Assessing in ELT, seen it beyond the paper

Assessing has been truly considered as one of the most challenging part of teaching. It has been known that assessment for learning should be part of effective planning of teaching and learning. Assessing also must be seen by the teacher as a way to know his students and the most important as a tool to make desicions about his teaching method not only to gather data or worse to collect scores. The teacher at the moment of assessing has to consider a set of variables about students like: previous education experiences and culture. This one is very important here, because this one strongly defines the way students learn and also how they assimilate situations.

We do not know what really matters about teaching, if it is the students' learning or the score. At the moment of creating a test the teacher has first to think about what he is interested in; it means the test creator has to analyze what his test is focus on. On the other hand, teachers have to become aware about the importance of assessing. Assessing can be useful not only for students but also for teachers: students can fall in motivation to learn through assessing, seeing it from the point that this is the moment for them to show how much they have learned; and secondly teachers can evaluate the way or the method which they use to teach, it means they can measure the efectiveness of his methodology on students' learning, in other words it could be called "self-assessment"

To talk about how a teacher can improve his teaching we must not forget about students indeed, because they are the directly affected ones, so in order for the teacher to know if he is doing a good job. Nothing better than asking your students about your activities, your lessons, your tests, and all those which is related to the class development.