7 Criteria for Improving the Validity of your Assessments

To validate your interpretations and uses of students' assessment results, you must combine evidence from variety of sources that demonstrates these interpretations and uses are appropriate. Thus several criteria should be used to improve the validity of using your assessment results of grading students. 

1- Content representatives: 

Your assessment must emphasize what you taught in the class and contain content that is worth to be learned.

2- Thinking processes and skills represented: Your assessment must require students to integrate and use several thinking skills and processes and allow enough time for students to use complex skills.

3- Consistency with other classroom assessments: Your assessment must give pattern of results consistent with other assessments of the class, and contain individual items not too easy or too difficult.

4- Reliability and objectivity: 

Your assessment must provide each students with several opportunities to demonstrate competence for each learning target assessed.

5- Fairness to different types of students:

Your assessment must be free of ethnic racial and gender bias and more over it must contain tasks that are interpreted appropriately by students with different backgrounds.

6- Economy and efficiency: 

your assessment must represent appropriate use of students' class time and the teachers class time.

7- Multiple assessment usage: 

Your assessment must be used in conjunction with other assessment results for important decisions.       (What does the percentage does the assessment represent compared to the total grade).

Personal Characteristics of an Effective Counselor

A counselor should possess certain characteristics in order for him to establish a strong relationship with the client and reach the desired results after the therapy. 

Some of these characteristics are:

1- They have an identity.They know themselves and they adopt certain values.

2- They are flexible.They are open to change.

3- They are authentic and honest.They are real.

4- They have sense of humor.They do not forget how to laugh.

5- They make mistakes and willing to admit them. They believe they are like any other human beings and they do mistakes.

6- They appreciate the influence of culture.They are aware of the differences of different cultures.

7- They have interest in the welfare of others.They respect, care and value others.

8- They are good at interpersonal skills.They are able to create collaborative relationships with 
others.

9- They are passionate. They are courageous to pursue their dreams.

10- They are able to maintain healthy boundaries. They know how to maintain balance in their lives.


So if someone is aiming to be a counselor, he should train himself to have almost all of these characteristics, in order to have great influence on their clients and be able to make a difference in their communities.

The Importance of Learning Targets

A learning target or what is called an objective, specifies what you would like your students to achieve at the end of an instruction. It emphasizes that the goal of teaching involves more than covering the material and keeping students actively engaged. The teacher should make sure to specify the objectives or the learning targets since they guide the teaching-learning process and they make things clearer for teachers, students and parents and they help students to achieve better.

Reasons for using specific learning targets:

1- They make goals explicit.

2-They communicate intent of instruction to students, teachers and parents.

3- They provide the basis of teaching.

4- They describe specific performances that will be evaluated.

5- They make it easier to individualize instructions.

6- They help teachers focus their assessment and evaluations. 

 Kinds of objectives:

1- Cognitive objectives: are at the level of cognitive and thinking skills of students.

2- Affective objectives: are at the level of values and attitudes of students.

3- Psychomotor objectives: are at the level of motor skills of students.

What Makes Family Relationships Happy and Healthy?

Most of our time is spent working, studying, shopping, cleaning, cooking or getting the kids to and from school or day care. So we might end up forgetting about our priorities towards our families and to make time for things that promote family strong relations with our family and relatives.

People in our families are the most important to us and closest to us. The family house is the place where we spend most of our time working with parents and siblings, sharing happy and sad moments and solving problems and conflicts.

Healthy and happy families tend tend to:

1- Make time for talking and listening: prioritize some time to spend with the family to discuss things that affect the whole family and be part of the decisions taken.

2- Show encouragement, affection and appreciation: show interest and care in each others lives and ask what each family member has done each day.

3- Accept differences in each member: respect the difference in personalities and interests among each family member and value uniqueness and individuality. 

4- Share chores and power: Be ready to give help for the youngest member and for the eldest member, 

5- Keep in touch with friends and relatives: be social and welcome friends and relatives at your home, because they bring joy and fun to your lives and most likely when you are not isolated from others less problems you will have in your family.

6- Have commitment: show loyalty and honesty to everyone in the family.

7- Preserve family rituals and traditions: try to keep and preserve your sense of belonging and your identity in order to stay in a state of safety and security.

Cloud Computing- Rediscover your Computer

I have attended a seminar that was entitled cloud computing. The seminar started by going back in time how people used to store data and information and how to get programs. In fact people used to get programs on flops and CDs but with more improvement in technology they started to download programs directly from the internet. 

Cloud computing is the use of computer software and data which is processed and stored by a remote computer. It has many advantages such as:

1. No more loss of data
2. No more use of USB
3. No need for backing- up your data
4. No more software installation
5. All the data is on the cloud
6. Your slow computer will become fast
7. Access from multiple device
8. Sending emails and attachments faster(faster connections)

There are 3 types of cloud services:

• Storage only cloud services: it allows users only to save your data on the cloud and to back up it, example; google drive, DropBox and ICloud.

• SAAS(Software as a service): it offers software that runs on the cloud that can be accessed for free or based on a subscription fee, example; google Docs, sheets and slides.

• PAAS (Platform as a service): it allows users to create SAAS applications and it provides web-site building platforms, example; IPage, Engine Yard.

Cloud provides special services such as: google cloud print and cloud antivirus. Cloud printing allows users to print from any device and from any location. The cloud antivirus scans the files that are on the cloud and protect them from viruses. More over to protect your computer from attack google has provided cloud security to the cloud that ranges from minimum to high security, but in this case google can view the user’s data and deleted if intended.

Cloud computing has many advantages as we see and it’s a good recommendation for everyone who uses the computer for any purpose. But if your information is very precious to you and you don’t want even google to be able to view it, SAVE YOUR DATA IN SWISS ALPS.

5 interesting ways to take attendance

Like almost any other classroom routine, attendance-taking need not be a mechanical routine, but can be used to get your students talking and thinking - to each other as well as to their teacher - in order to start their class in an active and engaged mood.

So here are 5 interesting varied ways the T can make use off to take attendance in her class and make her students be engaged at the same time. Note that the T can use her objectives for the session in the provided examples.

1-       Elicit some information 

Teacher: Rana?

Rana: Here, teacher.

Teacher: Good morning, Rana! What did you have for dinner last night?

Rana: I had a plate of rice and chicken with tomato sauce.

Teacher: Ibrahim?

Ibrahim: Here, teacher.

Teacher: What did you have for breakfast today?

 Ibrahim: I had a sandwich of labneh and one egg with a cup of tea

2-      Write an incomplete sentence on the board, take attendance, and have each student complete the sentence. In this example, the T writes, “I’m happy today because…”:

Teacher: Khaled?

Khaled: Here, teacher. I’m happy today because it’s not snowing!

Teacher: Yeah, me too! Nataly?

Nataly: I’m here, teacher. And I’m happy today because it is my mother’s birthday.

And so on

3-      Make a Student-to-student Question

Teacher: Lina?

Lina: I’m here. Emm… What did you have for dinner last night?

Teacher: Ahmad?

Ahmad: Here, teacher. I had a burger and fries at Five Guys.

Teacher: Oh, yeah. Good burgers. And your question?

Ahmad: How did your parents meet?

Teacher: Nice question! Rita?

Rita: I’m here, teacher. They met in high school at a dance.

4-      Use Your Class List but Not in the Usual Way

•       Go in reverse alphabetical order
•       Go in age order (oldest to youngest, or vice versa)
•       Be entirely random, jumping around the list.
•      Go by height order, or eye color, etc  but this depends  if u know your students very.

5-      Vary the Language of Your Question

•        Ahmad, are you her
•         Lina, are you in the room?
•         Mohammad, are you in the building?
•          Nour, are you with us today?
•        Fatima, are you present?

Multimethodology as an Instructional Process

In fact the teacher needs to have different ways of teaching methods when presenting information to her students due to the 2 different brain hemispheres present in the head, different learning styles and preferences in students and multiple intelligence.

First lets talk about hemisphericity. Hemisphericity is the study where of where in the brain-in the left hemisphere or the right hemisphere- different types of mental processes occur. The right hemisphere is involved in non-verbal, visual, spatial divergent, intuitive and creative thinking. While the left hemisphere is involved in verbal, logical, categorical, convergent and detailed oriented thinking.
Mostly what our schooling focuses on are things related to the left side of the brain and neglect tasks that involve the right side of the brain. So this reality should be changed into encouraging creative activities from the right side, and to have different teaching methods to meet the need to enhance activities from both sides of the brain.

Second reason is the learning preferences. Students have different ways of how they learn and absorb new information. Some students are visual learners, other students are auditory learners and others are tactile. Since preference is not an innate ability its something that can be developed and modified, so the teacher needs vary her activities target different learning styles and preferences in students.

Third reason as I mentioned is multiple intelligence. There are different categories of intelligence such as linguistic, mathematical, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic and kinesthetic. All researches has proven that intelligence is not static or fixed, its dynamic and can be enhanced in all human beings, through practice and different activities. A person might have more than one category of intelligence in his brain. So due to this range of different kinds of intelligence, the teacher should vary her activities to enhance and meet different kinds of intelligence in students.

Search inside yourself

I have attended an online webinar with Six Seconds that explained the meaning of searching inside oneself. Main points discussed were mindfulness, self awareness and emotional intelligence.

Search inside yourself is a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program for leaders. This program was worked out by the founder of search inside yourself Chade-Meg Tan.

Mindfulness studies have been embedded in many universities. The aim behind this program is to help people to optimize emotional competencies to be more happy.

Chade-Meg Tan says that mindfulness should no longer be considered a 'nice-to-have' for executives. Its a 'must-have': a way to keep our brains healthy, to support self-regulation and effective decision-making capabilities, and to protect ourselves from toxic stress.

Moreover Jon Kabat-Zinn says that mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.

The presenter Robert Chender  mentioned evidence-based benefits of mindfulness training such as: enhanced self awareness, cognitive flexibility, emotion regulation, decreased stress and anxiety, enhanced focus, greater insight and innovation, empathy and compassion, increased working memory and attention, clearer perception, better decision making and better overall health and well being.

He also summarized what Salovey and Mayer say about emotional intelligence, its the ability to monitor one's own and other's feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.

Robert Chender mentioned 5 different levels or kinds of emotional intelligence:

1- Self-awareness;knowing oneself emotions

2- Self- management(self-regulation);ability to manage one internal stage

3- Motivation

4- Empathy; awareness of others emotions

5- Leadership(social skills)

Then he mentioned the benefits of developing emotional intelligence:

1- Performance;who monitors his feelings and emotions is able to perform more.

2- Outstanding leadership; who understands others emotions are more effective.

3- Happiness; who controls his emotions is usually happy.

So both mindfulness and emotional intelligence includes self- awareness and the speaker said that self-awareness is a skill that can be developed and he said that its very important to have it, since it is a part of our emotional intelligence and being mindful.

The process of mindfulness practice:

The speaker also mentioned practices that someone can do in order to help their brains stay healthy, increase their self-regulation and decision-making capabilities, and to protect themselves from toxic stress.

1- One daily activity in mindfulness:walking to work, brushing teeth, eating( practice the mindfulness process in such tasks)

2- Practice 10 minutes each morning

3- Pause, pay attention,reflect

4- Attention at meetings, e-mail, conversation

5- Mindful practice

Importance of Cooperative Learning

Research has shown the importance implementing cooperative learning in the classroom. so researchers say when you implement cooperative learning in your classroom obviously there will be higher self esteem, retention and higher achievement in your classroom. Students are more motivated and more on task. There will be greater social support and greater level of higher level of reasoning. moreover there will be more positive psychological adjustments in your students, so they feel more safe and they are able to adapt. Well through my experience in cooperative learning as a student, I can tell that i really was able to realize the value of cooperative learning and there was a chance for me to reach and experience all the mentioned points that are agreed on by researchers. More important advantages of cooperative learning in a classroom I want to highlight are:

1- increased responsibility, so each student is dependent on himself and he feels responsible for the group success. 

2- saving time, so you can achieve the task faster.

3-leadership, all student can experience leadership

I personally as a student I enjoy and really love cooperative learning because it breaks the routine of daily individual work that dominates in most schools and it makes students more engaged and motivated. As a future teacher I will make my students have a chance to experience cooperative learning whenever its possible.

Teache'rs Day

Teaching is not an easy job, it requires a lot of patience. The teacher should have a kind of passion for teaching in order to succeed, without this passion her life and the life of her students becomes miserable. Students love the teacher who cares for them and for their feelings, they love the teacher who respects their knowledge and experiences. They love the teacher who is real and who is ready to talk about her experiences. More over they love the teacher who acknowledges them and treats them as individual human beings. So if you are really planning to become a successful teacher, try to acquire such traits and characteristics that students like their teacher to have and try to have passion for teaching and to be a patient one.

So Happy Teachers Day to all great teachers around the world.