Project Work, Listening, and a Monitoring Visit in Kailali
Sunita Karki teaches secondary English at a government school in Dhangadhi, Kailali. The Grade 9 curriculum requires project work, listening tasks, and continuous assessment carrying 25% of the final grade. She teaches five sections of 47 students, five periods per section per week. The school has no speakers or audio player; the one CD player broke last year and has not been repaired. Parents and a visiting supervisor have complained that project work 'wastes time' and demanded more grammar drills and past-paper practice, because SEE results decide admissions. Sunita's project records are incomplete for two sections, and her continuous-assessment marks for those sections were entered from memory at the end of the term. A district monitoring visit is scheduled in three weeks and will check her records against students' work.
1. How can Sunita deliver listening and project work credibly without audio equipment? Decide what to prioritise and justify the choice against the curriculum rather than against convenience.
Read the worked answer
The constraint is equipment, not curriculum. The curriculum assigns marks to listening and to project work; omitting them creates a marks deficit that no amount of grammar drilling repairs, and it is visible to any monitor who checks records against the specification.
Listening without a player
- Teacher-read texts, read three times with a purpose for each reading: gist question, detail questions, then a completed version for checking. This is standard classroom listening and is defensible.
- Short peer dictation and information-gap pair work, where one student holds the text and the other asks questions.
- Use a teacher's or a student's phone only if the school permits it: one phone at maximum volume reaches a quiet room of 47, but do not depend on it.
Prioritisation, with reasons
- Assessed listening tasks once a fortnight, not every week - marks coverage is the non-negotiable element.
- One project per section per term, not three. A single well-documented group project (for example, a survey of languages spoken in the neighbourhood, presented as a poster and a two-minute talk) satisfies the requirement and can be completed inside class time.
- Writing genres and reading comprehension keep the largest share of periods, because they carry the most SEE marks and also satisfy the parents' concern.
Design rule for projects: do them in class with scrap materials, in groups of four to five, with a one-page rubric shown in advance. Projects that need home resources or internet unfairly penalise poorer students and are the ones parents resent.
2. How should she repair the continuous-assessment records for the two incomplete sections so that the marks are defensible? Set out the process, including what she must tell the students and the monitor.
Read the worked answer
Problem statement: marks reconstructed from memory, with no dated evidence behind them, are not assessable data. They are indefensible on two counts - they cannot be verified, and they may be systematically biased (students who speak up are remembered better than quiet ones who performed equally).
Repair process
- Inventory what genuine evidence exists: exercise books, marked scripts, project artefacts, class registers, oral presentation notes. Where evidence exists, score from it and date the entry.
- Where no evidence exists, do not backfill. Set one short, rubric-based assessment task for those sections in the next week - a written task of 20 minutes and one short oral or project contribution - and score that. Announce the task and the criteria to students in advance.
- Separate the components in the register: participation, project, and achievement on tasks. Never let one informal impression carry a whole 25%.
- Have the subject head or another teacher sample five scripts per section against the rubric to check consistency; record the sample check.
- Write a short note for the monitor: what was incomplete, what was done, the dates, and the rubric used. Disclose it rather than present clean-looking numbers - a documented correction is credible, a fabricated record is not.
Tell the students the criteria and the date, and show them their own tally so they can query an error. Fairness requires that they know how the mark is made.
3. Script the substance of her response to parents and the supervisor who want grammar drills and past papers instead of project work. What compromise is defensible, and what must she refuse?
Read the worked answer
Open with the shared goal, then use the marks structure as the frame. Parents care about SEE results; project work is part of the same result, worth 25% of the final grade, so skipping it lowers the maximum mark available before the examination begins.
What to say
- Show the weightings plainly: what proportion of marks comes from reading and writing, what from listening and speaking, what from continuous assessment. Put it on one page in Nepali for parents; use the same page with the supervisor in English.
- Acknowledge the drill request as legitimate for the examination-writing components, and say what she is already doing - timed writing, grammar in context, past-paper sections in the revision phase.
- Explain the project in one concrete sentence: students survey languages spoken in their ward, produce a poster, and give a two-minute talk. It builds the speaking and writing skills that the examination also tests, and it is done in class so no home cost or tutoring is needed.
- Invite parents to a 20-minute presentation at the end of the term - seeing the work converts the argument faster than defending it.
Defensible compromise Keep the first three periods of each week on reading, writing and grammar, and use two for project and listening work; front-load examination-style practice from the revision phase onward; make projects group-based and in-class so they add no home burden.
What to refuse Removing assessed listening and project components, or inflating continuous-assessment marks to compensate for drills. Both break the curriculum and are exactly what the monitoring visit is designed to detect.