After teaching some corporate students, and reluctant to hand out school-type "grades" but still needing something, I developed the idea of a "Participation Index" to have a measure of how involved the student was in the training. This experience gave me a different viewpoint on grades.
Attendance
At my college I had one student who came on the first day of class and again for the final exam. I promptly forgot him after seeing him the first time and wondered who he was when I saw him the second time. The class monitors keep track of attendance. Now I have the class monitors also keep track of attendance in my Excel spreadsheet. At the most basic level, if the students are in class they are (hopefully) going to learn something. The idea is to show their "participation".
Class Interaction
But still some students are doing some other homework, reading something else, chatting with their neighbors, etc. Are they learning during this time? No. (Perhaps they already know. In that case it probably should be OK for them to do something else if it doesn't disturb others.) The idea is not to punish students but to show their "participation" in the lesson. Some MBA course instructors give scores up to 40% of the students' grades for "airtime", visibility acquired on basis of class participation. In "Alternative Approaches to Assessing Student Engagement Rates", Elaine Chapman at The University of Western Australia describes several ways of measuring participation and I'm thinking of using the one she describes as "Direct Observation".
Homework
I have 160 students and sometimes hand out homework with each class. So I usually see if the students did the homework without seeing how well they did it. The idea is that applying themselves to the work is beneficial for their learning whether they got it all correct or not. We then go over the questions and answers together and everyone self-corrects.
Quiz
I want to use quizzes more effectively and more frequently to see if the students are "getting it". When I haven't done this I've been surprised how many students really didn't understand (or pay attention).
Exam
To measure the take-away from the training. I'm having lots of other thoughts on this. While the school course teaches things like how to read the corporate year end report, I have found a lot of my students go out after graduation and get jobs as Nokia phone salespeople in a discount department store or other sub-entry level job. It is likely that a lot of what they learned is lost well before they get a chance to use it. I am thinking about not only not testing their comprehension of corporate reports but steering the course away from that sort of thing and focusing more on English that they will have more hope of using soon. If they don't use it they'll lose it. But to help them keep it we should teach what they'll use.
Showing posts with label sumative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sumative. Show all posts
08 March 2007
21 February 2007
Jack Welch and the language classroom
...well, OK, it's not really Jack Welch talking about English teaching but it is adapting a couple of his ideas.
A couple of Jack Welch's ideas that he expounds in his best-selling book, "Winning", are how he uses every opportunity to appraise the people working for him and how he regularly fires the bottom 5% performers.
In my spoken English class I am using almost every exchange with students to help evaluate their English. I'm not waiting for the end of term exam or even quizzes. Especially after a pair or group work activity I like to call on a few students to tell us what they talked about, what decision they made about the situation in the activity, what answer they have to the questions they were to talk about. When they speak I may ask them a couple more questions and then I will give them a score which is recorded in my computer and averaged with other scores and indicators.
In this way I can get a pretty good idea which students are doing well in my class and which ones are not doing so well. When you have classes of 40-50 students there are always a few very naughty students sitting in the back of the class and a few very smiley and bright ones sitting in the front of the class. Both of these types of students distract you from the more unobtrusive majority, many of whom are rather quite although often with good English skills. Only by systematically checking all of the students can we find these students before giving them an exam.
This leads us to the next point...
Another practice of that Welch follows is firing the bottom 5% performers. The employees that are doing the least in the company get fired as a regular practice. Well, as teachers we usually can't fire our students. But we can make a point of identifying exactly who the bottom performers are and trying to develop a plan to help them whether it's extra training, extra homework, extra encouragement or whatever.
In every class there are students who are doing well and students who are doing poorly and many in between. Unlike something like a writing class or four-skills class there may be less evidence of exactly how the students are doing. The speaking class students are not turning in homework and usually no quizzes. What some teachers do is to just teach, teach, teach and give an oral exam at the end of term.
My suggestion is that teachers should use as many opportunities as possible to assess the students, formative evaluation. I have realized that in the past I let many of these assessment opportunities slip by. I now make full use of them.
As far as face goes, we must understand the significance of face in Asian society, respect that and take it into consideration in all that we do. But face saving is not a goal unto itself. There may be instances when we are unable to preserve face and do what our jobs require at the same time. If a student is struggling in the classroom we must try to help them. Of course, we'll do everything we can to help him save face but his grades, his success in school and his success in life are not measured soley by the amount of face he retains. In fact, there are certain situations when it is better to lose face.
Concerning borrowing a page from Jack Welch, a captain of capitalistic-commerce, I believe he knows a lot about organization. I despise some of the snaky things Welch has done. If he is responsible for even half these things he should be tried as a war criminal.[1] I despise his attitude that business is more important than family.[2]
But that does not mean he cannot have good advice that can help us. After all, you or a friend of yours probably enjoy some of Hitler's good ideas, right?[3]
[1] http://www.cleanupge.org/gemisdeeds.html
[2] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7305761/site/newsweek/
[3] http://ask.yahoo.com/20050308.html
A couple of Jack Welch's ideas that he expounds in his best-selling book, "Winning", are how he uses every opportunity to appraise the people working for him and how he regularly fires the bottom 5% performers.
In my spoken English class I am using almost every exchange with students to help evaluate their English. I'm not waiting for the end of term exam or even quizzes. Especially after a pair or group work activity I like to call on a few students to tell us what they talked about, what decision they made about the situation in the activity, what answer they have to the questions they were to talk about. When they speak I may ask them a couple more questions and then I will give them a score which is recorded in my computer and averaged with other scores and indicators.
In this way I can get a pretty good idea which students are doing well in my class and which ones are not doing so well. When you have classes of 40-50 students there are always a few very naughty students sitting in the back of the class and a few very smiley and bright ones sitting in the front of the class. Both of these types of students distract you from the more unobtrusive majority, many of whom are rather quite although often with good English skills. Only by systematically checking all of the students can we find these students before giving them an exam.
This leads us to the next point...
Another practice of that Welch follows is firing the bottom 5% performers. The employees that are doing the least in the company get fired as a regular practice. Well, as teachers we usually can't fire our students. But we can make a point of identifying exactly who the bottom performers are and trying to develop a plan to help them whether it's extra training, extra homework, extra encouragement or whatever.
In every class there are students who are doing well and students who are doing poorly and many in between. Unlike something like a writing class or four-skills class there may be less evidence of exactly how the students are doing. The speaking class students are not turning in homework and usually no quizzes. What some teachers do is to just teach, teach, teach and give an oral exam at the end of term.
My suggestion is that teachers should use as many opportunities as possible to assess the students, formative evaluation. I have realized that in the past I let many of these assessment opportunities slip by. I now make full use of them.
As far as face goes, we must understand the significance of face in Asian society, respect that and take it into consideration in all that we do. But face saving is not a goal unto itself. There may be instances when we are unable to preserve face and do what our jobs require at the same time. If a student is struggling in the classroom we must try to help them. Of course, we'll do everything we can to help him save face but his grades, his success in school and his success in life are not measured soley by the amount of face he retains. In fact, there are certain situations when it is better to lose face.
Concerning borrowing a page from Jack Welch, a captain of capitalistic-commerce, I believe he knows a lot about organization. I despise some of the snaky things Welch has done. If he is responsible for even half these things he should be tried as a war criminal.[1] I despise his attitude that business is more important than family.[2]
But that does not mean he cannot have good advice that can help us. After all, you or a friend of yours probably enjoy some of Hitler's good ideas, right?[3]
[1] http://www.cleanupge.org/gemisdeeds.html
[2] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7305761/site/newsweek/
[3] http://ask.yahoo.com/20050308.html
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