chapter 6

Monitoring Student Progress and Potential

What’s the relevance that feedback and homework have for effective teachers?

Feedback and homework are pretty important because those give the teacher the opportunity o check what they are doing and students to improve in a specific topic or aspect during the learning process. First, feedback is a form of input on someone’s work, and it may be given in different forms. This happens when a student or the teacher or a classmate critiques or comments on someone’s performance. In this way, the person that is being critiqued is able to recognize and to learn by his or her own mistakes. Feedback plays an important role in students` development in the classroom because by means of feedback, not only are they able to correct their mistakes, but also they are able to improve the things that were not accomplished correctly. Furthermore, homework is relevant for effective teachers. Effective teachers not only assign homework but also check it regularly. Therefore, I think that we as teachers need to pay a lot of attention when assigning homework so that we can get the best out of our homework assignments. Effective teachers consider that the important issue is the quality of the homework not the quantity. It is important that we as teachers assign students homework so that they can practice, review, and understand better a new topic.

Why does assessment play a central role in teaching?

Effective teacher must be able to establish ways or forms of assessing students since this process is a way of determining how much knowledge students have gotten from a certain lesson. When a teacher assesses students properly, he transmits to the students a message saying that the teacher has clear expectations for them. Assessment does play central role in teaching. It is important because the teachers can see how students are doing. It provides feedback to the teacher about which strategies are working. A teacher may find weaknesses and strengths in the students and do something about it, but how could the teacher know if the students have learned if the teacher doesn’t use different ways to assess students. Assessment may be formal or informal, and it may also be formative and summative. I think that an effective teacher needs to use a variety of assessment practices to monitor student learning, including formal and informal assessment, and formative and summative assessment as it is said in the chapter of the book.

 

What are some effective ways of monitoring student progress?

Most traditional teachers are accustomed to using only the summative assessment. However, it is now important to use different and maybe even creative ways to measures students’ progress. Some effective teachers use pre-assessment techniques to support targeted teaching. Also, whenever students are on task, it is necessary that the teacher be monitoring, circling around the room. All effective teaches take notes of the difficulties they observe. Standardized tests, projects, assignments and even quizzes can also be a good way to monitor students. No matter how the teachers monitor students, if the teacher does not provide feedback or does not reteach parts of the lesson that students didn’t understand, the teacher simply won’t take advantage of his monitoring students.