How Teachers Can Collaborate on Assessment

Providing Testing Materials for English Language Learners

Sep 9, 2009

When teachers collaborate on assessment, they are more likely to target the areas of instruction that will most benefit their English language learners.

Collaborating on testing materials between ESL and general education teachers is most effective when there is a need to provide some kind of instructional support specific English language learners either in an ESL support or in a general education setting. Although some teachers may work more collaboratively than others, each instructional group requires different assessment practices which are contingent on ESL and ELL learning needs.

Collaboration takes the form of preparing materials and resource pages together as well as setting up planning meetings to discuss in-depth issues of particular students and potential methods of instructional support and early intervention.

Teachers can discuss and prepare necessary testing materials, keeping the language learning needs of their own students in mind. In some scenarios, ESL teachers may need to consult a general education teacher on a variety of issues including providing the right kinds of instructional support for their students and especially at later stages when they are ready to take a required exit exam for entering general education classes.

Collaborating on Assessment and Instructional Issues

When deciding on assessment and curriculum issues with their own students, teachers should first decide who should prepare specific required documents needed for an effective assessment in terms of table of specifications, mapping pages, formal assessment and reflection pages. Other instructional issues teachers may collaborate on include: assessment, curriculum, and method of instruction.

What Teachers Can Discuss Before a Formal Assessment

Teachers will also want to consider how much classroom time they plan to devote to teaching various skills on which students will eventually be assessed including:

When preparing their own tests, teachers can consider some or all of the following issues: grading the material from easy to difficult, using a grading scale including point allotment for each section, and considering the length and amount of students' previous exposure to learning English.

Implications for Diversified Instruction

Coping with differences through test tasks does not necessarily mean allowing each student to do the same task. Heterogeneity can be regarded as an asset, as a source of enriching both the learning and testing environment. Since English language learners from both ESL and general education settings use and apply different skills due to the differing instructional levels, teachers from both groups can decide which areas of fluency and early reading would be most meaningful to assess based on the skills they have already taught.

English language learners will ultimately benefit from teacher collaboration since teachers will focus on areas of instruction and assessment that specifically cater to their learning needs. Teachers can then retest their students using the collaborated materials to evaluate if any learning progress has been made. By collaborating, teachers will also feel less isolated in the classroom as they try to effectively cater to their students.

The copyright of the article How Teachers Can Collaborate on Assessment in English as a Second Language is owned by Dorit Sasson. Permission to republish How Teachers Can Collaborate on Assessment in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.