my quandary

Ohhhh, time to vent. I have this unresolved issue. I am FULLY committed to constructivism. I in NO way doubt the value of teaching this way. I feel like in my 6 years of teaching I've seen so much worth in making my students come to their own conclusions and make inferences. One thing about studying a world language is that most of us teachers were taught in such an outmoded way. In my French classes in high school, my teachers presented us information like new grammar as an abstract concept. They would show, for example, a "grid" that organized the verbs into 1st, 2nd, 3rd person, singular and plural. That was the intro to the concept - what?!?! It just makes sense to teach a second language in a realistic context. Here's an example of what I mean: when I teach something new, I like to present it to my classes in a way that really demonstrates the meaning of the concept - like in the form of a short reading or a conversation with them in French. From these "texts", I guide them to make inferences about meanings of what's unfamiliar to them and try to identify patterns that are distinct to that grammar point. I make sure that I give them time to develop some ideas, and then we talk about it all together to make sure that we're all on the same page. I DO find that there's value to the verb grid thing, but only after they've learned what it's for - it's simply a visual organizer; conjugating the verb is not the be-all-end-all. I'm sort of going off on a tangent, but all of this preamble comes from a tense conversation I had with a colleague that boiled down to the idea that "if your philosophy is so great, why am I not seeing some HUGE difference in their understanding and abilities?"
Well, it's a good question, and I have NO idea why not. What am I not doing right? I sure as heck am not going to abandon constructivism. Actually, I lied - I do have an idea why it's maybe not making as much a "difference" as I'd like it to, or maybe that the "difference" isn't really showing. Maybe it's that my students aren't consistently exposed to constructivist teaching. It seems like there are so many of us in between C1 and 2 that lack of exposure is probably not the real reason. (Glass half full?) One thing that I find is that my students have pretty poor memories. That sounds like I'm putting the blame on them, and I don't mean to. I recycle info as much as I can (I think). I worry that my teaching may lack in the "rigor" department, even though I HATE that word with a passion. That's a struggle for me - to make sure that I'm challenging my students consistently, but I also hate the idea that MORE is more. If we demand that they move constantly from one concept to the next and hardly move past the "knowledge" rung of Bloom's taxonomy, we're doing them a disservice; they won't develop more sophisticated thinking skills than information recall. However, there are so many demands for kids to know MORE rather than for them to know BETTER.
This is a slight tangent, but I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and it's so coincidental that a lot of things the author (Robert Pirsig) mentions are similar to our discussions in 21st Century; there are even similarities to The World is Flat when Pirsig talks about technology and the changes that had come about even by 1974 when he published it. This is the kind of book that I've striped with highlighter ink for a lot of reasons. One bit that struck me especially was when the author visits the university in Bozeman, MT, where he taught for a while. He was basically extremely depressed while he was teaching there, and he had a lot of criticism for the way school is "done". He wrote, "Imitation is a real evil that has to be broken before real rhetoric teaching can begin. This imitation seems to be an external compulsion. Little children don't have it. It seems to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself," and, "You're supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating...That gets you As. Originality on the other hand could get you anything - from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it."
I don't want to create little mimes like these. I hope I'm not. I worry also that I overestimate how constructivist I am - I don't want to be over-confident. I think this year I'm really going to be analytical of my own methods and make sure that the things I choose to spend our class time on are truly in line with what I believe.
I'm most certainly going to change my grading system to make it skills-based. My only trouble is that when I did it last year, it really had some quirks that I wasn't patient enough to try to iron out. Rather, I just went back to old school "homework, quizzes, tests and effort." Ew. My students deserve better feedback than that.