Week #5: If I judge a judge...

It's November. Vietnamese Teachers' Day is approaching. 20 November. Such a great month to reflect on the profession. But let's talk about weekly digest first, and save career talk for upcoming posts.

The most interesting part week 5 involves Rubistar - an excellent tool to design assessment rubric for project-based learning. With Rubistar, the subjective scoring can be mitigated, and learning will be more product-oriented. Rubistar offers a wide variety of rubrics, ranging from oral projects like class debate, video talk show, research and writing to even a public awareness campaign. Brilliant!! For future updates, Rubistar should support the function of teachers picking different criteria in different rubrics to create a truly customized form.

Another week's 5 highlight is assessing our approaches to assessment. One-size-fits-all testing is clearly prevalent in many Asian cultures, with the wash-back effect exhausting learners’ motivations. Personalized testing might not be practical when the achievement test is administered to 1 million high school leavers in Vietnam. The real argument that needs addressing is not about how to design such a large-scale test, but about the existence of such tests. This thought reminds me of Prince Ea's I just sued the school system. Last month, the song went viral in not only English learning communities but also in mainstream Vietnamese media. His vivid, lyrical description is a powerful wake-up call:

"If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it's stupid."

If I judge a tree...If I judge a dance...If I judge a judge...