Feedback to Feedforward: designing a Marking Policy for KS3 and the new GCSE

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how to tweak the KS3 curriculum taking into account the new MFL GCSE specifications. It was great to see that not much change was necessary per se, and the important goal, definitely for my team, was to put into place a rich curriculum targeted to reach Oral Fluency by the end of Y11, where real communication opportunities, international collaboration and cultural embedment in our SoWs were the key foundations, under the umbrella of a common departmental/school vision and what we know of cognitive science.

The next step is to create a clear Marking Policy anchored in meaningful feedback to move forward. It is what I like calling Feedforward.  I wrote about this in a previous post on different ways to provide feedback: Spinning the plates.  I wanted to design a clear Marking Policy that would not require my team to mark books every two weeks for the sake of it but would spell out different ways to provide feedback to students' work/performance in the classroom with the intention to check for understanding while providing clear steps for pupils to move forward. 

Nevertheless, it was important that we all had a common and clear benchmark against which to assess students' work for key pieces of productive work, especially towards the end of a learning unit. For that, I thought it would be a good idea to use the 5 Magic Powers + amount of communication/information given, as a way to help students to monitor their work and for us teachers to mark it:

1. Using more than one tense

2. Giving opinions

3. Giving reasons

4. Using reported speech

5. Using high impact expressions

The idea is to provide 5 points per Power, depending on how well each element  has been fulfilled/mastered in a productive task, giving a total of 25 points, similar to the new AQA GCSE Mark Scheme for Writing, and a further 5 points, in the case of Oral tasks to assess Pronunciation and Fluency. 

One may argue that real communication and fluency is not the sum of a specific list of elements, imposed on us, let's admit this, by the GCSE exam. In fact the new GCSE criteria for speaking and writing is very, very similar to the current one, at least in the case of AQA. I can't agree more, being fluent is more than that.

However, I see many benefits when using this benchmark:

1. We tackle some of the elements that will determine success in the inevitable final GCSE exam. This is vital. If students, as from Y7, are familiar with these elements and these are fully embedded in their language output while being fluent, in the communicative contexts when this is appropriate (we would not use 2 tenses or reported speech to perform a transactional conversation in a shop or a casual chat with a friend), the learning journey at KS4 would be much more approachable.

2. Students LOVE to know that what they are learning is actually something typical of a later stage, it makes them feel clever! ANCHORING IN CHALLENGE like Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby call it in their book Make every lesson count. It is the power of having high expectations, regardless of our students' attainment.

3. In my experience, these powers/elements work because students will always have something to say, which helps with fluency, developing motivation and self-efficacy. This doesn't mean that students speak in big monologues, but will always have something to answer when prompted with questions such as: What's your opinion on this? Why do you think this? and what happened next? 

4. The elements, especially the high impact expressions, are underpinned by real idiomatic expressions, frequency words and common verbs  that native speakers use constantly in their oral interactions: "puede ser" "suele" " puede que" " hace que" "ojalá" "si pudiera" 

Of course, this mark scheme shouldn't be used with all pieces of productive tasks but only with key pieces of writing/speaking at the end of a learning unit, when the communicative context is relevant and allows this criteria. 

When giving levels within the command of a Power: there are 3 levels with points assigned to it.

Let's take the Power: Covering the points of the task + Using more than one tense. 

There are three levels: 

Excellent command of the power, with a clear explanation of what it would be expected for this.

Good command and its explanation.

First Step: You are in the right path to command this power! This allows students to have a positive engagement with their work and a clear pathway of what is required to get to the next level. There's no failure, students just move up level at their own pace. This is important for resilience: Mistakes are the first step to learning!

This is, of course, still a working document, which I would expect to tweak, modify etc.. as the year goes by. This is the link to access the whole Marking Policy with the actual mark schemes for key pieces of writing at KS3, adaptation of the new AQA GCSE mark scheme for official end of year exams and the current GCSE KS4 mark scheme for timed writings and oral tasks for Y10 and Y11. 

Marking Policy example

Tweaking the Curriculum for the new GCSE

As you know, I am starting a new job in September as Head of MFL in a comprehensive school near Oxford, Princes Risborough School. Talking to my new team, it was obvious that they are super talented and really committed, as well as the SLT, to raise the profile of MFL across the school. MFL is an option at GCSE and we would like more students to choose it as option at the end of Y9!!  

"Languages, a LIFE skill to achieve"

I had a preliminary meeting with my new team in May to establish the priorities of the department using the SWOT analysis diagram:  Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  This led the path for our vision: For MFL to become a popular, established choice for students at GCSE with great results and make sure that pupils saw the benefits of learning a new language.  We came out with a Mission Statement that summarised this vision: Languages, a LIFE skill to achieve. This vision/mission statement would drive our curriculum: students should choose MFL for GCSE because it is a LIFE skill and must be learned and nurtured. 

To make the connection between LIFE skill and what happens in the classroom, we agreed that being able to communicate ORALLY at the end of the language journey had to be a must for the students, so our curriculum should be focussed on developing FLUENCY. 

To achieve this, we would use our knowledge of Cognitive Science, the benefits of a Lexicogrammar approach to language learning and applying Rosenshine's Principles to our teaching pedagogy, without forgetting the power of gamifying the curriculum, for real communicative tasks, even when these are just a drilling exercise, part of the learning process and, of course, Project Based Learning, as the reason why a unit will be taught, which will connect what we teach to a purposeful, meaningful, real to life scenario.  At this point we agreed that we would involve our partner school links as much as possible, so that at the end of each taught unit, students would have the opportunity to speak/present what they had learned to a real native audience. 

Tweaking the curriculum: LESS IS MORE and PROJECT BASED LEARNING

Last week we met to actually design a new curriculum for KS3, which would take into consideration all these elements, as well as the elements of our new GCSE for languages. 

Below you can find the presentation I use with my team to give a rationale to our new Curriculum. It was lovely to see that actually, the topics for KS3 would be the same as studied so far! We just had to take into consideration the new vocab lists for AQA/Edexcel and tweak some of the content to make sure that as much of that vocabulary list was learned during KS3.

We also decided that LESS is MORE, so we would teach just a unit/topic per term, to allow time for students to really practise the topic, embed structures, teach grammatical points and be creative with the language to, finally, become fluent in that topic.

5 Magic Powers to help Fluency and Embed Exam Skills

Finally, we agreed to use 5 Magic Powers, our non-negotiables, which would be the common thread across the whole curriculum. I have talked about the 5 Magic Powers before in this blog. I love them, because, not only they are success criteria for productive skills at GCSE level, even with the new GCSE, but they help my students to be able to speak and be fluent, as these powers are so embedded in all our lessons. 

If I ask my students: what do you do in your free time? They will always have something to say: an activity, an opinion, a reason, reported speech sentence, more than one tense and some extremely colloquial and common expressions, high impact expressions as students learn a few formulaic expressions for each power element, throughout the curriculum to be used in any context. By doing this, students not only speak but they embed the elements that will score them points later in their GCSE exam. We teach them to speak and give information and, by default, they will score highly in their exam.  

Finally, let's not forget, that at the end of each unit, students will have the opportunity to put the language (vocabulary, register and grammar) into practise via a real-life situation task: Taking part in little drama sketch performed in assembly, talking to our partner schools on a given topic/presentation, pitching for the best holiday experience to be featured in a digital travel blog, taking part in a film review competition, taking part in a school treasure hunt with the studied topic as the theme for this etc...

The 5 Magic Powers:

• Using more than one tense
• Give opinions
• Give reasons
• Using Reported Speech
• Using some idiomatic/high impact expressions, so you sound like a Spaniard/French speaker.

For the Magic Powers to have effect, they will need to be taught and practised constantly, throughout the learning journey at KS3, in all the units: that's why less is more!! Fewer units, more time to learn lexis and grammar and more time to embed skills.

The next step is to create the content for the units: via Sentence Builders, using  the material in textbooks, the new GCSE vocabulary lists and our knowledge of the language as specialists and create a mark scheme to mirror the curriculum. To create our sentence builders we are using the site Sentence Builders, super fast to create + lots of interactive activities to go with them! I will share mine once I create them. 

This is the language journey to share with students.

Creating your own AI Character for students to practise languages

 This is going to be a very short post! My friend Melanie Hughes, sent this infographic to me yesterday night

It links to a blogpost written by Luis Pardo in the official Quizalize Blog. For the whole blogpost, which is very good, as it shows ideas on how to use the different tools, click here. Among the different tools, Character.ai really caught my eye, especially because, for now, it is free. 

The idea is to create a character, to chat with, who can become your little teaching assistant. I thought that I could create a Spanish character: Maribel Madrigal, for my students to chat with and practise their Spanish. 

The process was really simple. I signed in with my Google account and within seconds I created the Maribel character. I also checked the terms and conditions of this tool, which estates that children must be 13 years old or older to use the tool, so ideal for Y10/Y11 students. 

Once I created my Maribel character, I made it unlisted. Meaning, that only people with whom I share the character link can see Maribel and chat with her.  This is the link that I will need to share with my students.  Have a go and let me know what you think!  It also speaks to you, not just chatting! 

I gave it a try. Below you can see some screenshots of the little conversation we had, where I pretended to be a GCSE student.  For the whole conversation click here. Students cannot see each other conversations, unless they share the link, which I can ask them to do with me!

This is how I can see Character.ai working in the classroom:

1. As a whole class activity: I show the character and we all ask Maribel questions on the topic we are studying and translate her answers.

2. I can share the character link and ask students to have at least a 10 question conversation with Maribel for homework. Students will need to share their conversation task with me, which I can assess.

3. In class, I can share the link with students, and they can have a 5 minute silent conversation or in pairs with Maribel. They can look new words up in the dictionary online, and then have a discussion of what type of answers they got. 

4. Students can use it independently at home to chat with Maribel any time they want to in order to practise their linguistic skills. Remember that Maribel can talk, so it can be used as listening, but also as reading and of course writing!

ChatGPT can also do this for you and your students, but, I really think that Character.ai interface is really cool and more appealing to students. 

A Treasure Hunt to gamify your lessons using AI and other tools

This week I have been thinking about ways to assess my students work informally in a fun, non threatening, meaningful way at the end of a teaching unit, while they have the opportunity to put their linguistic skills into practice in a real situation. 

This is easily done via Project Based Learning (teaching a unit giving students all the tools they will need for later, to carry out a particular writing/reading/listening/oral project).  However, I wanted to think of another way to do this involving all the skills in the project, promote collaboration, movement and ultimately fun! 

I thought that a game would tick all these boxes so I planned a Treasure Hunt game to carry out at the end of a particular unit or after several units. This is what I came out with, thinking of a Y10/Y11 group. The Treasure Hunt involves  culture as well and to generate it I used the help of ChatGPT and HeyGen (a tool that allows you to create a video Avatar from a photo).  This is the result:

La Caza del Tesoro

Divide the class in pairs or groups of threes. You will need to print off the following QR Codes (one per group so I suggest you stick them on colour card and assign a colour to each group). This is important as the students will need to move around the school and you don't want 30 students scanning a QR code at once! It will be much easier if students look for the QR codes with their colour. There are 7 tasks to complete in total but you can remove or add more!

QR Code 1

This will set up the context of the Treasure Hunt. To create the video in the slike, I used the App ToonMe on my iPhone from a picture of mine. Then I used HyGen to create the video. HyGen is an AI tool that allows you create videos from a script that you write. You only get 1 minute free but I thought it was cool!

 If your context is concise, say 10 seconds, you can create up to 6 little videos for free! Otherwise, PhotoSpeak is completely free and it does the job, although not as realistic! Students Scan the QR code and will get the image below. If they click on the hourglass icon, a message comes up telling students to go to a particular area of the school and look for their following coloured QR Code.

QR Code 2: Task 1

This task is a writing collaborative task. Students need to create a dialogue in Spanish about their Free Time and use the app Chat Animator to write it.  Chat Animator will create a little video of their text dialogue, which students must download to prove they have accomplished the task. Again clicking the hourglass will direct students to the next task. 

QR Code 3: Task 2

This task is focussed on Reading, Translation and Culture. Students have to complete the Riddle, super easy (the answer is Ceuta), and go to the QR code on the slide which will take them to a Google Earth Presentation. The presentation takes students around 5 iconic places in Ceuta. They just have to follow the presentation and translate into English the information about the landmarks. I used ChatGPT to generate the five landmarks with information about them in Spanish at GCSE level. 

QR Code 4: Task 3

This task involves Oral skills and Culture. Students need to look for different famous people in Spain and create a Roleplay/Conversation where each participant adopts the personality of a Spanish celebrity and ask questions to each other to find out key information about the different characters. I just expect students to ask basic questions about their age, name, birthday, what they do for a living, why they are famous, what they work on, family members etc.. It is also a great opportunity to learn about celebrities in Spain, a new topic inf the new GCSE!

QR Code 5: Task 4

This task focusses on Reading: Fill in the Gaps. The QR code will take students to a LearningApps activity on fill in the gaps on the topic of Environment. 

QR Code 6: Task 5

This is another Oral task. The QR code in the slide will take students to a Wheel of Names with lots of questions on Theme 2. They just have to play Stone, Paper and Scissors, evolution with each other until one of them wins (becomes Superman!), while spinning the wheel and answering the question that comes up!

QR Code 7: Task 6

This an Oral and Cultural task. Students find out the name of the Picasso picture on the slide and then, collaboratively prepare a collaborative presentation describing the actual picture and recording it using Flip, which they will access via the QR code in the slide. This is a very powerful activity which will require a follow up in a subsequent lesson: What does Guernica represent? What was the Civil War in Spain? What happened? Consequences? Of course in English! It is a great way to practise vocabulary for the GCSE Photocard.

QR Code 8: Task 7

This is another Reading Task. Students scan the QR code on the slide which will take them to a Google Doc with a reading comprehension text on celebrities. I did use ChatGPT to create this text. I asked it to create a 150 words text in Spanish at GCSE level on the advantages and disadvantages of being a celebrity using a specific list of vocabulary, taken from the AQA Excel document with the draft Spanish vocabulary list on Celebrities, for the new GCSE. 

It did it in 5 seconds! Then, I asked it to generate 6 reading comprehension questions in English. The hourglass will tell students to get back to their Spanish classroom.

QR Code 9: The end!

This just tells them Congratulations, in Spanish, and at this point, the teacher needs to check the tasks have been completed. In a subsequent lesson, I would give them the treasure: some tapas, certificates, merits or any other reward you really want!

For this activity you will need in total these 9 QR codes x the number of groups/pairs you have. My treasure hunt involves walking around the whole school and it will take 2 or three lessons to complete properly but you can have fewer tasks and/or simpler tasks such as small translations or just cultural questions. Instead of running around the school, you may want to restrict the hunt to two corridors or your school hall!

It can be adapted from Y7 to Y13, just change the tasks! I think it is a great way to assess students with a real game!

This is the whole Treasure Hunt for you to adapt in Genially as you need it fit. 

I have used Genially, for my treasure hunt, because I can create individual URL links to each slide, rather than the whole presentation, which then I have turned into individual QR codes.  

Google Slides and PPT, as far as I know, don't allow me to do this. I also love the interactivity and the graphics of the Genially Templates and it is FREE!

 Just click on the link below and at the bottom of the presentation click on the blue box where it says "REUSE THIS GENIALLY" to have your own copy to modify. You just need to open an account with Genially.

La Caza del Tesoro Presentation in Genially

This is a Google Document with all the QR codes in two pages for easy printing. 

La Caza del Tesoro Document

To create an individual URL link to each Genially slide, you need the last slide in the presentation, which looks like this

Just copy the RED box and paste it onto each slide, anywhere. Go to PREVIEW and in there, copy the URL link that will appear (That's the unique page URL for the slide). Paste it onto a tab and do the same for each slide. Finally, go back to edit and DELETE the RED BOX in each slide. 

The wonderful Julia Morris, explains the process very well in this 6 minute  Youtube video tutorial. IT IS REALLY EASY TO DO!   Alternatively, you can print each slide separately but it won't be interactive: for example, the hourglass information would need to be copied and pasted as part of the slide. 

I hope this makes sense!!!

Creative ways to practise writing, reading and translation skills: Google Earth

This week has been one of those weeks were more traditional activities and the latest cutting edge technology have merged to inspire me!  This morning I saw on Twitter a great writing game, shared by Erin Gray, called "Capture the flag"  to revise for the fast approaching GCSE writing exam. It goes like this: 

Divide your class in 6/8 teams. For the game you will need a set of coloured flags, say 12, per team.  Print your cards and stick them on the board, as shown by Erin on her twitter post picture: 

Give each team a list of typical GCSE questions/bullet points. Students, in teams, write a paragraph for each given question. Once their paragraph is written, they must come to the teacher who checks the paragraph for any mistakes and if correct, students are allowed to pick any flag belonging to any team from the board. If the paragraph is not correct, they must go back to their seats and correct it. 

At the end of the session, points are given to each coloured flag, (see picture below from Erin Gray posted on twitter) so the team with most points wins the game. As Erin points out, it is a mixture between a running translation activity and a group game with the add-on of practising writing skills!

I love the game as it is! Thank you, Erin. However, after attending the third webinar on Joe Dale's series on AI for MFL teachers, and being a BIG fan of Google Earth and Wheel of Names tasks, I was inspired to combine these two tools with Erin's concept into one activity. This is the result

Writing Quest around Barcelona using Google Earth and Wheel of Names

I created a project in Google Earth based on a Writing Quest around Barcelona. Inspired by Joe Dale, I used Chat GPT to suggest 10 famous landmarks in Barcelona and to provide me with a description of such places in Spanish at GCSE level. I added the places suggested by Chat GTP and their description information to my Google Earth project. 

Then, I went to Wheel of Names and created a wheel with the GCSE questions in relation to Theme 1 for AQA GCSE Spanish (it could have been any theme and I could have used Chat GPT to give me a suggestion of questions, but I had my own). I went back to my Google Earth project and added the link to my wheel of names, at the end of each landmark description. 

This is the result :  Google Earth Writing Quest around Barcelona 

It works like this:

1. Divide the class in 6/8 teams like the original Erin's game

2. Have the sets of coloured flags like Erin suggests, stuck on the board. One set per team.

2. Share the Google Earth link with students via Onenote or Google Classroom

3. Students in teams, you could this in pairs or threes too, open the Google Earth presentation, go to the different places and do two things: 

         a. Translate into English the description of the landmark they are seeing (Reading)

         b. Click on the Wheel of Names link, spin the wheel and write a big paragraph on the  selected question for Theme 1. They must do this without looking at notes. (Writing)

4. One member of the team must go to the teacher to check their writing is correct

5. If correct, like in Erin's game, they pick up a flag from the board from any other team. If mistakes are found, they must go back to their team and revise their paragraph.

6. They continue with the next landmark in the presentation.

I have included 10 landmarks, meaning, 10 translations and writing 10 paragraphs. The translations include nice, new vocabulary, which I will ask students/teams finishing early, to identify and add to their personalised Random Quizlets. 

The whole activity took me 10 minutes to design thanks to Chat GPT. The Wheel of Names can be reused in other retrieval practice tasks for self testing, either for writing or oral purposes. In fact I have a wheel of names for each AQA Theme for this purpose:

Wheel of names Sample Questions for Theme 1

Wheel of names Sample Questions for Theme 2

Wheel of names Sample Questions for Theme 3

The game, adding Google Earth Projects, adds a cultural important element: a virtual visit to Barcelona. If done periodically, you can show different cities where the target language is spoken! Students will need to speak in Spanish when talking among them: real purpose for the activity, which helps motivation!

I hope the idea is clear and thank you again, to Erin and Joe for their inspiration today!