It's funny that I was talking about this with a friend lately. When I was a teacher at an English language centre in Turkey and my best friend was the owner we could make our own evaluation system. We had grades, yes, but we also had "soft skill grades" like "Being helpful to other students", "keeping the peace", "being a good friend". It was nice to see that kids loved excelling at those - not all of them could achieve great academic results but many focused on being the most helpful in the class. It made such difference for everyone! The easiest way to incorporate this culture I think is when students are having individual assignments - when the best performing students are done with the task, I always asked them to go around and see if someone's struggling and help them out. I loved teaching :)
On Feb 11, 2016 Antoniya Koleva Zorluer wrote:
It's funny that I was talking about this with a friend lately. When I was a teacher at an English language centre in Turkey and my best friend was the owner we could make our own evaluation system. We had grades, yes, but we also had "soft skill grades" like "Being helpful to other students", "keeping the peace", "being a good friend". It was nice to see that kids loved excelling at those - not all of them could achieve great academic results but many focused on being the most helpful in the class. It made such difference for everyone! The easiest way to incorporate this culture I think is when students are having individual assignments - when the best performing students are done with the task, I always asked them to go around and see if someone's struggling and help them out. I loved teaching :)