TEACH-NOW

My school has our own evaluation system. The most common one is that each teacher will be observed by all teachers in the school. Before this observation, the teacher needs to have a discussion with the leader of his/her grade to decide what content is going to be taught for the observation. After that, this teacher will prepare the lesson plan. Then the teacher will have a pre-observation discussion with the grade leader about the lesson plan. This part will focus on teaching objectives. After this the teacher will have the first class observed by teachers who teach the same grade with him/her. Once completed, the teacher will get feedback from those teachers and make some changes to the lesson plan if necessary. When these steps are finished, the teacher will have the official observation by all teachers from the school. After this observation, the leader of this subject will arrange a meeting with all teachers, then give the final feedback to the teacher. I think this approach ...

Pre-Assessment for Differentiation Pre-assessment helps teachers know student’s prior knowledge and skills about a topic, which is very useful for lesson planning and class teaching. The topic of this unit is holiday. There are different levels of students in the class. I used the Quizlet to design a pre-assessment for students. With 5 past tense statements and pictures, students can choose learn, flashcards, write, spell, test, match and gravity to test their knowledge about this topic. Here is the link of this pre-assessment: https://quizlet.com/_4gn7mf   Different from traditional paper test, this is much more fun and engage students easier. The mind map outlines the innovative differentiation strategies for students at three different levels, and identifies assessments for tracking students.  Through the use of this mind map, I could really see the benefits of putting the different ability groups in order. This allowed me to praise based on ability w...

High stakes assessments are the most common test in China with a long history. From pre-schools to universities, high stakes assessments are the most frequent ones used by teachers and schools.   The school I am working in now is a private school. The principal of our school has a pretty advanced education concept: Let students learn the practical knowledge and skills in games. This is exactly what I want to do as a teacher. Therefore, we don’t have many big tests compared with the public schools. We have high stakes assessments twice every semester at most. The most important of these is the one at the end of the term which is going to determine whether students can move to the next level. Our high stakes assessments are written tests which usually take 1 hour to 2 hours in different subjects. Teachers always use the last week to help students to review for the tests. There are no rewards and bonus for teachers after the tests, but all teachers still try their best to help st...

Diversity and Multiple perspectives in my lesson plans      My school is an international school. We don’t have different minorities, only Chinese and mixed-nationality students. As well as this, we always have new students transferring from other schools. Therefore, I designed the activities according to the following prospectivies:               1) Students from different backgrounds;             2) New students (newly transferred this semester) and old students (studying in this school since Grade One);             3) Students with different English levels.       Here are the reasons I designed the activities from above prospective:              1 Since the topic of this unit is holidays, I let students use the questions: “Where did you...

The following quote from Carol Ann Tomlinson’s book on differentiation goes a long to describing how we as teachers should look at for our class; “A great coach never achieves greatness for himself or his team by working to make all his players alike.” I found this a very interesting way at how we should go about planning the class. Indeed as outlined in Janelle Cox’s article, there are many strategies we can apply when accommodating for the different types of learners in our class. The focus on differentiation in our instructions to students has been on my mind a lot as I undertook this assignment. I found myself reviewing how I gave instructions before and where I did okay and where I needed to improve upon.  The reassuring thing in all of this is knowing that our journey through differentiation is a continuous lifelong experience when we teach. There is simply no one way as all of us need time to formulate out understanding of what is being asked and our experiences up to t...

The performance outcome is the first thing I will consider when I start the unit lesson plan. Only when students realize that they can use the language learned in the class in daily life, will they then become more confident and more interested in studying. In this unit, students need to learn how to use the simple past tense, which is pretty difficult for grade 2 students. They are too young to understand the theory or grammar structure, and feel bored quickly if the teacher just tells them how to use it directly. As for teachers, we can use different tasks to tell whether students really get what they have learned. Performance assessment uses tasks that require students to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and strategies by creating a response or product (Rudner & Boston, 1994; Wiggins, 1989). Summative: The student makes a holiday poster, giving the presentation about their holidays with simple past tense at the end of this unit. The teacher will write down some notes to...