Assignment for “ Am I teaching well?

: Self-Evaluation strategies for effective teachers”

Evaluation is an essential part of the teaching process. Most of teacher’s daily work is determined by
judgements, decisions and choices. Some of these are macro decisions which are so important that
they could make or break a class. Due to the facts that the quality of the program system depends
on decisions and choices, interest in self-assessment in teaching is growing.

An effective teacher should keep a written diary or journal shortly after a lesson which presents
personal accounts of teaching activities, observation and views of how the classroom experience
effects teacher’s professional and personal lives in order to examine personal reflection.

Self-evaluation can involve many techniques and best results can be achieved by adopting a
combination of two or more of those techniques simultaneously and to yield deeper inside than is
possible with any technique.

The techniques are described in the following sections:

Action Research: Classroom tasks, Action Plans

Action research links theory and practice, providing an effective way for teachers to try out ideas in
the classroom to increase knowledge about the curriculum, teaching and learning. A Typical action
research goes through stages of investigation, planning, action, observation and reflection.

Self-reporting: Checklists or questionnaires

The ultimate goal of questionnaires and checklists is that teacher can raise their awareness and to
promote self-observation.

Self-observation: Audio or Video recording of Lesson

The video recording of lessons is most reliable and accurate means of documenting that actually
happens in the classroom . One way of using this procedure is to record lessons for a one- or two-
week period, with the goal of capturing class interaction. One tape is selected randomly for analysis.
Just by viewing or listening to a tape would not improve our understanding of our own teaching. So,
a systematic and objective way of exploring information in the recording is required.

Professional Portfolio

Portfolios are collection of material which is representative of work accomplished in a particular

course, with a particular group of learners or in an entire school year. This may include lesson plans,
student work samples, program goals, record of activity outside the classroom, records of courses
taken, summary of professional books and articles, notes from their or their parents, name tag from
workshop , conferences ,photo, videos and so on. Portfolio is beneficial when it is combined with
some techniques.

Role Reversal :Teachers as learners

Sometimes in order to discover the difficulties of learning a new language, a thing a language
teacher should do is to experience as a learner of other language like Mandarin and keep observer
diaries as teacher-learners. Sharing impression from their diaries, will help them discover real
learning experience for participants .

Peer observation
To see what is happening in the classroom clearly, if access to video or audio taping is not available,
teacher need assistance from their colleagues. Peer observation has been considered as effective
way to teacher learning, especially if what teacher observes is an experienced one and the
observation is followed by discussions and analysis of findings. Over the years, ideas for peer
observation have been revised and new method possibilities have been improved.

Programs and classrooms are intended to promote enjoyment in learning, to encourage

collaboration and interaction, and to help students develop real skills they will need in real life.

Program Design
Essential factor for successful teaching is preparation. It involves conducting a needs analysis,
defining goals of the program, creating a long-range plan and undertaking systematic work and
reflect on daily lesson plans.

Needs Analysis

It is essential to find out student’s needs, interests, expectations, preferences and dislikes before
commencing work with them. In helping them achieve their goals, the following elements such as
student’s level of proficiency, student’s individual learning styles and what students should be able
to do when they finish the course.

Program Goals

Goals might include assisting students in achieving educational goal helping students to improve
proficiency in their communicative abilities. A teacher should compare needs and goals to reveal
any program weakness .

Curricula, Course Outlines and Long-range Plans

Preparing to teach involves knowing the course curriculum. For designing a course for each new
group of students, teacher should adapt an established curriculum for the long-range plan include
selecting the units and topics to teach, deciding on the amount of time to allocate with each of
them, setting lessons at the end of the appropriate level and so on.

Daily Lesson Planning

Unit planning

Lessons plans are the tasks to reflect on context, techniques, materials , sequencing and timing, and
the aspects of program design. The first step in lesson planning is unit planning, which usually
involves applying a commonsense approach to select sequencing components. Lesson topics could
be designed by considering answers to following questions:

- What Language tasks do people carry out in the context?

- What language will student need to use

The Process of Designing Lesson Plan

The first step in creating lesson plan is to determine the contents need to be taught and define
an objective, what students will be able to do after the lesson. With an object defined, the
following questions are again needed to be considered:

-What language components student will need to describe and explain

 -What vocabularies and expression will be needed to preteach for students to be able to achieve
the objective identified

-What grammatical structures are related to the topic?

Decision for Introducing new content should depend on learner’s preferences, expectations, learning
and teaching styles and sequencing of the lesson’s other activities.

In a deductive presentation, movement is from larger context to the build the blocks. In inductive
presentation, starts with building blocks which mean directed preteaching vocabulary, structure,
practice activities and finally a role play.

Lesson objectives

Objectives state what students will be able to do at the end of the lesson and reflect the extent to
which we expect that teaching will result in learning.

Reflective Lesson Plans

Truly reflective lesson plans include note s about any changes like “Went well”, “Too challenging”,
“Took much more time than planned, “ Do this after the explanation phase” , and soon testify to the
fact that planning is going. Such notes promote reflection about teaching practice and guide us as
we develop plans for future lessons.

Overall Evaluation of Daily Lessons

Reflect on daily plans for the last week whether

- it is planned around the intended objects

- it is included a variety of teaching strategies to address different learning styles and clear objective

-the activities are well sequenced and a variety of material used relevant to the learners

-learners are provided with opportunities of practice of new skills and knowledge.

Resources
Characteristic of Resources

It is important to ensure that our students trust is not misplaced by reviewing and assessing material
is available to compensate for weakness.

Elements of a Lesson
Presentation Techniques and Language

There are two presentation techniques to inductive and deductive Additional aspects of
presentation include choice pf language and manner of speaking the use of teaching aids and
physical position in classroom.

Types of Activities

A Lesson needs to include a sequence of activities and techniques with common objective.
Possibilities include guessing games, song, puzzles, discussion, dialogue , paintwork and so on.

Preparing Students for Activities

One way of finding out whether sufficient preparatory work have been done with students is to
evaluate an activity right after it is completed. Students response to Activities better if they know
what they can expect and material that have been pretaught.

Balance of Skills

Establishing the skills that need to be addressed should be an aim of the initial needs assessment for
each program and group of learners.

Register

Most idioms are directly related to register. The idiom is completely isolated from context. The
teacher should explain other ways of using it like providing additional examples and creates
opportunities for students to practice in meaningful communitive activities.

The Grammar Dilemma

Teachers may find it difficult to persuade these students that communication revolve around
meaning, not structures.

Teaching Grammar

Teachers must decide not only how much grammar a group of students needs, but also how it will
be presented .A teacher should brainstorm what other units or topics could be linked with
structures.

Classroom Communication
Pattern of Interaction

A possible rule for establishing a balance of teacher and student talk is “If a student says what a
teacher wants say, make sure to repeat or clarify what the student says so that everyone in class
understand.

Group Work

Mixed-ability groups allow students to learn from o(one another and give students at high
proficiency levels a chance to enjoy being “experts”.

Dealing with learner Differences

In an excellent book , on selecting a common topic for all groups but set the activities at different
levels helps students develop a feeling of belonging to the class and this collaboration gives students
the opportunity to get to know all they feel comfortable working in different group.

Classroom Confidence and Trust

Classroom confidences involves several ingredients that help intensify class ties:

-building own confidence : looking acting confident, being aware of who you are and what you can
do ( the confident your project is contagious)

-building your students confidence- awareness of who your students are and their abilities providing
opportunities for students to feel confident about their work.
-building confidence : that class work can and will get done possession of the subject necessary
knowledge of the subject matter and teaching methodologies, determination to achieve our goals.

Questions and Responses

Teacher Questions

Knowing how and when to ask one of the appropriate questions is important skills. Display questions
can be used during explanation as a follow-up to the key points being presented.

Students Participation and Responses

Try to monitor which students are responding to your questions by placing a checkmark next to the
names of students. Finding effective ways of cutting down talkative students’ talk time can be
difficult but in order to ensure all students get chance to take part and let them know that they are
appreciated for the input and them state directly that would like to find out what others think about
the issue.

Special Consideration for the Language Teacher

Strategies to teach students how to ask questions are s are

-directly teaching -directly teaching -directly teaching -directly teaching basic survival goes and
expression. (“E.g. Can You repeat that, please?”)

-highlighting the focused repetitive techniques in which the known part of a statement is repeated
to highlight the unknown. ( E.g. “Mary ,had that book”. “Mary had what?”)

-teaching proper body language to indicate lack of comprehension.

Feedback and Correction

Positive and Negative Feedback

Corrective feedback starting with the word “No” may serve only to create barriers, esp. for adult
learners or students with low self-esteem. Positive feedback motivates students and improves
performance.

Correction

Monitoring of student errors can serve as an important guide for program planning and curriculum
design. Responding to a student’s mistakes by repeating his/her sentence and correcting the
incorrectly used word seems to be a good strategy.

Motivation and Attitude

Student Motivation

If we build programs around materials and topics of interest to our students, it can increase their
motivation. We must list personal details like Interests. Hobbies / Leisure activities and goal.

Assessment ,Testing and Marking

There are two generally recognized categories: quantitative and qualitative. The former includes
procedures based on formal tests conducted with a variety of objectives in mind , along with other
data-gathering techniques such things as attendance, records, rating and questionnaires . Technique
of qualitative is informal and include such thing as classroom observation, interviews, case studies,
student portfolios, student self-assessment , group projects and student presentations.

Program Evaluation
Evaluation involves the collection of information for the purposes of deciding what works and what
does not work. This information is used to decide what aspects of educational program should be
changed.

The types of evaluation mostly commonly mentioned include the following:

• Formative-conducted during the program with the purpose of bringing improvement

• Summative- conducted at the conclusion of program with the program to determine its
effectiveness
• Process – focused on how the program works
• Product- focused on whether program goals have been achieved
• Quantitative -including countable bits of information (test results, statistical data)
• Qualitative – including more holistic information based on observation , journal entries etc.,
• Outside – conducted by someone other than the teacher ( students, peers, supervisors, or
accreditation in situation) and
• Inside – self- evaluation of teachers by teachers of students by students.