Thinking like an Assessor

As in the article is stated, during the learning process we must look for evidences that not only show the superficial or obvious knowledge acquired from any contents but a deep understanding from them. It is very usual to associate the word assessment with grades, which come up as the advisable method to measure whether the students learnt or not. Undoubtedly this is the most basic way to view the culmination of a learning process, because our goal is not only focused in getting grades at the end of a unit but to create the instances in which the students can show evidences of their understanding through its practice. It means that teachers can control the process from the very beginning to the end through the application of formal and informal ways of assessing in order to check how students have assimilated the tasks and how they have worked related to achieve our goals. Therefore we can say that assessment is not only a way of grading students but one to give a point of reference about whether our teaching practices have been effective or not according to the expected results. That is why it is fundamental to have pre- determined what our goals are, before we plan the further activities, because teaching without regarding an aim, seems to be a waste of time and effort in the classroom.
We can not conceive to teach something just for the fact of getting marks, on the contrary we must teach, thinking in how we can guide our students to develop the necessary skills which allow them to extract a deep understanding from the different units taught. In that way we will be aware about what are the suitable tasks which can make them to transfer abstract pieces of information into the real world, assuring a fruitful teaching and learning process, because the more we focus our lesson on the reality, the more students will learn, while at the same time they may have the opportunities to make the necessary connection to reach a true understanding. If we as teachers are able to show them how adults solve x situation in the real world, I am sure that we would obtain better results than only teaching meaningless and isolated units. Therefore the students ‘performance will depend on how teachers plan their lesson looking for: the statements of the goals, the correct design of the core tasks or activities, and finally the application of a balanced type of assessment which allows to measure permanently the level of understanding achieved by students related to each unit seen in class.

GAINNING CLARITY ON OUR GOALS

It is well known that in the education field the backward design should be coherent with the goals proposed by the government, the questions is what are they? According to my own educational perspective we have not been able to get an agreement in order to discover what society really needs. That is why we work separately pursuing different goals what distorts the results obtained in the system. From my point of view the purpose of learning other languages should be known first by teachers and then by the students. If we regard that learning other language is a vital tool to have access to different pieces of information, we must focus our teaching on its use and application and forget for a while our current way of teaching which just points to explore the theoretical aspects of it. Therefore I think that the process should pursuit the development of practical skills among the students, in order that they can use them as a true means of gaining in communicative competences which are necessary to insert in this global world.
The problem is how we can become a bilingual nation if we are not able to set up our goals clearly?. May be, the answer is in the design area which has two main problems according to the chapter: the aimless coverage of contents and isolated activities which
In my opinion are the responsible that lessons pursuit neither a deep understanding nor the transferability of big ideas, together with the misperception that teachers show to
promote probably unconsciously the learning of the contents by heart what is seen as the right method to get understanding by the students without regarding the most relevant part of the process which is to take this information to the reality through its application in daily and common situations. The only way to revert this phenomenon is through the improvements of our current teaching practices, which should have a free access in order to obtain progressively better results in education along with the state of long-term goals which allow students to fulfill with the requirements to learn a foreign language.
As a conclusion I would say that is impossible to impart a ‘quality education’ without regarding the fact of promoting the inquiry, analysis and transfer capacities on the students, because they arise as essential to bring contents to life and extract a real understanding from them.

Essential questions:Doorway to understanding

In this chapter, we can see what is the real importance of making students go beyond the information given by means of ‘essential questions’ that have as purpose to stimulate the development of knowledge, skills, attitudes, habits of mind, and understanding on the students. The idea is that they find a real sense to what is learned in every one of the units through its application in different contexts. However to attain this aim, it is necessary to change the way in which our students are using the information, together with the focus given by the different textbooks, because learners frequently work on questions which stimulate neither thought nor their capacity of inquiry. That’s why our mission consists on framing work around such questions which allow them to explore beyond the boundaries of the topic given, and the use of connections that promote the transference of their ideas from one setting to others. Regrettably this aim is not entirely fulfilled in our current system of education, because of the lack of a clear proposal by the curriculum in order to stimulate and encourage the constructivist thinking among the Chilean students. A clear example of that situation is the training received by most of the teachers which includes neither the achievement nor the development of these competences, together with the lack of material that supports them.
Actually the questions formulated in the different textbooks do not help to get to the heart of the things (the essence). On the contrary they frequently stimulate the memorization of the content without giving the possibility to be transferred across other disciplines. This happens because the students can find neither the usefulness nor the purpose of why they have to learn that, causing confusion and lack of commitment by them. Personally I consider that behind the learning and teaching process should exist a reason for, in order that knowledge be enough meaningful to cover most of the students ‘need. If we have a clear target in education, we will surely be able to make the suitable questions which provoke in the students a deep thought, a spirit of inquiry, support their ideas, spark meaningful connections, and transfer power. The idea is to propose a challenger in every one of them in order to put in practice all the previous skills to solve problems, going from the most general questions (overarching questions) to the most specific ones (topical questions). The mixture of the different types of ‘Essential questions’ such as: open and guiding as well as topical and overarching allow the accomplishment of understanding and application of a determined content, because when we have identified one or more topical questions, we need broader questions to take the students beyond the topic’s boundaries, improving their capacity of argument to produce knowledge. Based on that, it is a mistake to consider students as passive actors of the process; on the contrary we must focus our teaching in giving them the right tools to become active ones. If we have clear, what is the role of essential questions, we will see that they are not only used to teach stuff, but to frame our goals in the current system of education.

assignment

‘Understanding Understanding’.

This article is focused on clarifying the term ‘understanding’, because from the earliest times, many curriculum writers have avoided the notion, producing confusion mainly among teachers. However, others have tried to give to this term a definition but without the accuracy required because of the existence of different degrees of understanding, what brings serious difficulties to provide evidences, in order to define this nebulous term.
For example, according to Bloom’s taxonomy, ‘understanding’ refers to the ‘commonly sought’, ‘but ill- defined’ objectives. This obstacle provokes that teachers, in most of the cases, confuse whether their students are only able to internalize knowledge or indeed understand the contents taught. The difference seems slight but it is not, that is why many authors have highlighted the distinction that exists between ‘understanding’ and ‘know’. According to Bloom the first term is defined as ‘the ability to marshal skills and facts wisely and appropriately, through an effective application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation’. In simple words, it is the capacity that students should have to transfer what they have learnt to a new setting or situation.
Based on that, it is fundamental to help the students to learn how they can transfer their inherently limited learning to many other settings. If we take in to account the latter, we will see that transfer must be taken as the aim of all teaching in schools, and not only the fact of storing information that in most of the cases is just forgotten by the learners.
Undoubtedly, it is a mistake to think that ‘the more I cover, the more they will learn and the better they will do in a test’. It proves that quantity has nothing to do with the success in terms of application of knowledge. This misunderstood has broken out that most of the teachers focus the lessons in just conveying information without considering the application that it may have in other issues or problems. Thus, coverage should not be seen as ‘a virtue in an educational context’, but rather as ‘a flaw in the current system’, because it leaves the students with no sense of the whole what affects the development of their intellectual capacities, producing confusion in the information given. The other crucial stage in this process is the way in which the understanding is showed, because there is also a wrong focus on our tests. Commonly teachers tend to measure only the superficial knowledge acquired by their students and not their capacity to transfer information. As we can see, the misperception of the word ‘understanding’ has drawn us to make serious mistakes related to the aim of teaching and learning process. There is not doubt that this way of thinking should change from now on, because the fulfillment of these practices will help us considerably to improve the quality of Chilean education, giving the right and necessary tools to students to be applied by them in any setting.