“Tell me and I forget
Teach me and I remember
Involve me and I learn.” -Benjamin Franklin
Making Oral assessments conducting an English oral assessments during online classes seemed like a daunting task. I wanted to move away from traditional oral assessment tasks like reciting a poem or reading a passage. I wanted to do something that would give children an opportunity to express
themselves more originally. Gathering all my courage, I decided to
assess students on their speaking skills by designing a collaborative
task.
After a round of discussion with my colleagues, and brainstorming on
different ideas for assessments, I decided to design an activity where
students would speak in pairs.
I selected a topic from the std. 6 Balbharati textbook, Seven Sisters,
which provides succinct information about seven states of North East
India – Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Tripura, Assam, Nagaland,
Manipur and Meghalaya. This lesson presented a lot of scope for self
exploration and research. My focus was to design an activity in such a
manner that students would go beyond the textbook and gather new
information by collaborating with each other.
I designed an activity where each pair was assigned a state and they
could explore any of the following.
I. Tourist/historical places in that state and its speciality.
II. Distinct tribes of that state.
III. Unknown flavours of that state and its speciality.
IV. Forgotten freedom fighters of the given state.
Students had to script a conversation which could either take place
between a native speaker and a tourist or between two friends, of
which one would be the resident of the given state. I had many fears about how the activity would unfold since I had a large class (60 students!) and they weren’t meeting each other in person. I was apprehensive if they would contact each other and communicate well to complete the task.
After giving appropriate instructions, I gave them a rubric in class, so
the expectations would be clear and they would prepare accordingly.
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Finally, the day arrived, and I was quite amazed to see the performance of our students. Most of them had written their script in an organised manner, done proper research about the given topics and they had practiced their conversations on Zoom, WhatsApp video calling and on call. They coordinated with each other and presented their conversation very well on screen. Few outcomes of this activity are:
a) It helped them to polish their Communication as well as Writing skill.
b) They learned new vocabulary.
c) They were able to develop a rapport with each other.
d) They gained confidence by speaking in front of their classmates.
These positive outcomes were perhaps also the benefit of providing them with RUBRICS for this task.
Script Writing by students:
Students experience:
Creativity of students:
To sum up, I personally feel that such an making oral assessments helped students to showcase their talent and creativity. As learners, it helped students to build their inner confidence, and to discover new information about North East States of India. In the words of Henry Ford,
“Coming together is a beginning;
Keeping together is progress Working together is success.”
This was the key to the success for this activity.
Contributed by Hetal Naidu
(Std. 6 English Teacher)