Humanistic Teaching

An approach to learning English

As anyone who has seen any of my old writing for Think Tank will know, I'm not a fan of tests. That's an understatement. Whenever I make a new game or activity I always worry and wonder if the game mechanics are testing children in disguise. For example, take one of the variations mentioned for Up And Down, "Write It Down". It's basically a dictation test. At least it doesn't penalise wrong answers as I remember some of the exams for economics used to do at my old secondary school. Avoiding penalties for trying I think is important. About the only time I'll consciously use a penalty in a game is for carelessness. I.e. in situations where children know that they know better. But usually, not making progress in a game is penalty enough. So typically, in a track game completing a task will give a chance to go forwards where as failing to complete a task will not give a chance to go backwards.

When using games always take into account the children's perception of the activity. If they perceive it to be testing them, then it is. Perception can vary from group to group and individual to individual. When children are being tested they usually become small. Many become more error prone. The signs are not difficult to see once one starts looking for them. I just don't think such negative pressure does language learning much good. If it's seen as a test leave the activity alone!

I once tried creating a game which used different dice depending upon the quality of an answer but I abandoned it. Children quickly came to understand which the "bad" dice was. I was inadvertently ranking them. Having said this, a game that offered different dice with different strengthens and weaknesses could be interesting to try making. But that would be offering choice, and possibly depending upon the game mechanics, encouraging tactics and strategy. Ranking is a form of labelling and in my experience children don't like to be labelled.

And that, more or less leads me to my theme for this week. Rather than assessing children, take notice of what they like doing. Turn assessment on its head. Let them assess you. Letting the children be the teacher quickly shows you what they know without testing them at all. This was brought hope to me recently with a new kindergarten class. Typically in the first month we do colours and this time I began with phonics from the outset. I'd have some flashcards of colours and say the first sound while hiding the colour. If no-one picked up on it I'd simple show the colour naming it as I did so. This combination of sounds and colours attracted the children. After six weeks or so some of them wanted to take over my roll and teach me. Sometimes I have more than one teacher at the same time! It is interesting to see what sounds they have trouble with. They tend to say "pi" pink and "pu" for "purple" indicating that they haven't got the idea of separating the vowel and the consonant. With this information I can plan other activities to encourage the discrimination.

With older children they tend to want to do activities that they find exciting and are good at. So take special note of all requests, especially if they are repeated. I have one group of third and fourth graders who revel in doing charades. We began with verbs but recently have done shops and rooms in the house. We're moving from single word guesses to complete sentence patterns. I tried a similar approach with one or two other groups and it was no where near as successful because the basic activity didn't capture the groups' imaginations.

I guess what I'm saying is encourage the children to make choices and honour them. Observe what they want to do and if there is anything that they prefer to avoid doing. Do lot's of pair work and small group work so you can both observe and participate. Is there a need for formal assessment? If there is I'd like to hear about it.

Thanks.

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