Nowadays the educational relationship between teachers and students, especially after a two year pandemic, is more complex than ever. In this critical situation schools need open minded teachers who can question themselves, learning new teaching methods and reviewing the old ones. On one hand this means teachers have to manage new technologies and include them into the learning process, but it also means they have to go back to the basic concepts, like the “feedback” and “assessment” ones, and develop a new definition of them. All of this and even more was presented by Francesco Tarantino in the new international course named “Effective formative assessment and feedback management in education”.
The course has been hosted in Bologne, between the 12th and the 18th of June 2022. Six participants came from “G.F. Abela University of Malta Junior College”, in Malta: Sharon Joan Role, Roberta Borg Parnis, Liliana Maric, Monica Galea, Patricia Vella Briffa and Juanita Sapiano. During the whole week they got in the shoes of the students and learned many skills which will surely help them with their students in the future. But let’s have a quick look at what we’ve done. ​
The first two days the main topics were “feedback” and “assessments”, what they are, the differences between them, how and when they’re useful/painful to the students. The following days there has been talk about many interactive virtual tools to use in class to make students more motivated and enthusiastic than ever. Just to make some examples, the Maltese group of teachers theoretically and practically learned how to utilise websites like Socrative and Mentimeter.
The lessons, drawn up by Francesco, are an interactive example of the concepts taught during them. They’ve been divided into theory and practice sections, where there has been talk and dialogue about teaching, classes and learning methods. The winning key of the program is that it is and will remain a peer to peer course, from teacher to teacher, created to hand down a new teaching concept which is going to represent the future of learning.
Either if you are a seasoned teacher or not, this course will open your mind and let you grow into a better teacher!
Learn more about the course here: 
https://erasmustrainingcourses.com/formative-assessment