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.