Assessment

As December is getting closer, on Monday's lesson we started planning how to design an English CLIL project that we ourselves will have to do in groups as if we were going to implement it in a real school.

We saw many "theoretical" aspects that we will have to include in our Didactic Unit such as the aims of the project, the competences that we will develop, which concepts the students will learn (both language and cross-curricular concepts), ...etc. But we especially work on the assessment step.

After sawing different types of evaluation, in pairs, we put them in order according to the importance we give to them. In my concrete case, we chose as the most relevant one the "Ongoing" and the "Formative" assessment because we think that learning is a process and not only a final result and, because of that, we should focus more on the development that children do while they are learning more than just on the final product. After this first type of evaluation, we thought that the second should be the "Self" and the "Peer" evaluation. We put these two kinds of evaluation on the same level and we thought that they are also some of the essential methods because, in the case of the self-evaluation, it allows children to be more aware of their learning process and it develops their reflective skills; and in the case of the peer-evaluation, we believe that it helps students to be more respectful and tolerant with their partners as they both have to accept and give positive feedback to learn from each other.

To continue with, we chose in the third place the "Backwards" and the "Diagnostic" assessment. Again, we put them together as we thought they had the same aim: get to know which knowledge do our children already have. We think this kind of evaluation is also very helpful in order not to repeat the content that children have already studied, and to develop it so that they can learn new things by connecting what they knew with what they are learning now in a meaningful way. We think that it is equally important not to provide children with too difficult content that they cannot connect with any of the ideas that they already have, but also not to provide them with too easy content that will make them be bored and that it won't be challenging to learn at all.

Finally, we placed the "summative" evaluation in the last place because, as I have said before, nowadays it's increasing the importance of valuing the whole process instead of just the final result and, in this way, the summative assessment is becoming less popular as we are replacing it with the other types of evaluation.

Moreover, as a transverse tool to implement the evaluation, we talked about using rubrics. They can help teachers to have more clear which items do they want to evaluate, but it could also be an easy way to make students become the evaluators by crossing or punctuating the items placed in the rubric, both about themselves or about the others (self and peer evaluation). About this resource for evaluating, we saw a website called "Rubistar" that help teachers create quality rubrics to evaluate. (http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php)

Luckily, I have seen all these types of evaluation in the schools where I have done my practical training and that's why I can say that the ones that I have placed in the first points (ongoing, self and peer and backwards evaluation) really work well in the schools and are more meaningful and helpful for students.

To end up with the importance of the evaluation, we saw a video called "Austin's butterfly edit" in which a teacher explains the case of one student who had to draw a butterfly for a project. At the begging, the student draw a butterfly that wasn't really similar to the photo he chose to copy (he forgot many important details), but thanks to the opportunities that the teacher gave to him to revise his first draw and the advice he received from his partners, the boy got to do an awesome draw of the butterfly after trying it 6 times! This video shows us the advantages of the peer-evaluation as the student couldn't have done the final fantastic draw without accepting and valuing the advice his peers gave to him. It also makes us aware of the benefits it could have to give children the opportunity to improve their jobs and to value this process because, if we only look at the final draw of the butterfly, we could think that it's just a good draw but that's it, when it actually contains a lot of effort from the student. That means, if we take into account the whole process that he has done to get to the final draw, the draw's value increases a lot!!! So, here it appears the importance of the ongoing and the formative assessment mentioned before.