As a teaching part of the school year has just finished along with the boiling “heat“ of finishing the school year, when students’ final marks, as their educational results, give that spicy touch to its end, sometimes in a more dramatic and emotional tone than usual, literally in a sweat and short, puffing breath, caused by the already unbearable weather conditions of mid-June, there is no better reason to take time, or we can call it a teacher’s minute, to stop for a moment or two, to take a deeper, releasing breath, to think about our students’ achievements.
Some would say that the teachers should take a shorter break to refresh themselves in order to continue their administrative role to close up this school year, by clearing their minds by shutting them off like a power socket by pressing that small button, but it is not that easy and possible, and therefore it is good. Yes, it is absolutely right when teachers make a use of their tired and stressed mental system to do some self-reflection and analysis of their work. Why? In teachers’ world the end of the school year is the beginning of a new one, so it is happening just in time, still fully alive and kicking, already spontaneously pulsating in every corner of teachers’ mind, no matter the school year has already ended.
Teachers’ self-reflection is one of a kind, because it is constant, usually uncontrolled and subconscious, motivated by inner and outer factors, “cohabiting” with different social interactions, strongly affected by others’ life struggles sensations, from their students’ learning difficulties and behaviour problems, their ups and downs to their students’ parents’ coping with learning parentship and existential challenges. It is often conscious, controlled, deliberate, and led by following the rules, academic laws, and pedagogical procedures. It is rarely absent. It never stops, and it should not ever. It reflects a teacher’s responsibility as it is equal to the highest values of our profession. What is there to reflect on continuously, doubtless it is on a teacher’s priority list of her/his teaching weak and strong points that should be set to improve a teacher’s performance.
One of the most top listed, prioritized, and highly sensitive, according to its importance, is the issue of assessing and being assessed. Assessing is enormously challenging, and in the context of a teacher’s duty, it cannot be just named as a part of teacher’s job, or task, because it is a multi-functional, rather to say expertise that requires a lifelong learning process and experience, self-assessing, and self-liberating, meaning opening oneself to criticism and accepting one’s flaws as good and positive turning points. Assessing is highly delicate and must itself be considered as thoroughly and constantly analysed and improved in order to be more precise, relevant and therefore as objective as it can be.
When teachers finish assessing their students, they cannot be completely at ease with all the assessment results, because there is always the question of whether the assessment rubric or method was fair, right and objective enough, and that is the starting point for why teachers find assessing the most difficult “part” in their already complex work. What I have learned is that to be utterly aware of the impact of assessment and its importance, the necessity of being assessed is inevitable. This is the hardest way to start from, but it should be taken in order to learn better and open our personal and professional horizons.
Generally speaking, being assessed is not attractive and interesting to anyone, and quite frankly, it definitely does not bring a nice feeling when someone is peer-assessed at working place. Our knowledge, skills, experience, and abilities are challenged then, and it is not pleasant at all to worry about what impression we will create. On the other hand, it is crucial to be subject to other professionals’ insight, because the benefits are massive. First, on a private level, it is an experience that brings changes for the better. It strengthens our self-esteem, empowers us to feel stronger, more positive, and more capable. It opens new vistas and sharpens our senses to think and conclude critically.
Second, when all those aforesaid are applied to a teaching context, then its effects are multiplied. For the start, open the doors of your classroom. Be prepared to have guests monitoring your teaching process. Those can be your fellow teachers, a school pedagogue, or a school headmaster. Just preparing yourself for exposing your teaching practice to them, makes you already aware of your mistakes, good sides, things you need to learn to be a more digitally competent teacher, and to make your students more engaged and active. Be ready to hear their review and talk to them about your assessment results without holding back. Think of it as an opportunity to learn, to improve yourself, to make your teaching more effective, more productive, just better. If you do not feel comfortable to have your colleagues as your guests, try to host foreign teachers who will do their job shadowing activity as a part of their Erasmus + project at your school, and they will observe your classes and practice.
Prepare a monitoring form they are going to fill in, observing your teaching methods, class by class. It will be perfect if you show your regular class, extracurricular class, field class, and your projects as well. At the end of their mobility, they are supposed to give you their feedback. After this experience your perspective of being assessed will be completely changed. You are able to question your assessment rubrics, the assessing structure (elements and criteria), to understand what should be corrected, improved, or just rearranged, to find and recognize the answers to your questions, always keeping in mind that assessing criteria and conclusion need to be clear to your students, the same way as it was obvious and easily understood when you were assessed.
Now, you can apply the same process in your teaching practice to teach your students how to peer assess. Here you can see the examples of peer assessment of presentations on the topic of healthy living in the 7th grade (age 13). Back then, in 2019, I taught my students to make an assessment form with several elements to be assessed (the same ones as in the assessment rubric) using Microsoft Forms. One student shared her/his form in the English language channel in Teams, few moments before she/he started her/his presentation, and her/his classmates assessed her/his performance following the given rubric by filling the form. Suggestion: give them a task for their homework to analyse their assessment results and to write a conclusion. Have them share their thoughts with you.
Note that in the assessment example (Figure 1) I prepared for my students to show them how it should have looked like, the element creativity was officially suggested then to be included. Nowadays, it cannot be one of the key elements to assess someone’s work summatively. It can be only relevant if you assess that element formatively.
Figure 2 shows some students’ answers. Note that those were the first attempts of their peer-assessment and today, after three years, they are much better, more seriously taken, and precise.
Today: The following figures (Figs. 3, 4, and 5) there are screenshots of the online voting/assessing example, again done in the 7th grade. Students assessed two presentations, done by their classmates, on the opposing points, by following the given rubric and giving pro and contra arguments. At the end, they needed to vote for the best presentation. The online tool for brainstorming, voting, mini debating, I highly recommend is Tricider (https://www.tricider.com/). This way our students learn how to show a reasonable, objective and explained point of view, how important is to prove it by arguments and also how to vote.
It is crucial to emphasize that only by determined and constant practising of peer assessment, visible improvements can be expected. The same can be applied to the individual assessment. There is no precise number of how many formative assessments should be done before our students’ knowledge, work, and skills are summatively assessed, but logically we can conclude that there cannot be too many. As much as we strive to help our students understand how much and what they know, can or should do, that much our students become independent and self-confident learners. The more confident learners we are, the more confident and competent students we have.
Author:
Ivana Bokavšek
English teacher, teacher adviser
Autumn 2022
