This week has been very “rich” from the perspective of methodology of teaching English because it focused on something very important for each teacher interested in new trends in education: it highlighted the innovative strategies of project-based learning , webquests and alternative assessment.
Of course, many teachers knew about these techniques and some have used them before in their practice but the main thing was, at least for me, to discover the ideas, the philosophy on which PBL and webquests are based.
Exploring the information on the philosophy of the constructivist model on www.edutopia.org I could see how this modern educational theory tries to respond to the challenges that schools are facing nowadays. The video fragments presenting concrete examples of PBL in American schools accompanied by specialists’ comments were very relevant in my opinion. Even if the chance to implement new strategies to a similar extent in my country is very little we still can interrelate our school syllabus with small short term projects like those with which Susan Gaer started.
Referring to the types of alternative assessment I would like to mention that I found rubrics as being a very helpful tool. This instrument is good for the student because it gives them more autonomy making them responsible for their learning performance. Also it is a useful instrument for the teacher because it excludes the subjectivity from the assessment of such productions like oral presentations, essays and letters. I consider that to compose rubrics may be rather difficult and time-consuming when you are not used to it that’s why I appreciate websites like www.rubistar4teachers.org . Exploring its rich collection of rubrics we can analyze and compare those made by other teachers and this way we will improve our assessing approach.
To conclude I would say that we as teachers have to know and use the above mentioned methods to correspond to the needs and interests of the new type of students we have: the net generation.
Ion
Dear Ion! It was a great week when we could analyze the role of PBL method and how can we implement it to our school. I agree with you and others that Rubric is so important for evaluation, for providing feedback and for monitoring the result of student work. I wish to use Rubric for teacher's work and to observe classes by Rubric that we can discuss with teachers. Have a great week! The best, Natalia
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