ELT in Brazil

Last Saturday, January 28th, I attended Caltabiano’s teacher development one-day event at Instituto Singularidades. Four plenary sessions were delivered by four different experts in the field and this post is a reflection on the first one (more posts to come on the other sessions).

The first plenary session was delivered by the always-relevant and on-point Isabela Villas Boas. Isabela talked about the possibility of making sure in-class assessment and proficiency exams see eye to eye. This post is not a summary or review ( I wouldn’t dare) of her talk, but rather an offspring based on insights brought about by reflecting on the topic.

Diversify your assessment tools

Assessment, as we know, is not synonymous to testing. This is a very common misconception and a very dangerous one for I believe it drastically limits our choices. We can assess learners in a thousand different ways. This assessment can be formal or informal, continuous or not, formative or summative. For instance, we can assess learning through projects, presentations, podcasts, videos, role-plays, articles, comic strips, profile writing, short stories, poems, raps, chants, infographics, illustrations, demonstrations, posters, blogs, portfolios, mini-lessons, quizzes, and yes – tests. Notice, however, the myriad of options at our disposal to make sure our assessment is as valid, reliable, and engaging to our learners as possible.

Make sure your assessment tools are as valid and reliable as possible

In short, an assessment tool is valid when it assesses what it is supposed to assess. If you taught students how to plan and design a presentation, it is not valid to assess them using a written test with discrete-item, multiple-choice exercises on the grammar and vocabulary taught to support the communicative goal of giving a presentation. You won’t find the evidence you are looking for and students will likely find it unfair.

On the other hand, an assessment tool is reliable if you can trust its results and you can use these. For example, if you wish to assess students’ skill to work on word transformation exercises for Cambridge exams, using the activities in Sergio’s book will give you reliable evidence on whether or not they can do it because there is only one correct answer for each.

The problem is that most of the time, having a highly valid and reliable assessment tool will not be possible. If you want a valid assessment tool to check students’ development in planning, designing, and delivering a presentation, you will have to allow them to give their presentations and assess them. However, if you don’t write very specific criteria to assess these presentations and share these with your learners, you will assess students subjectively and this won’t probably be very reliable. Catch 22, innit?

Vygotskyfy your self-assessment

I thought about this one while editing a coursebook unit for an author friend of mine. Usually, self-assessment tools require students to fill in charts such as the one below:

Let’s be honest – nobody wants a tick anywhere but under the happiest of faces. Only the most honest of students will actually tick anywhere else but the happiest face and all students who think they are not there yet are likely to feel frustrated about even thinking of ticking a sad face. What about Vygostkyfying our self-assessment tools? Here’s an example:

I believe that this way we can foster more honest, reliable, and kind self-assessment for our learners.

The (backwash) effect that assessment can have on teaching and learning is not one to be neglected. Teachers tend to teach according to the assessment system in place. If you want teachers to teach all four skills equally, if you want them to prioritize communicative competence over grammatical and lexical accuracy, your assessment system has to reflect this. If the only way students are assessed is through a written test at the end of the module, how much importance do you think students will give to classroom communication?