Sunday, May 16, 2010

WEEK 6 REFLECTIONS

This week was great for me. I have learned some new approaches about creating a rubric and using alternative assessment tools in my class. Learning styles was another important subject of the course. The most important isssue of this week was making an objective assessment in our classes, after reading the article I started to be more careful while evaluating my students. As I stated on nicenet, assessment was the hardest task of my job but now it becomes easier for me. I am going to ask my colleagues to read the articles about assessment and I am going to discuss with them and share my ideas about what I have learned on week 6. I think making a successful assessment in class makes the teacher more close to his/her students. My classes will end by the end of this month so the outcomes of this course will be more important for me for next year. I decided to make radical changes in my classes next year.

5 comments:

  1. Dear Bulent,

    I agree with you: assessment is important, for us as teacher and for students. But, both students and teachers are afraid of it, aren't they? However, I consider it one of the most important things in our career as we can measure progress and we can change what we have already planned.

    Glad to know you will make big changes next year. I don;t wait for the next year to come - I change things now, while I am still enrolled on this course. I am afraid not forget what I am learning week after week.

    All the best,
    Nadina

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  2. Dear Bulent,

    I believe all of us realized this week how important assessment and its consequences are. Fear of assessing is probably not the best advisor, however we - teachers should constantly be reminded of the importance of our decisions. Clarity and unambiguity as well as reasonable yet challenging requirements form the basis of what I perceive as appropriate assessment.

    Let us then be realistic, comprehensible and challenging at the same time!

    Regards,
    Joanna
    Poland

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  3. Dear Bulent,
    I agree with you that assessment is the hardest thing we do as teachers. I am not taliking here about designing tasks and administering a test, but I am more concerned with grading. Designing a test is not a joke. I see it as hard as evaluating. Some tasks are somehow easy to grade, but other tasks are not. Creating rubrics and sharing them with learners help be fair in grading and the students could also grade themselves. More than this, rubrics maximizes the learners work. I am going to implement rubrics in my classes as well because ,as Joanna said, the decisions we make do not end by giving a mark, but they might have great effects on the students. An unfair decision/grading would badly affect on at least the attitude of a student towards English. It's high times guys we revisit the way we assess.
    Yours,
    Hamid

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  5. Hi Bulent,
    Although I spent only two days on this week in order to catch up, hopefully, but I also found what I have learned about assessment quite useful. In my MA studies. all my grades were either As or Bs. The only subject I got C was "Testing and Assessment" . The readings were very fruitful too. I bookmarked them for further reading.
    Best,
    Hala

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