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.