TKT-YL COURSE: WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT

Reflective Essay
Maria Ignacia Vera

I
Teaching Context:
Education has always been an important topic in my life, during my childhood and adolescence the
main topic of many familiar conversations was education and how important it is for living. I decided
to become an English teacher when I was in the 12 th year of high school, and the experience has
been amazing.
I have six years of experience, four in public schools and two in a language institute. Today, I am
currently working in a rural school, I have been there for almost three years. It is a public school, and
English is not the principal subject, so the students are not interested in learning a new language.
Even though they start learning it in pre-kinder due to a program the school had for two years, and
thanks to this now there are more English hours; from pre-kinder to 4 th grade, students study 2 hours
per week, and from 5th to 8th grade they have 3 hours plus 2 hours of speaking workshop, then, in
high school they study 4 hours. The school is great with the material and I think I have everything I
need, maybe I would like to work with other kinds of coursebooks, we tried to buy them, but they
were expensive and the school couldn’t afford it.
I have faced many challenges during my teaching practice, trying to motivate the students to learn,
they think English is boring or they are not going to practice the language in Chile and for them, it is
not necessary.
II
Reflection on the TKT-YL course
As the coordinator of the English Department, I have to give the teachers the tools they need to help
the students to get interested in learning English or motivate them to learn, which has been one of
the main problems in the school. That’s why I decided to take this course. I needed to know more
strategies and ways to assess young learners. I have worked with YL before; however, my degree is
for high school students and I need to know more about primary students.
I love teaching and planning lessons that can be fun and motivational for my students. I think when
you learn a new language is very important to create a good learning environment and the students
can feel comfortable. And that was what this course taught me, learning and cognitive strategies give
me the chance of creating and applying new methodologies in my teaching practice. Practical
activities and assessment learners also gave me tools to implement in my classroom. The most
useful one was the feedback part which now I can give my students feedback differently and, I
learned the importance of this for my students. How with simple steps I can give feedback without
complicated myself with it.
Furthermore, a useful topic for me was scaffolding which I think I used it so much in my regular
teaching practice and now I know I have to gradually reduce it when my students can feel more
comfortable with the language. Even though, I will implement more practice activities in online
classes, because I think that in this kind of environment my students need more help with their
learning process.
Additionally, assessment learners unit was a difficult topic for me to study, however, I think I need to
work on that because I usually assess learners in a summative way, where I just grade some tests
and create some activities to evaluate. Now, with the TKT-YL course, I realize that there are more
ways to assess and I will take into account the assessment evidence I have. For example, I will apply
diagnostics tests when I come back to the classroom and I will see if my students learned something
during this pandemic and my remote work. This will be useful to start with the formative assessment
and create new ways that can facilitate my students’ learning. Also, instead of applying a regular test,
I will assess through a self-assessment or a role play.
To achieve all this, I need to study and get more information about them. So, I will do the following:
o Read the article “Scaffolding in Education” The complete guide.
o Read the article “Instructional Scaffolding in Online Education. What it is and how to
do it right”
o Watch the video “Helping All Learners: Scaffolding”
o Read the website “20 simple assessment strategies you can use every day
o Watch the video “Assessment for learning”
o Take the course on FutureLearn website: “Teaching Young Learners Online”

III
Formative assessment in online teaching
Assessment is an important part of the teaching–learning process, however, with the COVID-19
pandemic this process has changed and the way a teacher assesses is now different. How can we,
as teachers, assess our students in an online learning environment?
“Assessment is a general term which includes all methods used to gather information about children’s
knowledge, ability, understanding, attitudes, and motivation. Assessment can be carried out through
a number of instruments (for example, tests, self-assessment), and can be formal or informal”
(Ioannou-Georgiou and Pavlou, 2003:4) and as educators, we know that assessment can be done in
different ways with different focuses and purposes. In Chile, the way of assessing nowadays in public
schools is formative, because “the use of formative assessments, or other diagnostic efforts within
classrooms, provides information that should help facilitate improved pedagogical practices and
instructional outcomes” (Dunn & Mulvenon, 2009:2), it will be helpful for the new system that teachers
and schools are trying to implement and the ministry of education asks us to do, however, are we
doing it correctly?
Formative assessment is often applying on a regular year; but teachers usually do not focus on that,
since we are pressured by 1UTP’s teachers to gather the information of students’ learning through
grades (assessment of learning). Nevertheless, what students and teachers need is to assess the

1
UTP: Pedagogical Technical Unit
teaching-learning process, providing continuous feedback and correctives at each stage (assessment
for learning). According to Gaylard (2015) assessment is important because it has a strong impact on
learning and that is exactly what we need, have a strong impact on our students learning process,
creating new ways of assessing the process through the course, getting the information as educators
we need and providing the feedback that students need. Even though we have a remote system, we
have to accept that education is changing every day and teachers have to adapt to it, as well as the
assessment has to be adjusted.
We all understand that online teaching is the new method of teaching, and I agree with Gaylard
(2005) who expresses that “the online learning has developed drastically in the 21 st-century education
learning and teaching environment” and even more with the COVID-19 pandemic when every country
has changed their way of educating students.
There are still many things to learn, we are learning this new online system through making mistakes
and fixing them, so what can we do to assess for learning in an online environment? We can find
many ideas on the internet and have a million activities. However, can we just apply them? The
answer is no, we need to adapt tasks according to our environment and students. Not all students
have the same English level and we also have to differentiate the students who need help, with
scaffolding activities, adapting the layouts, or simplifying language. Furthermore, teachers have to act
on the assessment evidence, giving students feedback, reinforcement work with students who need
it, and reevaluating our teaching practice. The main idea is to “make sure that the learning setting
offers the learners enough chances to not only learn actively but prospects to take part in learning
which replicates in their real-world settings” ( Gaylard, 2015: 229) as a result, students will know that
teachers are still assessing them and we are worried about their needs in online learning.
To assess for learning we need to have clear the purposes and focuses if we are going to identify
progress in the use of language or skills, or maybe we want to identify students’ likes and dislikes and
start to work from there. For instance, if you are teaching your class through Zoom, you suddenly
realized that the students are not paying attention and a bit bored, allow them to select an activity,
voting whether they want to do a puzzle on the whiteboard of the platform or say a jazz chant with the
vocabulary. As a result, you will identify their likes and dislikes and start creating activities according
to what your students want. Give you the chance to be creative through formative assessment and
not only assess through paper-based tests.
We can find many benefits of assessing for learning, in agreement with Cassady & Gridley (2005)
quoted in Ogange, Agak, Okelo & Kiprotich (2015) “online formative assessment can help reduce the
level of anxiety among students before summative assessment”. Furthermore, “the timing is flexible
enough to allow students to take the assessment at any time convenient to them, as long as it falls
within deadline” (Ogange, Agak, Okelo & Kiprotich, 2015:1) giving the teachers the opportunity to
rethink our teaching practice in an online setting in order to achieve the level we want our students to
reach.
IV
Classroom Implementation
To assess online, we can find many activities that we can apply. As teachers, we can create different
games on different websites, as Quizlet or Educaplay, or simply we can create some of them by
ourselves on a simple PPT slide. For instance, a good activity that can work well in an online
environment is the game 2“who wants to be a millionaire” is a simple PowerPoint which allows us to
assess our students in the use of language.

Step I: Create PPT slides with different questions and give some rewards. Another idea is to get the
PPT template and modify it with the questions according to the content of our class, e.g if the content
is daily routine, create sentences or questions and add alternatives.

Step II: This activity can be used to assess at any stage of the lesson. Before to start, explain the
students the rules of the game.

2
See the appendix to find the link to download the PPT template.
Step III: Ask a question to one student or they can compete as groups or even play with the whole
class. Students will choose the correct alternative and see if they answer correctly or not. The good
thing is we can give immediate feedback, either positive or constructive.

This activity has many benefits, students can have fun while playing the game, they imagine that they
are winning the money and they are being assessed without knowing.
Another activity that is useful for assessing for learning is a 3dialogue simulation. It is a very useful
activity because students can practice real-life conversations with classmates, friends, or family. Also,
creating a conversation activity that a student can live or face in his/her life, will let them know what to
expect and say, so we can provide a safe setting to practice their reactions and responses.
The setting or scenario of the conversation can be created by making simply slides on a PPT
presentation, put pictures on it, and ask questions. For instance, you can do the following:

In this example, different responses are offered to the students and we can assess how they would
react. Furthermore, it will allow us to assess pronunciation and act on the evidence to give the
necessary feedback. If we want to do it funnier, students can get points for correct answers or lose
points for inaccurate ones. We can adapt it to our teaching context.
There are many benefits in this activity, one of them is that students can have the chance to
experiment some of the situations they can live in real -life, another one is that we can adapt this
activity as we want, just changing some questions according to the students’ reality and finally, we
can make this activity as a game as well and have fun as a class.
Word Count: 2018
3
Adapted from 9 ways to Assess students learning online by ISpring.
V
Bibliography
“Scaffolding in Education: the complete guide”
https://www.educationcorner.com/scaffolding-education-guide.html

“Instructional Scaffolding in Online Education. What it is and how to do it right”

https://www.newrow.com/instructional-scaffolding-in-online-education/

“Helping All Learners: Scaffolding”

https://eleducation.org/resources/helping-all-learners-scaffolding

“20 simple assessment strategies you can use everyday

https://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/20-simple-assessment-strategies-can-use-every-day/

“Assessment for learning”

https://granite.pressbooks.pub/teachingdiverselearners/chapter/assessment-for-learning-
formative-assessment-2/

Georgiou - Ioannou & Pavlou, (2003) “Assessing young learners”. Oxford

Dunn & Mulvenon, (2009) A critical review of research on Formative Assessments”, Article 7
Practical assessment, research, and evaluation. Volume 14
Gaylard, (2015) “Online Formative Assessment”, Centre for learning and teaching development,
Walter Sisulu University. South Africa
Ogange, Agak, Okelo & Kiprotich (2015), “Student perceptions of the effectiveness of Formative
Assessment in an Online Learning Environment” Maseno University. Kenya.
VI
Appendix
1. “Who wants to be millionaire” PPT template:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZVqbSXVBwhO0RDrmO8YaKxAr4nWhdC13/view?
usp=sharing