I give myself…

One of our objectives at St. James is that students evaluate themselves. This will help them to develop their self-awareness which is one of the most important intrapersonal competencies in our Emotional Intelligence Programme. I’d like to share a simple routine regarding self-awareness which can be easily done in class: I give myself…

The idea behind this activity is that:

• Students identify what they are doing well and get praise for that. 
• Students identify areas they need to improve.
• Students learn ways of improving their weaker areas.

Teenagers and Adults

• The role of evaluation.
• Who can evaluate your performance? 
• What are we evaluating?
• How can you get better? 
• Time to put it into practice.

The role of evaluation. Introduce the topic of school / work evaluation. You can do this by asking the students some questions. E.g. Write the following questions on the board. Let the students discuss them for a few minutes. Get class feedback. Encourage the students to explain their answers. 

• Who evaluates your performance at school / work? 
• How often are you evaluated? 
• How is it done? 
• Is it important or do you think it’s a waste of time?
• How does it make you feel?
• How effective is it?
• How would you like to get evaluated?

Once they’ve discussed their answers draw some conclusions if possible. E.g. Most of you feel anxious when you get evaluated. Only one out of 10 thinks it’s a waste of time. Most of you consider evaluations necessary and important.

Highlight that evaluation is important when we want to achieve an objective. We need to know how we are progressing and how we can get better. Elicit examples not only in education but in other fields. Eg. It’s like a GPS that tells you how close you’re getting to your destination and if you are on the right track. You can also talk about sports and the role of trainers. What do the players do after a match? They watch it together and evaluate the game and their performance. 

Ask the students: Who can evaluate your performance? The idea is to discuss the fact that our classmates and ourselves can evaluate us. Write on the board and elicit what it suggests to them:

• Evaluation.
• Self-evaluation. 

What’s better: that the teacher evaluates all the students?  That the students evaluate themselves? Let them discuss these questions in small groups before getting class feedback. Ideally it’d be a mix. 

Explain that from now on we are going to do more self evaluation. The idea is that we reflect on our own performance and give ourselves a mark. How?:

• Self-evaluation: the teacher will ask all the students to evaluate themselves at the end of the lesson or whenever he or she thinks it’s a good time. 

Write on the board and elicit from the students possible answers: 

What are we evaluating? Choose the most relevant ones for your group. 

E.g. 

homework

participation

interest in the lesson

oral production (quality and quantity), 

respect

asking questions

helping others

effort to improve

punctuality

attitude 

active listening

empathy 

social skills

When students evaluate themselves ask them a key question: Now, how can you get better? Elicit answers. E.g.

I need to find some time at home to do my homework.

I’m going to produce longer sentences

I’m going to speak more English

I’m going to help my classmates more

I’m going to arrive on time

Time to put it into practice. 

Remind the students that you will ask them to evaluate themselves at one point during the lesson. You will also give the student(s) feedback on their evaluation: did they do a good job at evaluating themselves?

Tip 1: Recording their evaluations

To help the students you might want to write on the board I give myself (7) points out of 10 because…. Ask their peers if they agree or not. Give them your own feedback. 

It’d be a good idea to record students self-evaluations. This could be done in a chart, E.g.

Tip 2: Peer Evaluation

Once the students are familiar with self-evaluation you can introduce the idea of peer evaluation. In this case the teacher will ask a student to evaluate another student in the group. This can be done in pairs,  St A evaluates St B and St B evaluates St A.

Tip 3: Young Learners

With young learners make this process more simple by getting them to evaluate themselves at the end of the class and explain why they give themselves that score. You will need to help them more not only with the language but also with the concept of evaluating others and themselves. It’ll be a good idea to make it more visual.