Task 10 - ANALYST

 

ANALYST

The task of this week has been the last one of the course. We had to create our own rubric for evaluating the role performance of the “Analyst post”. Creating the rubric at first seemed difficult, and at the very beginning, we felt a bit anxious about having to do that. I think that we felt that anxiety because we have always seen rubrics as a very difficult aspect of evaluating, as it has too many aspects that should be considered both when creating it and when evaluating any work. In addition, rubrics can turn into a very subjective way of evaluating, because each teacher can have his/her own view of the work performed. This, also, made us worry because we wanted to make a rubric that would allow us to evaluate fairly, without letting feelings override reason. 

This last aspect, that of not letting feelings affect the grading of a student, is something that our group considers essential (to the point of being "obligatory") for all teachers. An enormous debate throughout the educational system has been raised about whether there should be equality or equity in education. There is an interesting article about this topic conducted published in the “Revista Iberoamericana de Evaluación Educativa” called “Evaluación justa: entre la igualdad y la equidad”. As Murillo and Hidalgo (2016) said in this article, the debate is about choosing if we should consider everyone the same, and thus consider everyone the same; or should we treat everyone differently and give them individual attention according to their needs. 

This debate would lead us to a large number of papers, but every teacher should reflect on these aspects when evaluating a student using a rubric. At this point, we think that a solution for achieving equity in education should be creating different kinds of rubrics according to the concrete needs of each student. Is that “fair”? But… What really means  “fair”? No response is easy and absolutely correct. “Fair is also a behavioral quality, specifically interacting or treating others without self-interest, partiality, or prejudic” (Tierney, F.D., 2016). In the article published by Tierney, called “Fairness in educational assessment”, a deep study in what a fair evaluation means is conducted. 

Another important part of the task was creating feedback about the “Analyst posts” of the rest of the groups following the rubric we created. Feedback is crucial and extremely needed in anyone's life, whatever their context, their work, their ideas, their way of life. I say this because of the tendency of everyone to look at the evil of others and not to look at their own evil. In this sense, getting advice and ways to improve from other people helps us to get out of our closed minds where we think we do everything right. Letting others help you is crucial, as they get “a whole view of the picture”, while many times we only see a little part (because of prejudices, fear to see our mistakes…). However, there are some important things that should be taken into account when giving feedback. First of all, it should always be done with the aim of helping the other one, not humiliating or shaming him/her; if not, feedback loses all its purpose. Another thing is, not only saying what is wrong, but also saying what thing he/she has done well so that the receiver can learn both from mistakes and from the right things.

In conclusion, as we can see, evaluating is far from being an easy task, and when facing it, many issues or controversies can arise in our minds; but we should always look for the fair assesment, because, as teachers, we always and only look out for the good of our pupils.