KCL-TISS Assessments Workshop Series
It all began with a chance conversation on a trip to King’s College, London (KCL) in May 2016, when Prof Constant Leung offered to introduce the CLIx English team to his colleagues in the field of assessments in English Language Teaching (ELT). It took almost a year to materialise, but a workshop series of online sessions conducted by Prof Constant Leung, Prof Paul Black and Prof Jo Lewkowicz of KCL began on 5 April 2017. Attending the workshop are a motley crew of interested folks from the TISS Hyderabad Campus, people from the Department of English at the University of Mumbai, the research, implementation and matg team members of CLIx and, of course, our English teacher educators from various states.
So what do we do in these sessions, you might ask. We have readings for each session, mailed the week before,which we discuss in the 1.5-hour session held on Wednesday afternoons at 3:00 pm. Some are challenging readings. Remember, that many of us do not have a background in ELT nor the vocabulary to discuss assessments with the rigour demanded in academia. In a way, these workshops provide us with the tools to enable us to reflect on what we understand, what we deal with and what we aspire to. It is also an attempt to build a community of people who can interact outside these sessions to discuss their problems and their opinions on the overwhelming aspect of assessments in academia. Well, we have a few more sessions to go, and we hope to apply the academic tools in our practice more effectively.
Stay tuned for more updates on this workshop series. There is a face-to-face component at the end as well that will be conducted by Prof Lewkowiz.
(Anusha Ramanthan, Curriculum Consultant, English team, CLIx)
