Mi Familia
Tara Cloutier


I have chosen this artifact “La Familia” because it represents a substantial project for my Spanish 2 students.  It is a project I have done with Spanish 2 students for the past two years, the second year I revised it some for the purpose of making it better.  The artifact is two student projects one from each year.  This project requires students to use the two past tenses in Spanish, which is the main grammar base for the course.  This is a particularly difficult concept for Spanish language learners because it doesn’t exist in English.  I created this project to personalize an important concept and to encourage students to demonstrate their language skills in a real life situation.

This project is intended for Spanish students at the end of their second year of studying the language.  This project took about a week from start to finish.  The students were asked to bring in an old picture of a family member to use for the project.  They could use the original picture, a scanned picture or bring it to me for scanning at school.  Once they had chosen the photo they needed to gather information about the person in the picture.  The first day in class students made up questions that they could ask their parents or grandparents about the picture.  For homework that night they needed to interview the subject to get the information for the description of the photo.  The next two days in class and for homework the students were asked to complete a rough draft of the writing portion of the project.  The following period was spent doing peer editing of the work.  Students were given peer-editing guidelines, asked to make comments and suggestions to their classmates.  The following day was spent in the computer lab typing the writing part of the project.  Students were instructed about how to use accents using Microsoft word and required to include them in the project.  The students were given colored paper and asked to complete the project for homework that night.  



ANALYZE:

As I look back at the roads I have traveled in my teaching career, I am proud of the things I have done well.  I am even more proud though of the things that I have improved upon and learned from as an educator.  As a teacher, I do not wish to be stagnant.  I want to improve on what I do each time I do it.  This artifact is a concrete example of real improvements I made to a lesson.  Oh, the places we will go if we strive to do things better each time around.  

APPRAISE:

This project is important to me and to the Spanish 2 curriculum for many reasons and that is why I chose it as an artifact.  I also chose it to demonstrate my ability to improve upon work from year to year.  The first year this project and my ability to use it were rough.  The second time around I made changes to make the teaching and learning more effective.  Having done the lesson twice, I have ideas about improving it for this year when I will use it again.  The two different project examples from two years represent my professional development in the area of classroom methodology.  

The first year I did this project with students my feedback to them was insufficient about their final product.  Students also did not have adequate information from me ahead of time to complete this project as well as they could have.  For the peer editing part of the project I simply expected that student knew how to edit other students’ work.  Upon reading the final papers and comparing them to the first drafts I realized students were quite inadequate with their editing.  

The first couple of projects I graded I wrote corrections directly onto their work.  I quickly realized I did not want to write all over their final projects and began to write brief comments on the back.  I had the criteria in my head and graded based on that only.  I was probably inconsistent because I had not written out the rubric ahead of time and it was a daunting task to grade the projects.  

The second year with the project I was careful to not make the same mistakes twice.  I carefully constructed a rubric with which I would grade the projects.  I gave out peer-editing guidelines that I had written based on the grading rubric.  These two changes made the project much more successful.  I also graded and made all comments on the rubric sheet so that students could see where they may have fallen short and I was not marking up their hard work.  



TRANSFORM:

This artifact demonstrates my ability to take a good project and make it better.  While looking at the artifact and the data for this reflection I’ve been thinking of was to improve this again for the next time around.  I think students enjoy this project and I think it has a valuable place in my curriculum so I will continue to teach it.  As I continue to use this lesson over and over I hope to continue to improve upon it each time.  For the next time I’ve decided to incorporate technology to the project.  I will use the school scanner and require students to scan their pictures for the project.  I may even change the final product and give students an option of the paper-based product or a technology-based product.  This would not be just for the sake of changing it or just for the sake of adding technology but rather to meet the needs of different kinds of learners.  For some students the artistic part of this project is daunting.  Maybe if they were allowed or even encouraged to create a PowerPoint or some other tech based product they would have more success with it and learn about the technology as well.