As a teacher, my responsibility is to support, guide, and evaluate the learning of the students. Pre-assessment is an important tool to help me determine what prior knowledge students have already grasped before beginning a lesson. This will help me recognize the best way to scaffold. I believe students learn best when they are in classes with teachers who utilize different methods of teaching/and assessments. This way, students are provided with various opportunities to show what they have learned. Formative assessment is the major key of assessment; it is an enduring process to monitor learning progress during lessons. There are advantages to include formative assessment because Brown and Abeywickrama (2010) stated, “[portfolio] fosters intrinsic motivation, responsibility, and ownership, it also promotes student-teacher interaction with the teacher as facilitator and individualize learning and celebrate the uniqueness of each student.”  My philosophy is to provide a fair assessment of an array of accessible and diverse techniques (Richards and Rodgers, 2014). These include portfolios, multiple-choices, journals, rubrics, self/peer assessments, conferences, and teacher observations. I aim to accurately measure performance whether a student performs on, or above, or below grade level. It is imperative to incorporate informal assessment pre, during, or post instruction to successfully track the students’ performance, observations, and checklists. After given instruction on a lesson, it is critical to administer the achievement test at the end of a lesson and/or a unit to determine if the students’ skills acquired. I believe it is important to introduce the students to what is included in any subjects. Students are best served when their assessments are addressed with washback that is integrated, systematic, process and product-oriented, motivational, and directed toward their independence. My differentiated balanced approach with student-related reliability is aimed to provide success and challenge for all students in their use of language.

References

Brown, H. D. & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy. (4th ed.). White Plains, NY: Pearson.

Richards, J. & Rodgers, T. (2014). Approaches and methods in language teaching. (3rd ed.). United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.