Today our class began going over some of the different inquiries that we had about the IB program, or just teaching in general. Josh’s presentation on “how to mitigate stress in (IB) students” left the deepest impression on me, and made me really think about what I can do as a teacher to help students.

Some of the points that Josh shared were:

• sharing success criteria
• comment-only marking
• classroom questioning
• peer- and self-review
• formative use of tests

I have personally thought of some of these different practices to use when teaching, such as explicitly informing students what will be expected of them, and how they can work to succeed. I specifically used this method when helping prepare some of my tutoring students for their provincials this past June. I carefully went through the expectations of the exams with them, and gave them tips on how they could do their best on the exams.

One of the points that I had never really thought about was only give comment-based feedback to the students. However, this is a really valid point, because simply giving a numerical grade to the students on their assignments can be very confusing if the questions required more than just memorization. Given constructive feedback on assignments can help to lessen the stress for students, because it will clearly tell them what it is that they need to improve on.

I think that these are all very important things that I will have to keep in mind when I start creating assignments to give to students, because I really do want my future students to not only succeed, but also gain knowledge from their studies.