Assessment Rubric

Hi again!

Today I am going to write about one of the most important but also the most difficult aspects that teachers should consider. It is assessment.

If we think about how our teachers should evaluate us 10 or 15 years ago, we agree that the only resource they used are exams. However, education has changed throughout history and nowadays, we as teachers, feel the responsibility to evaluate our students´ learning process. This last point is very important, when we were young we were usually exposed to a knowledge that we should learn and vomit in an exam, but today, teachers know that learning is a process where there are many things to evaluate in order to guide our students through this process.

In CLIL as a quite new approach, sometimes we have got doubts about how to assess. Firstly we need to know the importance of the content we are teaching and secondly the second language we are using in order to learn this content, so that, teachers need to focus their assessment on language and content at the same time. About the skills we are going to make our students improve there are three very important skills that any CLIL lessons should assess: communicative, cognitive and attitudes to learning.

The most important thing we, as teachers, should take into account is that students should be the centre of the assessment process, it means that teachers should adapt their assessment resources to students needs and not the other way round.

The resources that fit with this type of evaluation are called rubrics and portfolios. With this resources, teachers are able to record how effectively their objectives have been achieve. We should remember that our assessment criteria is literally checking if our students have reached the goals we proposed.
Therefore, rubrics contain:
1-the objectives or goals teachers want their students to reach
2-a description of each aspect that is going to be evaluated
3-a scale of progressive ratings that teacher will use to evaluate the goals
4-a clear description of each level of the rating

In particular my open educational project is focused on creativity and entrepreneurship, collaborative group work, English language, Ict and Social science. So that I have already created a rubric for the first learning mission . It is also aligned with Infoedugrafias´ way of assessing, which of course is using rubrics and portfolios.

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Quick rubric is the online tool I decided to use. I first was thinking about making a table in google docs but this online tool provide you with all resources and possibilities to create a rubric: titles, rows, columns, the score. It looks very easy to create a table in word and that's it but as ICT is very time consuming all these tools like Quick rubric make us save time and the rubric, at the end, have a very good appearance.

As I said before, rubrics are one of the most useful tools for assessment, they allow us to check if our students have achieved the objectives we want but at the same time rubrics are giving information about how effective our performance as teachers has been. To conclude, I would like to reflect about how difficult is going back and review your whole project and check again what objectives we want our students to achieve and if the activities really help them to achieve it. I also should say that at this stage of the project I feel proud about the whole process, it hasn´t been easy but it has made feel very fulfilled. When you are reaching the assessment of your project you know that you are nearly at the end of your big challenge but, it is not the end, this is actually the starting point, now I am ready to propose this project and apply it to a real class and I can´t wait!

I hope you like my rubric and thoughts about assessment, thank you very much.