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.