My teaching training: a semi serial reflection on the experience

My teaching training in Diaconia went very fast: one month, twice a week teaching Orientation English to Social Worker students. Total teaching hours: 20.
The group was very nice: talented, polite, ready for working in group and to use their English in all the situation that we faced during our path. It was indeed heterogeneous group: some of them just graduated from high school, some of them didn´t finish it. Some of them (even belong to religious group that doesn´t have easy access to TV or internet) could speak English rather well, others they had difficulties to follow what I was saying...It was a challenge. I took it 100 %. 

The tutor was huge help: for the first time since I started my teaching carrier I have got advises on how to improve my teaching...and it felt so good!
The tutor role is not simple and it requires a huge dose of patience and open mind: give to the teacher student an entire course is not easy especially if the student teacher doesn´t have so much experience.
My tutor was one of the special one: we could cooperate withouth problem and he gave me time after each lesson, giving me a feedback. 

The Orientation English is a mandatory course for those students that are studying to become Social workers and also work for the Parish.
My lessons were focused in theme such as: Finnish Welfare System, Family life, Adoption and Foreigner clients. We went through also practical things : dealing at the phone with no Finnish speaker, be able to make a conversation with the client in order to help him/her to face the difficulties in life. I found the group ready to face different situation and I provide my self the material based on the themes from the book and instruction given by the tutor. 

In 20 hours wasn´t possible to cover all the book themes so part of the studies, the students did on their own time. I decide to approach in really practical way: problem solving, role activities, support of technologies for the theoretical part  I also promote quite much the collaborative learning: working in a group and as a group it´s a basic thing for a social worker and the best way for learning. I was also careful about the timing and give enough time for the discussion where it seemed to involve students 100 % but in the meanwhile had always ready extra activities in case that discussion wouldn´t start. 

I tried to cover all the learning styles: I used platform like Prezi and Popplet to support the visualist and the kinestetic learners. My tutor said that my strenghts are my social skills: how immediately I made the contact with the students and build their trust. My weakness? my English pronunciation.......I would like also improve the area of assessment and the observation of the group. I felt (even though I observed them for 30 hours) that I would need to observe other thing in order to get my core plan ready...well I guess I have to trust my memory. Lucky for me I eat fish twice a week ;) 

The difficult part for me was to evaluate their final test and give them a fair assessment: my tutor mentioned couple times that we were working in a University so the level of their English has to be proper for the studies curriculum. For the test please  look here: Test for Social Workers

The experience itself was great and exhausting and that´s why I wasn´t able to write anything until now. I need to breathe especially when at the evening I had long trips to go to work, a 3 years old to take care and housework to do it. A huge help came from my parents that spent 2 months in here without knowing English or Finnish, in the dark and cold December and January....to help me enjoying fully this experience. I would never thank them enough. 

Virtual session 3 Evaluating learning and competences

In my previous post I was really waiting to see, how the discussion about assessing the learning during the 21 century will end.
Yesterday we had a virtual session (we start really to own Adobe Connect and it feels soooo nice) about Evaluating learning and competences.
One first challenge in our presentation was to use Prezi. A new, but quite interactive program, which stimulates at least our creativity. Creativity in my opinion has to be part of teaching, so I don´t regret of choosing Prezi as a tool. I have in any case some concerns about our video about SOLO taxonomy. My concerns regard the vocational point of view. I think for the next presentation we should take care about the vocational point of view (when putting a video there). 
You can check our work following this link: How to assess learning
The other groups spoke about:
What are the central features of competence based qualifications and vocational skills demonstrations?and What is the role of the student's self-evaluation in vocational education?



Competence based qualifications were new things for me: it seems also that in our break session only one had experiences with specialist in competence basic qualification.
The pro in CbQ is that it prepares people straight for labor market (even though the students are adults) and the con is actually the really short training period that students are going to get. The students have to be demonstrated during a practical exam. So candidates are evaluated with a scale from 1-3 and the candidate gives also a self -evaluation.
I found that really strange: does each student need an evaluation? And what kind of evaluation? We spoke in our presentation about this: we read quite much academic material about how to assess learning. I found the material good in theory but not so effective, when they were speaking for example about the different kind of tests you could give to a large or small class,
Assessment in learning is important both for teachers and students:  Students need to be evaluated all the time, but we should use correct tools. Teachers need to be monitored during the whole process. Portfolio is a good thing to use, and now that I am writing one it seems to have logic. 
Through this teachers and other students can read, comment, give feedbacks. So the students are actually stimulated all the time and willing to learn. The motivation is also really a big factor in self-evaluation and we all agree that self-evaluation is not always easy when we speak about teenagers who don´t know how they feel about something they made. So, sometimes it´s just a matter of methodology.  Through games you might reach them and they might evaluate what they have learnt. 
Self-evaluation anyway requires suitable method and should be qualitative: I couldn´t agree more that self-evaluation is really a big part of of the job learning. It motivates the students and lets them to find the strength and - why not - the passion to go on. 
I should also do my own self-evaluation, editing my personal study plan. Read it again and laugh aloud and write  over and over. 

During the session I found very useful to go through this: we need to evaluate ourselves and others in order to learn together, in order to be ready to the labor market in practical issues.

This is really lifelong learning.


References:
- Biggs J., Teaching for Quality Learning at the University,  Formulating and clarifying curriculum objectives, Open Univ Pr; November 2007 edition, Society for Research Into Higher Education. 
- Jarvis P., Adult Education & Lifelong Learning abstract Assessing and Evaluation Routledge Falmer 2004 
-Wankat P., Oreoviz F. Teaching Engineering, chapter 11 Testing, Homework and Grading 
https://engineering.purdue.edu/ChE/AboutUs/Publications/TeachingEng/chapter11.pdf

Assessment or not assessment: this is the question

Picture from Black Hills State University
retrieved on: http://www.bhsu.edu/FacultyStaff/AcademicServices/Assessment/tabid/6923/Default.aspx

Virtual Session 3 is approaching. Our theme this time is: HOW DO YOU ASSESS LEARNING and my team and I were wondering (before getting some clues from our tutor) would it be a good idea to speak about ASSESSMENT IN 21ST CENTURY?
In time like this learning is already different than before: we have so much information to select that it´s not always easy decide, what to use and most of all how to evaluate students.
The retorical questions: When, why and how we evaluate are the main issues nowadays and has been for the last 10 years. We have to consider so many things that effect our evaluation. In addition to that we have also to consider that there are still teachers who evaluate in the old way and with old tools: it´s not easy to change mentality of those from"old school".
When we speak about learning in 21st century we should consider tree important factors: virtual community, complex materials and new technologies. Without them we probably cannot speak about e-learning.
Inside e-learning I see a lot of collaborative learning. So when we evaluate we probably want to evaluate also the quality of individual learning of the participants, the interaction they have between different channels, and the contents of the course (actually built by the participants).
How do we evaluate the e-learning? In my opinion we can evaluate the products (things such as for instance a translation, a solution for a problem) the process (the students acutally don´t produce anything, but they are able to put in act process).
I really hope that in our VS3 people are going to ask themselves this same question (How to assess learning in 21st century) and try to find with Martian answers. I look forward to hearing from them.