Thinking like an assessor...
Teachers spend a lot of time testing, evaluating and assessing students because of several reasons: sometimes to measure our students’s abilities to pass a course, to see how well they are doing in the semester, or simply to know how they are doing in a task during the class.
It is impressive how much we can take from assessment and how much we can make out of it. If we stop thinking about assessment as marking and start thinking about it as the most reliable proof of where we and our student are in the learning process, we would be a couple of steps forward in our way to lead our students to understanding. Lets’ not think about difficult- to- make things, for example an assessed homework or unit test (no matter the results) represent ideal learning opportunities, since they contain the information we need to start building from them meaningful tasks, activities, lessons,etc. These oportunities coul be wasted if we put the information gathered away and just continue with the next activity.
Designing around problems not just exercises...
Does the assessment require students to really “perform” wisely with knowledge and skill, in a problematic context of real issues, needs, constraints, and opportunities?
Definitely, there is no point in assessing our students through a task which does not emply a challenge at all. It would be a waste of time for us to assess, but mainly for the students who would get a good result in numbers (marks) but zero learning.
Students must be exposed to problems or situations in which they are challenged to decide and be responsable of what to do after cosidering a number of options.
Are we giving our students the tools to face problems and find the best way to deal with them? Are we helping them create an “English language storage box” in where they can go back to every time they face a communicative situation?
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Gaining clarity on our goals
Gaining clarity on our goals...
By establishing goals we affect our class in its broadest sense, as they define the methodology with which we are going to work with, our disposition towards the group, the tools and strategies we need, the contents we select for our students to achieve the goals, etc.
When there’s no goal, there’s no perspective. Our teaching becomes a bunch of contents without any backbone. Even though we teach a great lesson it is not meaningful, as it cannot be conected to anything else. There is no sequence. It’s obvious for students when there’s no purpose behind a lesson.
“... Helping students to “learn how to learn” and “how to perform” is both a vital mission and a commonly overlooked one...”
Along with specifying where we want our students to get. We must provide the tools for them to accomplish this goal. No goal will be reached if it is not accompanied by a meaningful process. This idea has been a constant throughout the previous chapters, and even though it seems obvious, it is not quite so. We tend to assume our students will get to the point we expect them to, yet we don’t help them.
And what exactly is a big idea?
As a counter act, teachers are called to redeem ourselves by narrowing things down a bit. When planning and designing around goals we help our students indirectly by setting priorities. In this respect, it becomes fair to ask our students to reach the goals, since we go hand-in-hand in the process.
To sum up, let’s not blame our students on our lack of professional rigour. We are the biased part of the cycle, since our plannings are not carefully designed. Our students end up feeling lost and not knowing what to do, the outcome is not what expected and the learning process is definitely not achieved.
By establishing goals we affect our class in its broadest sense, as they define the methodology with which we are going to work with, our disposition towards the group, the tools and strategies we need, the contents we select for our students to achieve the goals, etc.
When there’s no goal, there’s no perspective. Our teaching becomes a bunch of contents without any backbone. Even though we teach a great lesson it is not meaningful, as it cannot be conected to anything else. There is no sequence. It’s obvious for students when there’s no purpose behind a lesson.
“... Helping students to “learn how to learn” and “how to perform” is both a vital mission and a commonly overlooked one...”
Along with specifying where we want our students to get. We must provide the tools for them to accomplish this goal. No goal will be reached if it is not accompanied by a meaningful process. This idea has been a constant throughout the previous chapters, and even though it seems obvious, it is not quite so. We tend to assume our students will get to the point we expect them to, yet we don’t help them.
And what exactly is a big idea?
As a counter act, teachers are called to redeem ourselves by narrowing things down a bit. When planning and designing around goals we help our students indirectly by setting priorities. In this respect, it becomes fair to ask our students to reach the goals, since we go hand-in-hand in the process.
To sum up, let’s not blame our students on our lack of professional rigour. We are the biased part of the cycle, since our plannings are not carefully designed. Our students end up feeling lost and not knowing what to do, the outcome is not what expected and the learning process is definitely not achieved.
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