Assessing students the right way

  Most of the times when we want to find ways to improve our performance as teachers we focus on the obvious or on the same things again and again, and most of the times we forget to rethink our assessment tool(s). 

  Today, I want to point out that I find it highly effective and useful to assess students as many times as possible during the term; this gives them a sense of fairness about the final mark they get and they also appreciate the teacher giving them more than one opportunity to show what they are capable of doing. 

Here Peps Mccrea gives us two great ideas: 

• Hinge questioning: Asking the whole class to answer a multi-choice question using hand-signals; or show their thinking using mini-whiteboards.

• Exit ticketing:  Giving students 3 questions to answer on a sheet of paper which they have to hand to you as they walk out the door. ("The 7 habits of highly effective lesson plans – Peps Mccrea – Medium", 2015)

For the latter, I've used Socrative and it turned out to be great. My students were about to have a test so we used Socrative for revision; they told me it helped them a lot to be aware of the topics they were struggling with. Here's a useful link: http://help.socrative.com/launch/exit-ticket/deliver-an-exit-ticket 

The 7 habits of highly effective lesson plans – Peps Mccrea – Medium. (2015). Retrieved from https://medium.com/@pepsmccrea/the-7-habits-of-highly-effective-lesson-plans-f785f1f8974e