Day
6 Session 1 (Wednesday, 15 October 2014. 9 - 10.30am)
FOCUS
ON ASSESSMENT AND EFFECTIVE ERROR CORRECTION
As educators, we are using assessment to
evaluate our learners and it has become a method for us to observe their
performance. The education system is mostly exam-oriented and learners are
expected to produce results with zero defects. However, in this lesson
conducted by Bill, we were taught that it is okay for students to make mistakes
because it is the mistakes that are going to tell us about future lesson that
we could plan for them. It’s just a matter of how we correct them effectively.
In the first part of the lesson, we are
exposed to the focus of assessment which tells us what aspects we are looking
for when doing assessment. By this, we would know whether to assess in terms of
the content, the language or both the content and the language.
For the first task, we were asked to
classify some samples of assessment questions according to each focus. We used
a die (singular for dice) to select the questions that we have to answer. By
doing this task, we found that it is a bit tricky to classify if there are both
content and language in a question.
Then we moved on to the Key Concept and the
CLIL Classroom. There are three skills involved, namely Communicative Skills,
Cognitive Skills and Practical Skills. In this part we learned about the
importance to teach learners to select information (cognitive skills), how to
demonstrate them (practical skills) and not just give them the information. For
further readings and activities on developing cognitive skills, one can visit
‘TED Talks’ and Ken Robinson’s webpage over the internet.
For the second part of this topic, which is
‘Effective Error Correction’, we were first told to think of a skill we have
learned as an adult. Then we had to recall with who did we learn those skills,
did we make mistakes and how did we feel about making those mistakes. Well, we
managed to go through all the obstacles in learning those skills and it is a
sign that we are very motivated and not afraid to make mistakes.
This is why we have to bring out that
positive side of us and encourage our learners to feel motivated and make them
feel positive about English. Here we can make use of ‘Short Term Motivation’;
grabbing their interests by using subject and real materials which related to
their field of study or their interests.
After they did their practice, here comes
the part where the right technique in correcting mistakes takes place. We can’t
simply blame the students when they are wrong, but we have to make them take
the mistakes in a positive way by using indicators which will not downgrade
them, for example by using gestures to indicate the mistakes or we can get
other learners to correct the mistakes.
As a conclusion, we as educators need to be
clear what our focus of assessment is. In addition to assessing content and
language, we can assess other skills as well, for example their cognitive
skills. We also have to realize that having zero-defects result is not
everything, but making mistakes is actually a part of learning. As said by
Albert Einstein “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything
new”.
Prepared by,
NURUL JIHA BINTI JAYOSMAN
KOLEJ KOMUNITI PAYA BESAR
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