Teacher-Student Interaction: Foundations for Ensuring Quality Personal Communication Assessment

Why is quality personal communication assessment important? Quality personal communication between teachers and students can reinforce student’s participation in their own learning experience, make student’s feel like teachers care about them and their progress, and build trust between teacher and student which is essential for a respectable and honest teacher-student interaction. On Professor Angela Valenzuela’s ethnographic work, “Subtractive Schooling: US-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring,” she explains students understanding of caring teachers and its effects on their learning experiences. In the book, according to Ana María’s, an immigrant student, experience her interest in social work was motivated by her teachers in Mexico because “the teachers were not only in contact with most of the students’ parents, they also visited students’ homes” (128). Valenzuela argues that the close proximity between students and teachers that immigrant students experience, ease their ability to form new bonds once in a US school. While US-born students have no previous reference of proximity with teachers and often see teachers as an unavailable and unreachable individual who do not care for them or their education. The author’s work supports the need for quality personal communication between teachers and students as well as demonstrates how personal communication can have positive or negative effects on student’s progress in school. Therefore, teachers should be aware of the foundations of ensuring quality personal communication and how to use it for assessing students’ progress as well as what they can do to ensure such quality.

The first step to move towards quality personal communication assessment is for the teacher to develop a...

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...is helpful in gathering and record information for later analysis for personal communication assessment.

The five foundational elements to ensure quality personal communication assessment offered by Stiggins are a helpful template for teachers to keep in their toolbox. However, it is also important to remember that every student is unique as well as every situation, so making the proper distinctions and adjustments necessary to meet students’ needs should be a constant goal for educators.

Works Cited

Stiggins, Richard J.. "Personal Communication as Assessment." An Introduction to Student-Involved Assessment for Learning. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall, 2008. 194-215. Print.

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999. Print.