Standards in Teaching

  I think that the importance of knowing and checking standards in teaching have influenced a lot our teaching practices.  At the moment we realized the existence of them, we as teachers can be aware that knowledge students acquired depends not only in them but also in us. We facilitate them with content and tasks in our classes, but this content and practices should match with the goals and objectives of the course.  

 According to Kuhlman (2001), “Students’ performance (on assessment) depends on the quality of the instructional program provided… which depends on the quality of professional development”. For this reason the importance of emphasize in teachers standards help to ensure teachers’  pedagogical content knowledge,  and relevant theories, principles and purposes of assessment and evaluation knowledge.  This professional development also taken into consideration teachers’ abilities  to select curriculum content appropriate to learners and the learning context, to know how  to develop metacognitive strategies for diverse learners, and  to recognize the complex  influences  in personal, social and economic factors.

To sum up, the implementation of these standards in teaching practices can have a positive influence on students’ achievement, instruction, content,  and  assessment.   

Becoming experts!

At the beginning our careers when we started to work, we were aware of our shortcomings and weakness, it was not so easy to plan a class, develop activities that promote all the skills, create tests or control students discipline and behavior. All those factors make us be aware of the importance to get more experience and become more tactful, dynamic and patients. We as new teachers felt the necessity to improve our lessons plans, classroom management skills, strategies to teach and ways to evaluate. It was not an easy way because those days we spent more time planning and controlling students’ behavior and less time teaching students.

 Now that we could get a little more experience we could realized that not only many mistakes were made but also changed as the time went by.  One those mistakes I want to make emphasis in this reflection is the way tests were chosen, created and scored. Creating a test goes beyond than just implementing the topics taught and explained in class.  According to Brown (2006), tests have to be carefully constructed, edited, tried out, and revised in order to be more reliable.  Taking into account these factors we can change our perspective and try to apply them in order to get higher reliability, washback and content validity. 

As a conclusion, we should be careful in the way tests are implemented in our classrooms, sometimes aspects such as time, purpose, objectives, instructions and kind of tasks are just forgotten and given less importance.  If we don’t apply these key aspects that we have learned, tests are going to be a matter of worry for our students in terms of frustration, misunderstandings, anxiety, etc. 

Journals in the Classroom

After reading Brown (2003), many teachers can be aware of the importance of using alternative assessment in the classroom because it is a useful method in which students can express their interests, goals, and desires using second language. This way of assess students does not follow the normal path of using tests, notebooks or  books,  due to the fact that teachers can include extra tools such as portfolios, journals, conferences and interviews, in order to evaluate their learning processes and learning outcomes. 

One of those relevant extra tools mentioned above are journals. At the moment teachers decide to implement them in the classroom, many factors should be taken into consideration because it is not just asking students to have a diary or complete a notebook.  Before requiring student to develop those journals we should have our purposes and objectives clearly. We can start by determining how journals should be organized, assessed and shared, when they should be incorporated into the lesson and the several uses they can have.

On the other hand, there are two relevant aspects in order to help learners become familiar with journals:  guidance to let students know what we are looking for or what to do, and encouragement to focus on their thought process, not the right answers.  Also, if we allow students to personalize their journals with stickers, pictures or photos would make the process engaging and exciting for them, not laborious and tedious.

In conclusion, begin implementation of journals with affective, open ended questions regarding the students’ feelings about a particular experience, concept, lesson or  problem would give the teacher greater insight regarding how to develop each individual student and diagnose misconceptions and or areas of difficulty.

Observation in the classroom

One of the important aspects of alternative assessment is called observation. Observation is basic to assessing human skills and behaviors. This specialized method of collecting information can elicit behavior, attitudes or skills to be observed under specific circumstances. Observation in the classroom can be a trustworthy way of observing teacher – student interaction in order to describe and understand second language teaching and learning.

This useful method allows teachers observe how students respond to and use instructional materials and how they interact during group work; teachers can also observe how effectively they themselves are presenting particular lessons, units, and so on.  On the basis of their observations, teachers can assess what students have not learned, they infer the learning strategies students may be using that are facilitating or impeding learning, the effectiveness of particular teaching strategies and determine which instructional activities and materials students enjoy.

The information gather from these observations provides a basic understanding of what is happening in the classroom, and it can be used for making decisions about what should follow, for making inferences about instructional or learning process strategies, and for planning instructions of unit, lessons or courses. On the other hand, classroom observation should be organized in a systematic and manageable way in order to know how to record the resulting information and inferences, and how to make use of this information in planning effective instruction. This organization is done accordingly to your instructional plans and focus on instructional content, organization, materials, equipment, and activities.

In order to do a classroom observation is important to identify why you want to observe and, more specifically, what kind of decisions you want to be able to make based on your observations. Once you have identified why and what to observe, you can decided how to observe, it can be on individual students for detail information or on group of students for diagnosing whether things are working for the whole class as intended.

To sum up, observation in the classroom is really important because it allows teacher to do an analysis of how the class is working, students’ weakness or strengths in order to make decisions and identify possible problems or difficulties.  

                                             Reading is fundamental

At the beginning of our teaching process, the majority of teachers just thought about many concerns related to students´ learning process. In our minds there were many questions that couldn’t be answered because we didn’t know how to deal with. It was pretty difficult to affirm if what we were doing were correct or incorrect just because we threw ourselves into the void without taking into account theories, authors, theoretical support, etc.   

Now that that we have read about their processes, how they acquire and synthetize knowledge, their ways of learning, factors that affect them, their performances, etc,  we can have a clear idea of how to teach or assess learners. Language acquisition is a process and we can’t pretend they acquire everything in the first class and just store this knowledge in their minds; many abilities are unobservable and we can’t see the process.  In this moment is when assessment becomes more complex because it´s just by inference and we as teachers should start to rethink and consider more factors that simple give them a grade.  

Talking about these unobservable abilities, reading is one of these skills that must be taken into consideration because many people have thought that it is something that every single person must have and acquire as the time went by.   But it isn’t so easy, this ability should be analyzed deeper because according to Brown (2003), there are2 primary hurdles in order to become successful readers:  first, they need to be able to master fundamental bottom – up   strategies for processing separate letters, words, and phrases,  as well as  top – down, conceptually driven to strategies for comprehension. Second, as part of that top – down approach, learners must develop appropriate content and formal schemata; it means background information and cultural experiences to carry out those interpretations effectively.

 The assessment of reading it’s not only assessment comprehension, as we could see below there are other aspects to take into consideration and they vary according to the types of readings, tasks or purposes. To sum up, this ability allows learners discriminate, recognize, infer, distinguish, identify not only in this skill but also with the other abilities. 

                                 Two relevant principles

At the moment we are going to assess our students we as teachers must be aware that the importance of the integration of skills is the paramount importance in language learning, as cited by brown (2003). When these skills are integrated, assessment is more authentic and provides more washback.

When students would be assessed it’s really important to set a contrast between student’s competence and student’s performance. Brown (2004) “When you propose to assess someone ´s ability in one or a combination of the four skills, you assess one person’s competence, but you observe the person´s performance”. Sometimes the performance doesn´t indicate true competence: rest, illness or emotional distraction, text anxiety, a memory block or other reliability factors could affect student’s performance,  thereby providing an unreliable  measure of actual competence.

Brown (2003) cited two important principles:  the first one is to consider the fallibility of the results of a single performance; it means that you as a teacher have the obligation to consider at least two or (more performances) and/ or contexts before drawing conclusions.  Multiple measures will give you a more reliable and valid assessment than a single measure.

The second one is observable performance, it means being able to see or hear the performance of the learner, but in this case you are not going to observe the listening performance, what you are going to see is the results of the listening. The listening performance itself is the process of is the invisible, inaudible process of internalizing meaning from the auditory signals being transmitted to ear and brain, so this product  is within  the structure of the brain.

A wrong concept

Nowadays many of the teachers that have been educating for years have a wrong concept of what evaluation and assessment is. They just think that both involve grades and mean the same thing but these concepts are more than grading students and deciding whether they should pass or not.

 Assessment is a continuous process that involves many aspects that affect student´s learning directly. Genesee & Upshur (1996) explains that assessment consists of three essential components; the first one is information that may be gathered through observation of students´ behavior in the classroom, by students´ comments during individual conferences or from entries in students´ journals. After gathering this information, the second component is interpretation, and the last one is decision making in order to decide what actions to take or what changes to make to instruction. 

 Talking about the last component of assessment, relevant aspects about educational decision making are the strategies used by the teacher at the moment students would be assessed. According to Brissenden and Slater, teachers should manipulate the kinds of learning that takes place, it means if they used assessment strategies that focus only on recall knowledge the result would be superficial learning, but if they choose assessment strategies that demand critical thinking or problem solving the result would be completely different, the level of students´ performance or achievement would be higher. To sum up assessment is a process that takes place everywhere and takes into account important factors that affect students a such as attitude, behavior, needs, learning style and strategies.