Reflective Journal for Week 2

We have two topics this week. One is about the best search, and the other is the ABCD mode. Just by coincidence, I happened to attend two workshops, “Britannica Project Starlight Taiwan” and “Assessment Symposium: English Remedial Teaching in Compulsory Education”, that share some similarities with our topics this week.

Invited by the British Council, the speaker demonstrated how to search its resourceful learning materials effectively. Since teachers in Taichung are allowed to surf this website without signing in, we are encouraged to incorporate what we found into our classrooms. Also, they are planning to recruit innovative English teachers to team up and design lesson plans, learning activities and worksheets, to help other teachers make the most use of this encyclopedia.

As for the Assessment Symposium, Dr. Tan Su Hwi mentioned questioning techniques by presenting Bloom’ taxonomy of questioning, which made me ponder over the ABCD method and the Indicators of Stage Competence in this regard. I’m especially impressed by the differences between “Assessment of Learning”, to check status of learning and “Assessment for Learning”, to improve learning . Does a proper learning objective achieve both?

After the orientation week, we started to really expose ourselves to the inspirational topics of this week by completing all the assignments. Also, we got to move towards the final project step by step. By the way, I have a  presentation to prepare, and I’ll incorporate some of the assignments into my PowerPoint slides because I think I can share what I have learned so far with other teachers.