CRITICAL REFLECTION

In the Valencian Community we have a curriculum where it appears the goals, the contents and the assessment criteria. These things, in some subjects on many occasions, limit teachers in many aspects but I think at the same time, they are necessary to guide our teaching.

I am a primary teacher in a private school. I think the most important thing I would teach in my class, is the acquisition of the main contents in the curriculum but not all of them. We have to pay more attention to the contents of the context. We must take into a count that if we teach the contents in another language we have to use resources to help students to understand things in an easier and more interesting way, and we also have to pay attention to simplify assessment criteria so that the student can acquire the contents better.

In the subject of Language, for instance, we have to care about the pupils’ accuracy, fluency, writing language, reading comprehension, and so on, rather than the curriculum contents.

We can assess pupils with rubrics. “A rubric is a scoring guide that seeks to evaluate a student's performance based on the sum of a full range of criteria rather than a single numerical score.” Authentic assessment is used to evaluate students' work by measuring the product according to real-life criteria. A rubric is a working guide for students and teachers, usually handed out before the assignment begins in order to make students think about the criteria on which their work will be judged and enhances the quality of direct instruction.

Rubrics can be created for any contents’ area including Maths, Science, History, Writing, Foreign Languages, Drama, Art, Music, etc. Once they are developed, they can be modified easily for various grade levels and I think rubrics are the best way to evaluate students because they have many advantages. Some of them are: teachers can increase the quality of their direct instruction by providing focus, emphasis; teachers can focus on particular details like a model for students; students have explicit guidelines regarding teacher expectations; students can use rubrics as a tool to develop their abilities and teachers can reuse rubrics for various activities.