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Teacher-student classroom engagement

Students’ performance data is an advisory note on how well the teachers are delivering classroom instruction and how well students are receiving classroom instruction and applying themselves. Teaching and assessment make teacher-student classroom engagements a truly give and take process. Teaching and learning are symbiotic processes where the giver and receiver thrive on feedback.

In classroom interactions, nobody stops learning. Teachers are not static entities whose learning began and ended at the pre-service qualification stage. There is so much learning on the field. Years of pedagogical practice make teachers grow, mellow and get refined like old wine. Teachers continue to learn and so are their students. The school teaching and learning environment can, therefore, be summed up as a continuing and dynamic learning community where teachers strive to teach hard as much as they learn hard in their endeavour to reach best pedagogical practices. Students too can realise where they stand in the learning process and achieve their full potential when prepared to learn from their strengths as well as their limitations. Working in groups rather than as isolated entries help students to learn better and navigate their learning tasks with relative ease. Students should cultivate a culture of learning from their peers either in the classroom normal teaching time or in a relaxed, less exacting environment at home. Uniformity in a school should be standard practice. Students in block B should not be made to envy the progress made in Block A.

There should not be two schools in one. Achieving a commonality of approach calls for more collaboration among teachers and students. To get better students should be subjected to a culture of continuing and relentless feedback. Any drought of assessment and feedback is a recipe for disaster. Assessment exists solely for the very purpose of information instructional interventions. It informs how the next lesson should look like.

Any teaching devoid of assessment or where testing is sporadic, no matter how well cooked or brewed if may be, cannot have any meaningful impact. As a matter of necessity, good teaching should always go hand in hand with timely and appropriate testing. Some educators who master their teaching content well and deliver it meticulously are let down by sporadic assessment, poor grading and delayed student feedback. Every module or learning tasks completed should follow by some testing.

Students should not run for a prolonged period of time, battling with absorbing and digesting large volumes of content without testing. This means at all times teaching and assessment should be regard as two sides of the same coin. The one should follow the other. At all times, students should be subjected to quality and appropriate testing consistent with the demands of the curriculum. All cognitive domains should be fairly represented in any assessment. Any bias towards low demanding cognitive skills as opposed to high cognitive skills cannot help students realise their full strengths.

This calls for a lot of preparation behind scenes when preparing the examination items. Not every teacher is an expert item writer. Setting effective examination items is an art that can learn and mastered through years of classroom practice. Subjecting students to too many tests, which are devoid of quality and diverse cognitive skills spelt out by the curriculum, is an exercise in futility, which won’t help the teachers and students to achieve their cause.

An expert at item writing, usually a tried and tested teacher should be identified in every subject area to lead and marshal the item writing tasks. The exercise should not be an exclusive preserve of one person. All hands should be on deck. Once items have been prepared, they should be subjected to a process of rigorous peer review. This is a quality assurance exercise, ensuring watertight items, free from errors while catering for a fair representation of the syllabus content.

The next crucial stage after administration of tests is grading or marking of scripts. It should be carried on time and meticulously executed. The marking of students’ examination scripts, especially common half yearly examinations, should not be an isolated affair.

A standardisation meeting usually precedes good marking where teachers collaborate to determine the best possible marking keys. This meeting is usually characterised by robust debates leading to a consensus.

Once agreed upon, a marking key should be followed religiously to ensure every script is subjected to a uniform standard. The first script marked should be treated the same way as the last script. Fatigue should never be allowed to compromise quality. The golden rule is that a mark should not be given where it should be denied and withheld where it should be given. Teachers even when marking tests and quizzes should avoid working in silos in order to cultivate a continuing culture of collaboration and shared experiences. Professional exchanges are healthy for the teachers and students as they ensure subjection of students to the same instructional and assessment regime despite being taught by different teachers. Where performance gaps on the side of students and teachers have been identified, efforts should be made to close the existing gaps. There should be no procrastination in this regard. There should be a continuous cross fertilisation of ideas within and between schools.

Besides testing right and at the right time, a school that desires success should make strategic and intentional decisions about where concentration of efforts should lie. It is a suicidal tendency to focus energies on the handful of gifted students. The academically gifted minority is a darling of any school and every teacher relishes association with a rare breed of students.

But is it worth it for the school to focus its energies on students who can prosper with minimal support from their teachers? Chronically struggling students who enjoy numerical superiority requite maximum attention. Because of their numerical strength, they can make or break a school. They require special attention. This speaks to issues of teacher deployment. The best, gifted and pedagogically mature and experienced teachers could be strategically deployed to handle less achieving students. When subjected to rigorous classroom instruction, learners can redeem themselves and shift towards proficiency. Schools should not give up on their students but should relentlessly raise and revise the pedagogical approaches to meet varying classroom needs of learners. All students must succeed.