Ignoring evaluation means surrendering an important tool we can use to judge our students' abilities and our own success as teachers. However, care must be used when evaluating students. From a teaching pedagogy standpoint, evaluation is a double-edged sword that can help you or hurt you.

We usually evaluate our students' abilities, understanding and progress through homework, class participation, and testing. But we also evaluate our students informally as well. We are constantly making private judgements about our students that may result in labeling, preferential treatment, or non-functional pedagogy.

Don't let your evalution processes, be they formal or informal, hurt you in the classroom. Understand that your students are evaluated constantly. From the moment they get out of bed every morning until they go to bed every evening, your students face evaluation from themselves,
their parents, their siblings, their peers,and their teachers. This is a critical period for your students--they use feedback from both positive and negative evaluations to form images of themselves at a time when they haven't developed adequate defense mechanisms to deal with excessive negative stimuli. Excessive negative stimuli will lower your students' self-confidence and motivation, which will cause them
to withdraw from academics entirely.

For this reason, your evaluations, be they informal or formal, should be fair above all else. This will help eliminate labeling on your part as well as peer-labeling and self-labeling. Make sure your evaluations are respectful of your students' concepts of themselves and their abilities.

One thing I use to evaluate my students is the "old reliable"--the quizz. Quizzes are easy to prepare and grade and give an accurate assessment of my students' progress and abilities without making them feel inferior. I've found that frequent, functional, short quizzes give my own students positive reinforcement of their abilities and give both me and my students immediate feedback of progress. Quizzes will also motivate my students to stay abreast of classwork and make them more prepared for exams.

It's another lesson learned for me in TEFL thanks to my experience-- evaluations carry tremendous power. Teachers must be aware of the profound impacts their evaluations can have. Be they formal (homework/quizzes/exams) or informal (ignoring students/placing students in certain seating arrangements/patronizing students/giving too easy or too difficult homework) evaluations, students will react to negative feedback by using coping strategies that ultimately handicap them in the classroom. Avoid chastizing your students and especially avoid destructive criticism. Always be fair, avoid labeling your students, give them praise when they deserve it, and always give functional (doable) assignments and quizzes/tests. Help your students form and maintain a postivie image of themselves and their abilities and you may see almost miraculous results--your students may actually love your classes and ESL. Imagine that.

More from Rheno747 at:
http://www.eslteachersboard.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=12