Here at SWiSS we recognise the importance of building up a teacher's professional competencies, for them to be able to better offer quality lessons and high standards of teaching to the SWiSS students.
As a result, our EL teachers underwent the course 'Assessment for Learning' (AFL) held by the CFBT and MOE kindly hosted by TKGS on Wednesday , and we learnt a lot about how to match our assessment criterias to the strategies that are being used in class, and also to highlight some of the existing strategies (peer review, self-critique post performance) that we currently already use in class, and to see how to bridge other gaps in students' learning.
Some of the EL teachers' takeaways for the course includes a plenary table of statements cut out on strips of paper and arranged in a diamond shape in accordance with our own personal take on the levels of importance we appropriate to each statement in our capacities as teachers in our own individual classes - with the statements that we 'Most Agree' with were placed right at the top and statements that we 'Least Agree' with were placed near the bottom. This simple activity acted as a powerful visual tool to instantly help us to address our concerns in terms of our aims and objectives in the classroom, and really helped us to refine the way we were already teaching by putting into perspective the various understandings about AFL approaches we already knew.
Lastly the teachers also consolidated a personal mindmap of what we perceived AFL to mean to us in our Literacy through Drama class in the future - good stuff was learned and clarified, and we do see a lot of potential to be able to incorporate lots of AFL strategies to run concurrently with our Drama project that will hopefully pave the way for students to do more with their English Language and Drama competency development in class.
Without the school and department's support and encouragement to constantly upgrade ourselves in terms of pedagogy and teaching practices, it would be hard for us to deliver good lessons to the students - which would in turn benefit them as we would be better able to play our part as mentors, leaders, facilitators, teachers.
We'll update you again once we try these out in our classes!
Till the next one :)
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