Week 5. PBL, alternative assessment, etc.

This week's assignments made me think about different things.

First of all I made sure again that PBL can be used in all spheres, all topics and all levels. Even if you teach phonology, grammar or semiotics you can do it. It needs more time, more efforts, more ideas, abandoning your usual and habitual way of teaching but it's worth doing. In some aspects we can teach passing on from one project to another, in others - once a course. But it will make teaching and learning more practical, it'll develop students skills which will be helpful for them in their future (teamwork, brainstorming, information search, critical thinking, preparing the speech, etc.) and it'll develop their individuality.

The second thing is alternative assessment or rubrics. It's a good idea as it gives students more understanding of what they are to do and how the results ll be evaluated, it teaches them to keep ethic norms while evaluating their peers, it shows them what aspects or traits they should pay attention to, it teaches them to be more objective and many other things. But here it should be mentioned that not all the tasks can be evaluated, for some tasks in the course of intercultural communication (sure we can assess here some formal things but the course itself is not destined for it).

I'm waiting for the next week and new discoveries!