Seventh week assignment: Systematizing observations in the classroom

As the other alternatives in assessment (portfolios, conferences, self- and peer- assessments, journals) observations are different options to assess students’ performance and aspects of teaching practice. Most people could say that they are not as affective as theory suggests because they do not give a grade or because they require a lot of time and that makes it unreliable. It is true that it is not a summative assessment but we should keep in mind that the most important characteristic of those alternatives is their formative nature. For that reason, we as teachers should take them as an opportunity to make changes in the classroom, to improve or help more our students.

In this little space, I will focus on a few ways to systematize observations so as to show that they can be reliable as far as they have clear objectives and specific instruments to collect information.

Anecdotal records: if you are not an experienced teacher in terms of carrying out observations, you can start by using this type of observations. You can use an informal notebook for you to write an aspect you consider important as soon as you observe it.

They are more useful for internal purposes; teacher can evaluate and tailor instruction for their learners.

Checklists: compared with the previous example, these types have predesigned categories for recording your observations. They require precise and specific categories and criteria for assessing students and instructional activities. On them, teachers select among the criteria the one(s) that correspond to the observations. In next example, the teacher is observing a linguistic aspect during a class and there are some options (s)he chooses and writes a line according to the observed performance:

Rating scales: the difference with the formerly mentioned is that this one provides more categories in which observations can be clasified. Generally, they use numbers to locate the students according to their performance. Here is an example of an observation of oral production where different scores are given:

These formats will systematize our observations in a way that they can give us appropriate information for the learning and teaching processes. 

Another key point is that before carrying out observations, we must be clear about the objectives of our observation. They must be organized according to our instructional plans, content, materials, equipment, and activities. 

After that, organized information will be useful to prepare effective reports.