Dear Naile and Seda, We had the same problem in our class. We think that giving more work to these students since they finish early will be punishing them. For this reason, it would be a better idea to encourage them to participate in outside-class activities. It will give them extra motivation and will enhance their language learning at the same time. For example, we may create a book club and we may ask these students to prepare a presentation about their favorite book character and present it to the students in this club. In this way, other students will get motivated to participate in this club as well. During the lesson they can work on their presentation when they think that the topic is familiar to them. Another way would be including some difficult exercises for upper level students. In our class we had a student who participated only when no one else could give an answer to the questions. Including a few difficult exercises will motivate the others as well. Another way is to know your learners, of course. Again, in our class, there were few students whose level was above their peers'. On one of the teaching tasks we showed a short video clip. Although we did not think that it would attract the upper level students, it turned out to be just the opposite. We were amazed to see that even those students were interested in the movie and the exercises. Therefore, going beyond the traditional and knowing your students would definitely help you to call these students to the lesson as well.
Duygu Deniz Esranur Efeoğlu Banu Çiçek Başaran Dilara Arpacı
We do not think that it is a good idea to share the exam questions with other teachers, especially, when there is a huge difference between what is taught and what is tested. In order for a test to be valid, there should be one to one correspondence between the material taught in the class and what is asked in the test. For this reason, the teacher your mentioned made a big mistake leaving him with a completely invalid test. Telling students that he will prepare "easier questions" is another issue because the teacher seems to be underestimating the students. As far as we can see, the students were not complaining about the difficulty of the questions but the content validity of the exam. On the other hand if teachers are to administer a common exam, they should prepare it together. In our opinion a test prepared by one teacher and given to the other teachers to assess the students would have no validity again. Each teacher should have an opinion about the common test and they should come together and discuss it. Otherwise, it would not be valid again. If we do not want to have this kind of problems we should be careful about the preparation process of our tests.
Duygu Deniz Esranur Efeoğlu Banu Çiçek Başaran Dilara Arpacı
hi naile and seda, I really agree with my friends and I want to tell it with my real experience. In my teaching class, I made an interview some students whom I think their level was higher then their classmates and they said that they were really bored in the lessons because they finished most of the exercises or activities their teacher gave earlier than others and he was never interested in them although they finished the assignment, so they never wanted to participate in these lessons. Due to these reasons, we have to think about our students whose levels are higher, we should not think about only our lower-level students because if we only think about them we can lose others, so we should prepare a balanced lesson for the mixed-level classes and we should be ready for every type of students.we may bring extra exercises or enjoyable activities for our students who finish earlier than others or give extra assignment such as helping his/her classmate who has difficulty in completing the assignment or understanding it. have enjoyable lessons:) pelin arslan
We think it is a common problem for all of us. In such a situation, the teacher should bring materials that suit to the majority of the class and s/he can help them specifically when their friends are on task during the class time or when they are in the break. Also, the teacher can prepare groups each of which include strong and weak students. Via such an activity, weaker students can learn from stronger ones. Furthermore, when the stronger students finish the activities before the others, we can give them tasks which are enjoyable and suitable for their levels. This will prevent them from spending their time free and out of task and also it provides an opportunity for them to improve themselves. If the activities are enjoyable enough, this encourages weaker ones and helps them improve themselves as well. We believe this can solve your problem.
Best regards… Have a nice holiday…
Asiye Baştürk Görkem Beydilli Mustafa Çavdar Ahmet Bülbül
First of all, we can easily claim that a test will lack content validity if it covers topics that are not taught in class. This is quite unacceptable for validity of an English test. Sharing exam questions may be a good idea for English teachers to avoid subjectivity in testing and evaluation. It would even be better if they prepared the test questions together as a group; these will increase reliability of English tests. However, these question-sharing sessions should be done carefully in order to prevent such incidents that tests don’t cover all the topics which are taught or they consist of questions related to the topics that are not covered in class. Teachers should pay attention to reliability and validity issue. That was what your mentor teacher should have done, simply cancelling the exam and prepare a new one. Giving another exam which consists of easier questions would not be a solution; on the contrary, it would mean another exam which lacks reliability and validity as they would be easier than they would be supposed to be. As a group, we support the idea that teachers prepare exams together to enhance validity and reliability as it is stated above.
Best regards… Have a nice holiday…
Asiye Baştürk Görkem Beydilli Mustafa Çavdar Ahmet Bülbül
While Hanife was teaching in one of our teaching tasks, one of the students asked an irrelevant question. He said “Hocam o kitap sizin mi?, Yoksa 150 milyon mu bayıldınız?” Hanife answered “Yes” and she went on the lesson. She by giving the answer “yes” in a way showed that she didn’t pay attention to what the student asked. She could give a different reaction to the student, but she chose to seem as if she disregarded the student. This student began to listen to the lesson. The interruption was prevented in a successful way.
In one of the teachings that I was doing I experienced something sad and I want to share it. This is very important because this kind of problems should be taken into consideration. It was a speaking activity and in pairs students were expected to the activity. One of the pairs was expected to look at to picture and tell to the his/her friend and the other one was expected to make sentences in English. However one of the students in the class was visually disabled and then I realized that the activity was not well thought for the all class. The student with visual problems said “then I am not supposed to this activity” but thank God his friend helped to him he described the pictures and his friend were able to make sentences then. This experience showed that every class is special and unique and the preparations should be done accordingly.
Hi Zeynep and Müge, First of all, threatening our students with exams and grades is one of the worst ways of punishment. We should not load so many meanings on examinations, such as punishment or praising. Expressing that examinations are just procedures of evaluation and don’t have quite importance may be a solution. As teachers we can improve other evaluation techniques for decreasing the test anxiety. For example, projects, portfolios are useful alternative ways of evaluating the students; furthermore they are more enjoyable than the exams. But if these cannot stop their stress, then we can use different techniques. For example, we want to share new technique that we have just read on a newspaper. It is said that the students who write about their feelings before a test which makes them nervous do much better in the exam than the ones who don’t, because their brains focus on the writing, not the test anxiety, so this helps them remember their knowledge in the exam. Hülya Akkaş Yağmur Adsan Nilüfer Alkın
I would ,of course, share my exams with other teacher but If they use them in their own exam, it may not be appropriate for the students. We learned that we, as teachers, should prepare our lesson plans according to our students' levels, so it is the same case with the exam.
Another point that I want to mention is that as you all know the exams should have validity. In your problematic case, the exam validity was not taken şnto consideration that students faced with subjects that they were not taught before.
In my opinion, the teacher's attidute like asking easier quesitons in the following exam is not a good solution for the problem. I think, the teacher should have omitted the exam and sat down and prepeare a new exams including topics which students had learned in the class before.
Hello Nilüfer, Yağmur and Hülya We encountered such a case during our teaching sessions. Students could not understand what we meant and asked what it means, so we also tried to explain it in other words as you did. But they could not understand it. Thus, we had to translate it into the Turkish. It is really problematic case. It is also irritating for the teachers since we should expose students to many more plenty, pleasurable and meaningful inputs. Thus, maybe we as teachers could explain the issue by forming a dialogue and acting out in the class by emphasizing "have to".Students are more possible to understand the issue since it will be given in a meaningful context. Moreover, their learning will be more permanent via visual aids. If the students do not understand it after all, I think we will have to explain it in Turkish as a last solution. :)
We think that test anxiety is a big problem for students because students get lower grades than they deserve. They are generally aware of their problem but they cannot solve this problem on their own. So, we need to do something for them. We think that if students have a lot of quizzes in addition to certain number of exams, they may get used to taking exams. At first, they may see quizzes unnecessary but these quizzes can be useful not only for decreasing test anxiety but also for revision. However, students may still find exams more serious and threatening. For this problem, we may give points for each quiz and decrease the number of points they get from the exams. By this way, we can give students a number of chances instead of giving them only two chances to become successful.
Dear Sebahat, Losing control of the classroom in speaking activities, especially in the group work was unfortunately one of our biggest problems in our teaching tasks. Walking around and monitoring the students as they are working in groups can help, as you can naturally move over to the part of the classroom where the noise is coming from and calm the ‘noisy’ students down and focus them back on the task without disrupting the rest of the students who are working well in their groups. Good luck in your professional career! : ) Özge Ceren Çelik Gül Bıyıkoğlu
Classroom management is an issue that needs to be handled carefully. I think a teacher should make a balance between being "buddies" with students and being a strict authority. A teacher should motivate students by his/her friendly attitude, but should not go further in order not to spoil them. Sometimes, a teacher may need to be strict, but this strict attitude should not be offensive for students. All in all, everything is for motivation and we should mark off the boundaries between us and the students carefully.
Hello Seda, I think that what you have encountered in your school experience is a very common problem that is peculiar to any learning environment. Assuming that not all students are the same in that they differ in their knowledge, capacities and abilities, we have different inventory of students with various profiles. As language techers, our job is to successfully promote the participation of our students and create motivated learners. Though this is not an easy job, it is not impossible at the same time. I do not think that it is a good idea to make the lesson harder or simpler in order to accommadate the levels of high and low levels of the students. The lesson should be conducted in an average level that no student would have difficulty in keeping up with. . I beleive that we have to conduct the teaching very well and keep it simple for any student to understand the subject well. Of course, we will have some students that know these subjects. In this occasion, all we need to do is to create novelties and varieties in our teaching. One thing we can do in order to make sure that every student benefits from language classes well regardless of their different levels of English is that we can design different activities and tasks that are in compliance with our students’ different proficiency level and abilities. I beleive that if we find really interesting and fun activities, our students, even those knowing the subject would be eager to participate for the sake of being involved in the activity. Therefore, the quality of the activities and tasks are very important, in this respect. The activities can be various so that they can adress to any student’s interest and ability. Some of these activities may be challenging and this challenge may not only be related to be language but any other skills. To illustrate, if we are teaching past tense and some students already know it, we may include a task in which students do not only need to know the past tense but also use their creative thinking, processing, problem solving, etc. In this way, students with not only low but also high level of English have something to do, they become motivated and eager to learn.
Dear Naile and Seda,
ReplyDeleteWe had the same problem in our class. We think that giving more work to these students since they finish early will be punishing them. For this reason, it would be a better idea to encourage them to participate in outside-class activities. It will give them extra motivation and will enhance their language learning at the same time. For example, we may create a book club and we may ask these students to prepare a presentation about their favorite book character and present it to the students in this club. In this way, other students will get motivated to participate in this club as well. During the lesson they can work on their presentation when they think that the topic is familiar to them. Another way would be including some difficult exercises for upper level students. In our class we had a student who participated only when no one else could give an answer to the questions. Including a few difficult exercises will motivate the others as well. Another way is to know your learners, of course. Again, in our class, there were few students whose level was above their peers'. On one of the teaching tasks we showed a short video clip. Although we did not think that it would attract the upper level students, it turned out to be just the opposite. We were amazed to see that even those students were interested in the movie and the exercises. Therefore, going beyond the traditional and knowing your students would definitely help you to call these students to the lesson as well.
Duygu Deniz
Esranur Efeoğlu
Banu Çiçek Başaran
Dilara Arpacı
Dear Aysun, Burcu and Pelin,
ReplyDeleteWe do not think that it is a good idea to share the exam questions with other teachers, especially, when there is a huge difference between what is taught and what is tested. In order for a test to be valid, there should be one to one correspondence between the material taught in the class and what is asked in the test. For this reason, the teacher your mentioned made a big mistake leaving him with a completely invalid test. Telling students that he will prepare "easier questions" is another issue because the teacher seems to be underestimating the students. As far as we can see, the students were not complaining about the difficulty of the questions but the content validity of the exam.
On the other hand if teachers are to administer a common exam, they should prepare it together. In our opinion a test prepared by one teacher and given to the other teachers to assess the students would have no validity again. Each teacher should have an opinion about the common test and they should come together and discuss it. Otherwise, it would not be valid again. If we do not want to have this kind of problems we should be careful about the preparation process of our tests.
Duygu Deniz
Esranur Efeoğlu
Banu Çiçek Başaran
Dilara Arpacı
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletehi naile and seda,
ReplyDeleteI really agree with my friends and I want to tell it with my real experience. In my teaching class, I made an interview some students whom I think their level was higher then their classmates and they said that they were really bored in the lessons because they finished most of the exercises or activities their teacher gave earlier than others and he was never interested in them although they finished the assignment, so they never wanted to participate in these lessons. Due to these reasons, we have to think about our students whose levels are higher, we should not think about only our lower-level students because if we only think about them we can lose others, so we should prepare a balanced lesson for the mixed-level classes and we should be ready for every type of students.we may bring extra exercises or enjoyable activities for our students who finish earlier than others or give extra assignment such as helping his/her classmate who has difficulty in completing the assignment or understanding it.
have enjoyable lessons:)
pelin arslan
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHi Naile and Seda,
ReplyDeleteWe think it is a common problem for all of us. In such a situation, the teacher should bring materials that suit to the majority of the class and s/he can help them specifically when their friends are on task during the class time or when they are in the break. Also, the teacher can prepare groups each of which include strong and weak students. Via such an activity, weaker students can learn from stronger ones. Furthermore, when the stronger students finish the activities before the others, we can give them tasks which are enjoyable and suitable for their levels. This will prevent them from spending their time free and out of task and also it provides an opportunity for them to improve themselves. If the activities are enjoyable enough, this encourages weaker ones and helps them improve themselves as well. We believe this can solve your problem.
Best regards…
Have a nice holiday…
Asiye Baştürk
Görkem Beydilli
Mustafa Çavdar
Ahmet Bülbül
Hello Burcu, Pelin and Aysun.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, we can easily claim that a test will lack content validity if it covers topics that are not taught in class. This is quite unacceptable for validity of an English test. Sharing exam questions may be a good idea for English teachers to avoid subjectivity in testing and evaluation. It would even be better if they prepared the test questions together as a group; these will increase reliability of English tests. However, these question-sharing sessions should be done carefully in order to prevent such incidents that tests don’t cover all the topics which are taught or they consist of questions related to the topics that are not covered in class. Teachers should pay attention to reliability and validity issue. That was what your mentor teacher should have done, simply cancelling the exam and prepare a new one. Giving another exam which consists of easier questions would not be a solution; on the contrary, it would mean another exam which lacks reliability and validity as they would be easier than they would be supposed to be. As a group, we support the idea that teachers prepare exams together to enhance validity and reliability as it is stated above.
Best regards…
Have a nice holiday…
Asiye Baştürk
Görkem Beydilli
Mustafa Çavdar
Ahmet Bülbül
While Hanife was teaching in one of our teaching tasks, one of the students asked an irrelevant question. He said “Hocam o kitap sizin mi?, Yoksa 150 milyon mu bayıldınız?” Hanife answered “Yes” and she went on the lesson. She by giving the answer “yes” in a way showed that she didn’t pay attention to what the student asked. She could give a different reaction to the student, but she chose to seem as if she disregarded the student. This student began to listen to the lesson. The interruption was prevented in a successful way.
ReplyDeleteIn one of the teachings that I was doing I experienced something sad and I want to share it. This is very important because this kind of problems should be taken into consideration. It was a speaking activity and in pairs students were expected to the activity. One of the pairs was expected to look at to picture and tell to the his/her friend and the other one was expected to make sentences in English. However one of the students in the class was visually disabled and then I realized that the activity was not well thought for the all class. The student with visual problems said “then I am not supposed to this activity” but thank God his friend helped to him he described the pictures and his friend were able to make sentences then. This experience showed that every class is special and unique and the preparations should be done accordingly.
ReplyDeleteHi Zeynep and Müge,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, threatening our students with exams and grades is one of the worst ways of punishment. We should not load so many meanings on examinations, such as punishment or praising. Expressing that examinations are just procedures of evaluation and don’t have quite importance may be a solution. As teachers we can improve other evaluation techniques for decreasing the test anxiety. For example, projects, portfolios are useful alternative ways of evaluating the students; furthermore they are more enjoyable than the exams. But if these cannot stop their stress, then we can use different techniques. For example, we want to share new technique that we have just read on a newspaper. It is said that the students who write about their feelings before a test which makes them nervous do much better in the exam than the ones who don’t, because their brains focus on the writing, not the test anxiety, so this helps them remember their knowledge in the exam.
Hülya Akkaş
Yağmur Adsan
Nilüfer Alkın
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletehi Burcu, Pelin and Aysun,
ReplyDeleteI would ,of course, share my exams with other teacher but If they use them in their own exam, it may not be appropriate for the students. We learned that we, as teachers, should prepare our lesson plans according to our students' levels, so it is the same case with the exam.
Another point that I want to mention is that as you all know the exams should have validity. In your problematic case, the exam validity was not taken şnto consideration that students faced with subjects that they were not taught before.
In my opinion, the teacher's attidute like asking easier quesitons in the following exam is not a good solution for the problem. I think, the teacher should have omitted the exam and sat down and prepeare a new exams including topics which students had learned in the class before.
Nilüfer ALKIN
Hülya AKKAŞ
Yağmur ADSAN
Hello Nilüfer, Yağmur and Hülya
ReplyDeleteWe encountered such a case during our teaching sessions. Students could not understand what we meant and asked what it means, so we also tried to explain it in other words as you did. But they could not understand it. Thus, we had to translate it into the Turkish. It is really problematic case. It is also irritating for the teachers since we should expose students to many more plenty, pleasurable and meaningful inputs. Thus, maybe we as teachers could explain the issue by forming a dialogue and acting out in the class by emphasizing "have to".Students are more possible to understand the issue since it will be given in a meaningful context. Moreover, their learning will be more permanent via visual aids. If the students do not understand it after all, I think we will have to explain it in Turkish as a last solution. :)
Dear Zeynep and Müge,
ReplyDeleteWe think that test anxiety is a big problem for students because students get lower grades than they deserve. They are generally aware of their problem but they cannot solve this problem on their own. So, we need to do something for them. We think that if students have a lot of quizzes in addition to certain number of exams, they may get used to taking exams. At first, they may see quizzes unnecessary but these quizzes can be useful not only for decreasing test anxiety but also for revision. However, students may still find exams more serious and threatening. For this problem, we may give points for each quiz and decrease the number of points they get from the exams. By this way, we can give students a number of chances instead of giving them only two chances to become successful.
Gül Bıyıkoğlu
Özge Ceren Çelik
Dear Sebahat,
ReplyDeleteLosing control of the classroom in speaking activities, especially in the group work was unfortunately one of our biggest problems in our teaching tasks. Walking around and monitoring the students as they are working in groups can help, as you can naturally move over to the part of the classroom where the noise is coming from and calm the ‘noisy’ students down and focus them back on the task without disrupting the rest of the students who are working well in their groups.
Good luck in your professional career! : )
Özge Ceren Çelik
Gül Bıyıkoğlu
Dear Gül and Ceren,
ReplyDeleteClassroom management is an issue that needs to be handled carefully. I think a teacher should make a balance between being "buddies" with students and being a strict authority. A teacher should motivate students by his/her friendly attitude, but should not go further in order not to spoil them. Sometimes, a teacher may need to be strict, but this strict attitude should not be offensive for students. All in all, everything is for motivation and we should mark off the boundaries between us and the students carefully.
Duygu CAN
Eda CEYHAN
Hello Seda,
ReplyDeleteI think that what you have encountered in your school experience is a very common problem that is peculiar to any learning environment. Assuming that not all students are the same in that they differ in their knowledge, capacities and abilities, we have different inventory of students with various profiles. As language techers, our job is to successfully promote the participation of our students and create motivated learners. Though this is not an easy job, it is not impossible at the same time. I do not think that it is a good idea to make the lesson harder or simpler in order to accommadate the levels of high and low levels of the students. The lesson should be conducted in an average level that no student would have difficulty in keeping up with. . I beleive that we have to conduct the teaching very well and keep it simple for any student to understand the subject well. Of course, we will have some students that know these subjects. In this occasion, all we need to do is to create novelties and varieties in our teaching. One thing we can do in order to make sure that every student benefits from language classes well regardless of their different levels of English is that we can design different activities and tasks that are in compliance with our students’ different proficiency level and abilities. I beleive that if we find really interesting and fun activities, our students, even those knowing the subject would be eager to participate for the sake of being involved in the activity. Therefore, the quality of the activities and tasks are very important, in this respect. The activities can be various so that they can adress to any student’s interest and ability. Some of these activities may be challenging and this challenge may not only be related to be language but any other skills. To illustrate, if we are teaching past tense and some students already know it, we may include a task in which students do not only need to know the past tense but also use their creative thinking, processing, problem solving, etc. In this way, students with not only low but also high level of English have something to do, they become motivated and eager to learn.