ASSESING YOUNG LEARNERS AND RUBRICS (CLASSES IN CONFINEMENT)

On October 21 and 22, I couldn't attend face-to-face classes at university due to a positive contact with Covid-19. For that reason, I had to remain in confinement at home. Fortunately, Maribel gave me the opportunity to follow the classes through Microsoft Teams, which I appreciated a lot since I could follow the subject at the same time as the rest of the class.

Those days, Maribel continued with the Assessment unit. She showed us a PowerPoint with different evaluation ways of assessment such as portfolios or Self-Evaluation. In addition, she explained different ways to assess Speaking and Writing skills. On the other hand, Maribel explained how to make evaluation rubrics and the steps we must take into account to carry out one.

What I learnt of those classes it was the advantages of portfolios because although I already knew them, I didn't think that they had so many benefits for the daily learning of the students. Besides, I learnt how to make appropriate and easy rubrics with the Rubistar website.

In my opinion, as future teachers we must innovate in our teaching process so that students feel motivated and show interest in learning. Therefore, we must know very well how to make a good assessment to give them the necessary tools to improve. Here I show a video that I found quite interesting about assessing young children.

FORMATIVE APPROACH

 In the classes on October 14 and 15, Maribel focused on a particular approach which is 'Assessment for learning' (AFL). This assessment consists of providing Feedback to the students to highlight their strengths and weaknesses and thus achieve an active engagement of the learner. Maribel explained the ten principles of assessment for learning and after that, we did an activity in pairs on how students should be as aware of the ‘how’ of their learning as they are of the ‘what’. Finally, we learned how to carry out an effective learning plan to assess our students.

Even though these classes were a bit tiresome due to the amount of information but it was very useful for me to know the keys to carry out a good assessment to the students.

In my opinion, students should always receive a contructive guidance in order to improve their weaknesses, how to develop their strenghts and give them the opportunity to progress in their daily work. Assessment for learning has numerous benefits such as motivate unmotivate students, encourage students to keep learning or create increased acvhievement.

ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION

On October 7 and 8, we worked in class the unit about Assessment and Evaluation. Firstly, the teacher asked us some questions about how we were evaluated during our time in Primary Education. Most of us used to be evaluated with exams or tests that were obligatory to pass and the daily and progressive work was not usually very rewarded. Then we made some questionnaires about methodology, lesson planning, independent learning and some personal reflections. I suposse the teacher wants to know our prior knowledge about planning a class or taking an assessment.

These two classes were not so much to learn new things but to debate and get the points of view of the classmates and give our opinion on how to evaluate students in the future. There are many more ways to evaluate such as diaries, portfolios, group projects... and we have to learn to use those resources properly.

From my point of view, it is very interesting to know that most of us were not evaluated with an appropiate assessment and that the whole subject mark should not depend on passing the exam. 

MY FIRST CLASS IN DIDACTICS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

It was the last class of the day when we met our new teacher María Isabel. She told us to call her 'Maribel'. The first impression was quite good as I noticed that she was a very nice and outgoing person.

First of all, Maribel introduced herself with a presentation about her family, her job, her travels and her hobbies. Afterwards, each student came out in front of the whole class to introduce themselves. We had to tell our names, our age, where we live, our hobbies...In short, anything we wanted. And that was our first day of class!

What I have learnt about this class is that making a simple presentation about ourselves you can make students feel more relaxed on their first day of class. Moreover, making  a presentation about themselves, it helps them get to know each other better.

In my opinion, this class was very useful as it is very important that teachers establish personal ties with students and also among students, they can discover many things in common.