Seventh Week Reflection

Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand . . . what he learns and the way he understands it. Soren Kierkegaard

This week we learned about alternative assessments. Working in the ESL field and previously in Special Education, I have used a lot of alternative assessments. A lot of these assessments were just informal with me basically just making daily observations about my students. I have also used journal writing as a way of assessment, though looking back I do not think that I gave my students the kind of feedback that they really needed. I guess it all came down to time when I was reviewing the journals. I wanted to make sure that I read everyone of them, but I really did not take the time to write any positive or constructive comments. If I decide to use journals again in the future, I will make sure that I take the time to give my students the proper feedback that they need.

Some of the teachers in the ESL Department have folders for all of the students with various examples of the student's work in it. This is sort of like a portfolio except that I do not believe that the students make the decision on what does or does not go in these folders. Having studied a foreign language before, I know that we did a lot of roll playing in class. This is another type of alternative assessment that can be used in an ESL class. Most of the time, the students like to do roll playing with either the teacher or other students. Usually the teacher will show the students some examples of what they are looking for and provide the students with a script template to follow so that the students stay on track and do not just start talking about whatever they want to. We also used roll playing in one of my ESL workshops. In this activity, we were trying to express various emotions and get the audience to guess which emotion we were acting act. Students can also use roll playing without actually using words. The students will then have to infer what is happening.

I chose my quote because it basically states that as teachers, we must realize that our students learn in many different ways and they express their knowledge in many different ways. We cannot use tests as the only means of determining whether or not our students are making progress. Hence, we have to incorporate the use on alternative assessments into our classrooms.