Assessment through Observation     

Dear Friend ,

As I wrote in my last e-mail, assessment through observation is relevant to you whatever age student you teach.  If you teach kindergarten you will be observing the children playing and working in their different areas of learning.  You will be listening to their conversations and extending their language and you will be helping them to climb the equipment outside or count the beads on a string.  If you teach all subjects to primary children, you will be noticing which subjects each child enjoys and excels at most.  The advantange of teaching all subjects to a class is that you are able to encourage those who find one subject difficult by using methods that you have seen work for them in another subject.  In other words, teach through their multiple intelligences. They in turn with know that their teacher has seen them excel in another subject even though the subject they are working at is not one they find easy.  For the teacher of secondary students you need to talk about the students who find your subject difficult with other teachers, to find out which teachers see a different side of the student and why that is.

Often in my workshops, when the teachers come from the same school, I ask each teacher to mention a child in their class who they find difficult to teach.  I then ask if any of the other teachers are surprised by the description of the student who in their lessons performs in a very different way.  The former can often learn from the latter.

This website gives you an inventory and useful pointers for observing how a child / student learns best.  Under the headings of their multiple intelligences it first asks "What does the child / student actually enjoy doing most?"  You can find this out through observation, through discussions with the child or through talking to your colleagues.  Next it asks. "What is s/he actully good at?"  Here the answers might lie in test and exam results, comptitions, exhibitions or other ways that you and your colleagues use to assess  and test your students.  And don't forget to ask his parent when you meet them the smae questions.  The child / student may be particuarly interested in, or excel at, something outside school that is not provided by the school, such as, for example, coin collecting, ballet or judo. 

Once you have answers to these two questions you are ready to plan your lessons in a way that will ensure he /she has the best chances of success.  The activites you plan will be ones that fire his imagination and use the skills he or she is best at and methods that interest him most. This inventory website gives a wide range of ideas for planning, for example:

For the student who is very sociable and talks to people easily and is popular, working in a group is a good way of learning for him. Often these are the children who find the silent, didactic classroom oppressive. 

For the student who finds it hard to sit still, is always tapping something on the desk or getting out of his seat, learning through activities which allow him to move about or make things is probaby the best way of learning for him, and less stressful for you!  He is a kinaethetic learner.

Have a look at the ideas this website gives you, they could radically change your teaching and your students' learning. 

I know of one history teacher who raised many of his students' grades in their final examinations my setting rather boring historical facts and dates to music.  This appealled to those with a strong musical intelligence as well as to others, and all benefitted, including the overall school examination results!    Here is one website for an example of history to music .   
  
You will also find this inventory on page 6 of the MI and Assessement booklet which also has many other examples of how to assess students through their multiple intelligences.

I hope by my next e-mail you will have tried out some of these ideas in your own classrooms.  We will think about children with special educational needs in a few days time and how to provide for them.

With kind regards,

Margaret

Margaret Warner M.A. Ed.
International Education Consultant

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