'PLANNING EVALUATION'

I would like to make a short reflection on the chapters we have read this week (planning evaluation and collecting information) because they point out an important issue in our practices: “making decisions.”

A great number of the students in our program have had the experience of working on institutes, in which they are a little bit restricted in making decisions on their methodology and their assessment practices. They can decide if they do their job comfortably following a text book, or they can actually make decisions about it. On the other side, in public schools you may say ironically that ‘you are free to do whatever you want’. So, you can be a committed teacher who takes into account the instruction (objectives, plans, practices),  the students (needs, goals, personal background, attitudes, feelings), the teacher (language experiences, language skills, and attitudes), and the school (physical and personnel resources); or you can take to heart this option in other sense, and become a babysitter who at the end of the period take the list and write a grade depending on your personal impressions about each student.

Then, the way we take depend on the decisions we make every day. No matter in what context we are, in which conditions, the number of learners, or even the pay,  language assessment, as it is stated in the chapters, should be an on-going process, that involves the collection of both qualitative and quantitate information’ so it ‘can enhance the reliability of our assessments and the validity of our decision making.’ It means much effort and commitment from our part, but it is ‘just’ because our decisions affect our students’ performance.