17 Playing with assessments

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.