Sarah has just been assigned her first class of adolescents. After several years of teaching adults, her school has recently expanded to include...

Sarah has just been assigned her first class of adolescents. After several years of teaching adults, her school has recently expanded to include classes for high school and middle school students. It has been a long time since Sarah was in high school, and she's not sure she can relate to modern teenagers. She has heard horror stories of disrespectful students, frequent disruptions, and rampant behavioral problems. She tries to dismiss these as a few isolated cases and focus on the positive aspects of teaching adolescents, such as the bright futures ahead of them and their wonderful passion for their interests. However, despite her attempts to think optimistically about her upcoming class, she is nervous about being unable to relate, creating lessons that fall flat, and opening the door to bad behavior.

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Many ESL schools divide their students by level, but Sarah's school chooses to divide them by age. As such, teachers at her school have to deal with multi-level classrooms. In any classroom there are a range of abilities, but in a true multi-level classroom, this range is far greater. One of the particular challenges of this type of class is how to assess the students, while at the same time keeping them motivated. Creating and marking tests and different assignments for every level in the class can be very tiring and time consuming, often impractically so.

With these thoughts in mind, how can Sarah fairly assess her students without overburdening herself with additional work?

Choose the best two of the following answers:

a. 

Sarah should create single assignments and tests for the whole class, and then encourage her students to do as much as they can on each assignment. Since students will have varying skills in different areas such as reading, writing, speaking, and listening, the levels would sort themselves out fairly based on the quantity of work each student is able to complete on a given task. She can then assess the quality of that work for a final score.

b. 

She could design rubrics for each assignment that outline the expectations for each level. All of the students would work on the same task, but greater depth and detail would be expected from those at a higher level.

c. 

For many tasks, she could make use of group work with assigned roles. Each group would consist of a mix of student levels, distributed so that the makeup of each group is roughly equivalent. Then within each group, she could assign tasks based on the level and ability of the students. This allows the weaker students to interact with the stronger students, but ensures that they each have level-appropriate tasks and expectations set for them.

d. 

She could structure all of her tests and assignments so that the questions get progressively more difficult as students progress through the test. This will help the lower level students to see how much work they have ahead of them, and it will give the higher level students a sense of pride at all they have accomplished.