As we moved through our final units within the course I found myself becoming increasingly curious about assessment - specifically formative assessment.
The following video highlights a simplified overview of formative assessment but offers three interesting tips about how to bolster formative assessment to benefit your students. Using the idea of quizzes as an example the three tips are:
1 - Poll students about how they think they did on the quiz.
2 - Facilitate a critical discussion about the quiz and talk about what's next
3 - Get students to create questions.
Those snappy quizzes that we use in classes can suddenly have much added value if we conduct a post-mortem Q&A session with the students about how they view the overall "scope, challenge, and practicality" of the quiz to their learning. I really found this critical thinking element a wonderful way to engage student talents and promote assessment. I actually used this approach this week in conversation class and it was easy and very quick. We finished a couple of exercises (not quizzes) and I would ask which parts they found most impactful to their learning. The details shared were amazing and demonstrated a clear understanding of the words and ideas under review.
Also, the following hyperlink leads to chapter 4 of the ESL Council of the Alberta Teacher's Association's document written by Karen deMilliano (20010) called:
"Understanding ESL Learners: Assessment"
deMilliano's 1st page makes an excellent summary of assessment and reads as follows:
"According to Alberta Learning, the purpose of ESL assessment is to:
- identify strengths and weaknesses of individual students,
- adjust instruction to build on students’ strengths and alleviate weaknesses,
- monitor the effectiveness of instruction,
- provide feedback to students and parents or sponsors, and
- make decisions about the advancement of students to the next level of the program."
This document reveals an excellent subsection on pages 3 and 4 called "Assessing the Language Strands" which I found helpful in that it details methods of assessing oral and auditory skills and associates same with student activities that are easy to implement and recognize.
I am excited to build some of these approaches immediately into my own lesson planning activities to support the formative assessment portions I have struggled with. I think this is one area where my learning about ESL has grown significantly = HAPPY!
References
Duckworth, S. (2015, August 12). 10 Habits of Bloggers that Win. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/sylviaduckworth/20489663266/
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