This school year we have decided to take another decisive step towards educational innovations introduced in our Teddy School language school. Namely, we no longer have grades (this has been the case since last year), there are also no tests after the chapter and there are no percentages (they remained only as the results of semester exams).
What is it?
There are evaluations and semester reports. Today we will focus on evaluation.
What is evaluation? This is information for Students, Parents and Teachers describing the progress of our charges from two perspectives (students, i.e. children learning from the first grade of primary school, are subject to evaluation). The first level is the student's perspective, the child himself notes about himself what he already knows, what he does not know and what he wants to improve. The second level is the teacher's perspective, the lecturer notes in analogous sections what he managed to notice during the month-long language course about a given student. When describing the student's skills, the teacher uses the expressions: you know, you do not know, improve.
On the teacher's level, it is very important to inform students that what the lecturer notes is only an observation, and therefore may be imperfect for various reasons. In other words, it is good when there are discrepancies in the evaluation recorded by the teacher and the student. This does not mean that either party is wrong, but it is an element for discussion and finding the cause - often the cause of such a state of affairs is development, which is a process. What was the basis for observation in the previous lesson, may be noticed completely differently in the next one.
The aim of the new way of describing students' skills is to get rid of "pigeonholing" and dry description of one's own progress using only numbers - "I can do it at 5". We want students to be able to describe their own language competence level more precisely, to be aware of what they can do and what else can be compensated.