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Generally speaking, what we understand from the word "assessment" mostly concerns about measuring a student's ability to recall an information and write down the definition of a word, reform a sentence, or do a matching or filling in some gaps during a written exam, basically.
Although I've always acknowledged the importance of giving verbal/non verbal feedbacks, such as smiley faces, well done!'s or emphasizing the good points in a student's work; I've never thought that those small feedbacks would also fall under the category of assessment (as informal ones).
I think in Turkey, there is a strong emphasis on formal assessments, and because of that, we spend too much energy and time on preparing the students for the formal assessments. While getting high marks on exams makes them feel confident and proficient; getting low marks works for the opposite direction. And by the time, other assessment types (informal, self & peer) stays in the shade.
For assessment, I had been using a technique; giving plusses and minuses for doing/not doing their home works each week. The ones who have more than 10 plusses get "very well" on their end-of-the term reports. I think it is good for them to see that the ones who care about their responsibilities and do their home works regularly, are awarded at the end. (They keep asking "teacher how many plusses do I have?" every week) It motivates them a lot.
And from now on, I'm planning to use more of self-assessment techniques (such as traffic lights or 3-2-1 technique) as I also want my student's self-reliance to improve. Relying on teacher's praises all time won't get them anywhere.

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Some Useful Tips and Techniques to Adapt for my PDCs

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Some Useful Tips and Techniques to Adapt for my PDCs

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Today's session gave me a bunch of ideas to adapt in my PDC sessions for better management. As stirrers, chinese whisper and running for dictations activities were creative and I liked them. Maybe because I have a good memory and I can keep even very long sentences in my mind and retell them easily. But for instance, regarding running for dictations, there was also a role for the writer. So, the ones who don't feel comfortable about memorizing lines or the ones who are not kinesthetic learners could choose to be the writer?
As the days pass by, I got quite accustomed to the "onion ring" technique, which works well for exchanging opinions.
Assigning each corner of the class a name (name of a city, or the name of a vehicle, or a season etc.) and asking participants to choose a corner, go there, and discuss their ideas there was a brilliant idea. I'm surely going to use it both in my primary classes and in my PDCs.
As settlers, wordplay games and art&craft activities really work well.
And in terms of managing feedback, categorizing the given answers of the participants and prepare my upcoming sessions accordingly could be useful, for sure.

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There is a slightly perceivable line that is absolutely hard to accomplish, between children enjoying and freely speaking/acting for the activity they are involved, and them getting overexcited or distracted and behaving completely in a ridiculous and irrelevant way.
Giving them some space and choices while also letting them feel that they're not completely free and there are some rules is a big challenge, which we all face.
For instance, shouting at the students has no benefit at all, and it may cause pharyngitis, regarding the teacher's voice. But finding other ways for the class to be silent and ready to listen when the teacher is giving an instruction or telling something important is mostly about creating a classroom atmosphere where each student is responsible for the management, so that they warn each other to be silent when needed, but not the teacher. Creating that kind of classroom atmosphere should be done cooperatively with the classroom's actual teacher who see the class 28 hours a week. If not, in my opinion, there is only a little chance that it works. Because they're only 8-9 years old and they just want to have fun in their fun time (English classes).
As another point, today I have come to think the significance of assigning each student a role for classroom management and even using these roles as rewards for them to be achieved, as they're often incredibly concerned for helping me by carrying my items, helping me to hand out some papers, cleaning the board etc.

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Promoting shared reading is a really smart way for children who start to read in a second language. As reading requires combining a set of skills and strategies, such as skimming, scanning, paying attention to the sentence structure and recurrent vocabulary, minding the pronunciation, intonation, rhythm and most importantly the meaning that the story conveys; children need to be guided to get accustomed to successfully use those strategies.
When I look back, I'm surprised that I still remember some school subjects that my teachers taught by using creative stories. And as an adult I'm still fond of literature, but, I think the role of stories for children are quite underrated. They understand the world and concepts through stories and ask millions of questions, because they got curious about it. So, while working with young learners we can use shared reading in order to create an atmosphere, arise curiosity, set a model of fluent reading and guide them on how to start reading effectively by themselves.
Previously I wasn't using stories and reading activities a lot in my classes even though the children ask for it. Partly because I was thinking their proficiency level is too low for understanding a story in English and partly because we don't have any technology or English books in our school. But after today I decided to involve some super-simplified shared reading activities in my classroom. Now that, I know that I can adapt some and create materials accordingly.

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The 3 coursebooks we use for grades 2,3 and 4 are all prepared by different writers and different publications.
However, in terms of boosting speaking, they all have common problems; especially in the book of the fourth grades, drill and gap filling activities that require reading and writing compose a large part, while the dialogues required from students to produce lack meaning and social context. They are either expected to repeat a dialogue or substitute a word instead of another one and read it aloud.
I believe in the importance of creating dialogues that the children can relate into their own lives and share their personal ideas and preferences. So, the course books could be adapted in a way to involve that kind of drilling and dialogue building activities.
And PDC's can give us a chance to hold a mirror to our teaching; to figure out whether if the activities and drills we use in our classes enhance our students to speak English (and to what extent). And when the coursebook activities fail to support speaking, the ways we learn thanks to PDC's can encourage us to find and implement creative ways to encourage students' oral production.

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While my mind was clear about the fact that "Children learn best by being physically and verbally active in the classroom." I figured that my ideas on immediate error correction do not necessarily have to be true. Fossilization of pronunciation errors and grammatical mistakes was my main concern, but then when we discussed about it with my colleagues, I have gained a different perspective that not all the so-called errors, have to be corrected by the teacher immediately, as some of them may stem from the learners' creativity, their efforts to find a way to conduct their messages.
Also, as most of the primary school English teachers, I have been using vast amount of songs and chants related to the topics I teach. But, as a new thing, I learned that handing out the lyrics of a song before singing the song along may create an unwanted effect, resulting with the kids following along a text in front of them, rather than paying attention to the actual target; listening.

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How did your first day go? Did it meet your expectations? 

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How did your first day go? Did it meet your expectations? 

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The first day was mainly about familiarizing with each other, playing some ice-breaker games and of course learning more about the definition, aim, and benefits of PDC.
From the very first moment, the classroom atmosphere was welcoming and encouraging. I felt the urge to give all my attention to the activities and instruction and tried to be active and participate as much as I can.
What I liked the most is that, the training was interactional. So even though we got tired of brainstorming by the afternoon and our attention span got shorter, the interactional activities (including, Kahoot, ActionBound, jigsaw listening etc.) have managed to keep our minds active.
It wasn't like any of the in-service-trainings I've attended before. I can definitely tell that we're here for a reason, and that we will soon become a part of a change. And that is really motivating. So, it absolutely met my expectations.