Teacher Guide
Assessment
A lesson such as this needs to be carefully structured so that you can make sure that students are participating and learning from the discussion. You will want to be able to answer these questions:
- How well are students participating?
- What are they learning?
- What progress are they making?
- How can I guide them to make further improvement?
Start by listing some specific objectives for the lesson: what you would like students to have learnt by the end of it. Share the objectives with the students and tell them you will be revisiting the objectives at the end of the lesson.
In evaluating the students' progress, you are assessing whether they are justifying their choices with evidence, and taking note of other people's arguments. How convincingly do students make their case? Listening is as important as speaking — does anyone change their mind?
You will sometimes need to guide the discussions to make sure that they don't get bogged down in one particular topic. Use open–ended questions to make them think about their choices.
Activities such as role–play or creating presentations in pairs are a useful way of assessing whether students have understood what the lesson is about, and a good way of making sure that everyone gets involved.
Use peer and self–assessment — ask them to constructively feed back about how a peer or themselves performed — what did they do well, how could they do better in future debates?
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