What do we evaluate and assess?
In education there are very few times one can say that input produced that output, but over a period of four or five years I am sure that the ethos, the personality, the character of the school reflected by the children has changed, in the way we wanted it to change ... We have children who are aware of issues that arise from the work we intended to aim at in terms of cooperation, understanding of other cultures, sensitivity towards other people's feelings, fairness and justice. It's particularly noticeable that our Year 6 children are able to articulate some quite abstract concepts and I think that's quite a significant achievement.
(Headteacher of an inner city school, 1992,
quoted in Steiner, 1993, pp. 24-5)
Examining the traits of a global citizen and a 'global educator' is a good starting point for considering what it is we are trying to assess and evaluate.
Click on a link below and read the 'Traits for the educator aspiring to be a global citizen' from Global Citizenship: the handbook for primary teaching (Young and Commins, 2002, p. 13).
Traits for the educator aspiring to be a global citizen
(Adobe PDF 5.0)
Traits for the educator aspiring to be a global citizen
(376k)
Now consider these questions.
- How do we judge if someone has, for example, an understanding of and active commitment to social justice and equity?
- What evidence would we base the judgement on?
- How do we 'measure' the degree to which knowledge, understanding, skills, values and attitudes for active global citizenship have been acquired and applied?
The Oxfam curriculum for global citizenship is useful to refer to when planning, assessing and evaluating teaching and learning. There are three key elements in this curriculum:
- knowledge and understanding;
- skills;
- values and attitudes.
The activity on the right will provide you with useful information on the curriculum.
Activity Resources:
- Images
- Interactive
- Sound
- Text
- Video
Activity
- Go to the 'Cool Planet' section of the Oxfam website. Oxfam
- Click on the link 'Global citizenship' and then click on 'Oxfam's curriculum for global citizenship'. Scroll down the screen, click on 'Curriculum for global citizenship' again, and then select the age group(s) you require.
- Print out the relevant screen(s) and keep them, as you will find them useful throughout this unit.
