations of a lexicogrammar approach, this language journey can be divided in 4 stages: Modelling, Structured Practice, Expansion (via the study of grammatical rules) and Independent Practice, to lead to Fluency under a communicative framework. 

Adaptive teaching, should take place at all these four stages of learning and, because we react to students' outcomes, then and there, the feedback is immediate: the reaction to these outcomes. This means that that marking books can become obsolete and unnecessary. Of course, personal comments on pupils' work can still take place, but this will become more of a encouraging tool rather than the main means to close gaps.  Formal marking of work, using specific rubrics, normally rooted in exam boards criteria, will still be needed; but this will be more sporadic and comments on these more tactical, which will also be the source of future teaching based on common errors spotted by us.  This formal marking can also be assisted by AI generative tools, for example, the new "Help me Write Feature" in GoogleClassroom will write a review on students' work based on specific rubrics which we can then modify accordingly to help us save precious time!

How does Adaptive teaching looks in practice?

Through Modelling

In the modelling stage, adaptive teaching can be achieved with the help of MWBs. After choral repetition of vocabulary/ key structures, to which we can react straight away from a phonics and pronunciation point of view, carrying out Dictation tasks using MWBs can be extremely powerful. 

We can scaffold the process by providing students with with key vocab handouts of sentence builders to be used if needed, or displaying these on the board for support. We can then carry out different dictation tasks, scaffolding the process: starting with simple sentences leading to more complex utterances, carrying out the dictation tasks in a slower or faster pace, repeating several times as needed, basically, responding 100% to students' performance on the MWBs.  

At this stage, having a seating plan where we can clearly identify Premium Pupil students, students with SEN and Gifted and Talented pupils, will be essential, as we navigate the classroom encouraging these students and giving them quick guidance ( pointing them out to the use of our Sentence Builder or just telling them not to use these and extend answers).

 As we are responding to students' work, we can spot specific common gaps, for example, on links between phonemes and graphemes and reinforce these. We can also stretch the students by asking them to translate sentences/ key vocab on the spot or explain a particular grammatical rule which can inform us on how well our students know specific material and act upon it. 

At this point, we are marking students' work and nothing can be more interactive and powerful than our reaction to this on the spot, instead of wating for a worksheet to be marked in a couple of weeks!!

Through Structured Practice

At this stage, students will be carrying out more oral, communicative tasks, in pairs or small groups, for example via information gap activities, board games where students have to translate given sentences, battleships  or connect four games etc.. 

When students are carrying out these more independent tasks, we should be moving around the classroom, again, spotting mistakes, encouraging key students to extend answers and helping those students who need it by guiding them to use a sentence builder or oral mat. 

Structured Practice although should involve oral practice, can be preceded by whole group work, again, via MWBs. For this, I am a big fan of Flippity or Wheel of Names, where key structures come out and students need to translate them into the target language and pupils be encouraged to extend their answers using the Rule of 3 (using 3 sentences for each answer) or our 5 Magic Powers, linked to the Rule of 3. 

This way, we can spot gaps, reteach misconceptions, revise key vocabulary and stretch pupils by asking them to use different tenses or vocabulary from previous topics and react to students' answers. Again, feedback is carried out interactively and effectively while carrying out these activities.

Through Independent Practice

At this stage students will be practising communicative tasks, where they will need to think on the spot for specific answers to given questions or situations.  At this point, scaffolding the process and reacting to students' performance before they need to be fully independent will be key. 

To do this, we can show any oral questions we want students to answer in a Flippity format or Wheel of Names and expect students to write model answers before embarking on oral tasks to develop confidence and allowing them to reflect on their own knowledge, making the link between productive skills. 

This can be done via MWBs again, so that we can guide and stretch students as needed while checking for understanding for the use of specific grammatical structures or tenses. This can be extremely useful to develop fluency. 

After a few minutes answering key questions in writing, we can then carry out oral work in pairs or groups, for example via games such as this Monopoly Game to practise potential questions for the new GCSE exam. 

Once students are carrying out these oral activities independently, as with the previous stage, moving around, spotting mistakes, talking to students to give guidance or encouraging them to extend answers is our way to adapt our teaching. At some point, we may need to stop an oral activity to give feedback to the whole class on a specific common error or we may need to reteach or revise a specific grammatical point or tense. 

Adaptive teaching and Metacognition

Another big asset of using adaptive teaching via interactive techniques is that we also develop metacognition skills with our students. As we drive students through their learning journey via the use of key questions and by scaffolding the process, we can add more reflection moments which will help students to identify and self-assess what they command. 

Doing Brain Dumps, which I call In my own words, can be a wonderful strategy here, for example, by asking students to write down all the vocabulary they remember from the previous lesson or write down a paragraph as long as possible, using the structures and vocabulary practised throughout a lesson or previous lessons. Similarly, using quick, low stake tests or self- quizzes via Flippity or Forms, will help students to retrieve vocab, structures and self-assess their own progress. 

Carrying out learning schedules to encourage guided independent practice at GCSE level, can also be a powerful tool which will help students to develop ownership for their own learning journey. I use learning schedules via Padlet, an example can be found here.

By adapting our teaching to students' responses in situ, what I call, spinning the plates, we are providing valuable and face to face feedback to all our students, which is more powerful than a written comment in an exercise book, Onenote book or Google Classroom Assignment. 

To embed this in our department procedures, a clear mark scheme where specific reference to how we provide specific feedback to students in our MFL department is essential. Key pieces of written and oral work will still be needed to be marked and collated, however, the routinary and time consuming process of marking books can be fully avoided or minimised if adaptive teaching is fully embedded in all lessons by all members of the MFL department.

After the MOCK exams: THE LEARNING SCHEDULE STRATEGY

Like most teachers in the country, we have just finished our Mock Exams. For our school, this is the second set of trial exams carried out by our Year 11 classes.  The data that comes from these exams is invaluable in deciding a course of action for the next few weeks, leading to the actual exams in May and June. 

To help students analyse the data, we use the following KS4 Self-Reflection Exam analysis form, which breaks up students' performance by skill and helps them see how many marks away they are from the next grade.

There are several elements to consider, when we analyse the data of our Y11 classes:

• Which skill was the worst performed by our students?
• Within that skill, which question or section was the most challenging?
• Which skill was the best performed? Why? 
• How many marks are students away from the next grade?

Exactly a year ago, I wrote a blog post "SOS: After the mock exams, what?" describing a strategy to follow in order to maximise, listening, reading, writing and speaking skills in the last few weeks of the course. Although this was meant for the old languages GCSE qualification, the strategies and techniques are the same. You can access the blogpost here.

In this short post, I want to focus on creating a learning schedule for the students.

I see, year after year, that students perform in lessons and generally can do the work well but once they are at home, a part from specific homework tasks, they do not know how to revise. 

In the case of the languages exams, this task becomes harder, as students have 4 different papers to prepare for requiring specific skills and within the papers, different exam questions, such as the translation or dictation tasks, all underpinned by a strong vocabulary and grammar command and knowledge. 

Even the best students can become overwhelmed with the languages revision demands and many reduce this revision task to learning some random quizlets, with disjointed vocabulary, with a few carrying out some past papers, in the best of cases, normally, a day or two before the actual GCSE exams. 

To help students with their revision, we have created The Learning Schedules.

We have created two learning schedules: One to be carried out, specifically during the Easter holiday period, focussed, entirely on the Oral exam and a second one, spread over three weeks, to be started mid May, leading to the actual Listening, Reading and Writing exams. 

The schedules tell students what to revise and for how long, on each day, during a given week. Ours is based on 5 days of learning revising 45 minutes on each day.  We have used Padlet to create the schedules so that these are fully accessible and interactive, with direct links to specific, quizlet, Mizou courses, past papers or Exampro tasks.

The Oral exam Learning Schedule

You can access the Oral exam learning schedule here.  The idea is to start the schedule during the Easter Holidays. The main focus of the schedule is to prepare students for the unprepared conversation following the description of the two photos and reading aloud tasks, by chunking the revision of different topics throughout different days, with interleaving practice and using Mizou to practise random, potential questions for the exam.  When following the schedule, students will identify gaps and they are encouraged to be proactive, and go back to their own Sentence Builders Booklet to revise any topic which they may find challenging.

The May-June Learning Schedule 

You can access the May-June Learning Schedule here.  This schedule is meant to start once the oral exams are finished. It practises lots of different skills: 

• Writing, using potential questions from the previous schedule and Mizou, now to be carried out in writing.
• Reading and Listening, using past papers from previous years and Exampro tasks
• Official AQA vocabulary learning, via quizlets featuring all official vocabulary.
• The 5 Magic Powers practice, via a quizlet and a technique to maximise the skill: to write a sentence with each key structure.
• Grammar practice, focussed on verb endings via interactive tasks for Higher Students and interactive practice for Foundation Students on Question 3 of the writing paper.
• Dictation and translation, via interactive Exampro tasks.

The schedule breaks up the revision of these elements, day by day, giving students flexibility to assess and evaluate which skills to focus on, depending on the data provided by our Mock exams. Ultimately, we want students to ask themselves:

Which skill do I struggle the most? 

Which particular question do I struggle the most?

How can I practise my verb endings?

How can I practise the 5 Magic Powers and the Verb Nuggets as an alternative to verb endings, if I need to?

How can I practise my listening and reading skills?

How can I practise the vocabulary?

and find something in the schedule to close the gap so that they become independent learners.