All our meeting that afternoon focused on
ideas on how motivate to children don’t see assessments as something
threatening. My mentor showed me a research indicating the index of stress causing
evaluations on students, reaching the point that just hearing the word caused
horror to students. But at the end, as they explained me, when you have a job
rarely suffer these stormy experiences, in return, the more ability you have to
adapt to the environment and to solve problems, greater the check.
In teachers case, we receive orders and
follow agendas, maybe that’s the reason more and more people write about the
unfortunate teaching profession, reaching the point that miserable a salary isn’t worth the liability. That is true, but I
still believe that children deserve a bit of effort.
Over the weekend, all of us thought of
questions and possible answers that could be found at any tests, validate them
and put them in an application in which when responding allows you to see if the answer is correct or not, but even
if it sounds great, the truth is that never stops to analyze the answers. Thats what
we would be doing with children, give them the ability to analyze all answers
together, and don’t feel that aversive, hoping that we could break with the
idea that the assessment does not matter.
On
Monday I got to the classroom and proposed a game that we would start each day,
would be a sort of competition as Jeopardy and all children would take turns to
respond. Unlike the common error work in groups, the responses would be
individually, because ultimately, the qualifications are individual, so it
would avoid the bias that trust the abilities of others, because each one must
create them and use them to their advantage.
The game was to respond, analyze the
response and compare it with the correct answer. The group was divided into 4
and they would take turns to answer, the group that could win 5 points had the
right to decide the next activity, which could be reading, writing, math or
science. That would give us flexibility during the class and to them that
sounds like a Prize .
I also learned that if a response was
confusing to them, I could work during the day's activities to consolidate
their knowledge. We laughed so much that by themselves began to measure the
speed of responses.
Each scoring what they learned during the
day wrote it in a blog that we improvise on the south
wall of the room, thus
creating ideas that everyone saw and of course employed in their own benefit.
It is true that not all children have the
same motivation, so those who I saw more reticent, were invited them to pop up the questions, read answers, and little
by little all joined.
In 15 days the game was the most
fascinating activity of the day. We had
only 10 days before the tests. While my stomach shrank more thought that
children would have tension, they seemed to enjoy most of our simulation, even
the time stopped being annoying for them. Perhaps it was on the right track,
perhaps would come out well left of the whole process.