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Working on final poems and portraits

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Standard Five of the Brown Practice Based Standards reviews the importance of assessment in the classroom. A successful teacher must know and be able to confidently use a wide variety of assessment types, including both formal and informal assessments. The teacher should also be able to clearly articulate what each assessment measures and communicate those standards to her students with examples or rubrics. Building upon the importance of the student as the center of the assessment process, teachers need to carefully apply the results of assessments to tailor future lessons that will fit students’ needs and abilities. Finally, a teacher should also provide both the students and herself with opportunities to self-assess and reflect on their performance so that everyone can set goals for future learning.

 

 Pre-assessment before a unit or lesson begins is an important part of assessment. As a teacher at SummerPrep, I have given and experienced several pre-assessment opportunities, so I will focus my discourse on pre-assessment. I know that in the fall and spring semesters I will learn much more about assessment and find many opportunities to apply that knowledge to my classroom practice. One of the first pre-assessments that I experienced as an MAT student was in our first Science Methods course. Zach asked us to write on an index card and think about the question “what is technology?” By having us work on these definitions without providing us any information about the definition of technology, Zach was able to see our prior knowledge on the subject and likely tailored his upcoming lesson and questioning techniques to reflect our knowledge. I used a similar practice when I gave my math pre-assessment during SummerPrep. I explained the directions to students (identifying shapes), but I did not help them identify the shapes on the page. I also reinforced the concepts that this exercise was to aid me in helping the students learn and that it was okay if they did not know all of the answers. It is important that students understand the purpose of the assessment so they recognize that assessments can help them learn rather than provide opportunities for someone to judge them (Tomlinson, 2014, p. 11).  I believe Zach used similar language when we began writing our definitions of technology. It is clear to me that assessments, particularly pre-assessments, can be stressful for students if they think they absolutely must know the answer. By reframing the pre-assessment as an opportunity to learn however, I think teachers are able to alleviate some of the pressure on students and focus on gathering the needed information to prepare lessons and guide learning.

 

I also used a writing pre-assessment task at SummerPrep. Our performance task for our class of rising first graders was the completion of an I Am From poem and a self portrait. My teaching partner began our writing process with a lesson on brainstorming. Students brainstormed things that they saw, heard, smelled, felt, and touched in their homes and in their neighborhoods. After the lesson ended and the students had gone home, I used this information to create templates for the poem drafts that students wrote the next day and determined which of our two templates would be a good fit for which students. I saw some similar “on the spot” changes based on a pre-assessment in our Analysis class when we used the chalk talk method to respond to some questions before starting a discussion on some of our readings. My professors read over our responses and directed our discussion based on some things that we had identified about the previous night’s readings. I think the chalk talk also offered my professors an opportunity to design questions that would get the class thinking about what we might discuss that day. An open-ended question like “what are the purposes of assessment?” allowed each of us to respond with what we found important, just like the boxes on our brainstorming graphic organizer at SummerPrep allowed our young students to offer their important responses. A successful assessment poses a question like this and allows students to enter the conversation at their current level of understanding (Duckor, 2014, p. 30). It is then the responsibility of the teacher to take that information and use it to guide the student toward further understandings and plan future lessons, as my Analysis professors and I did in these instances.

 

As I continue to develop my assessment skills, I am curious about the ways in which I can incorporate more feedback into my assessments. I did not give as much feedback to my students as I wanted to this summer, so I hope to make a much more concerted effort to assess student work and provide regular feedback. My teaching partner and I did debrief every evening about our students’ daily progress and changes we might make for the following day, but we did not always get the chance to share this information with students. Fortunately at the end of SummerPrep, we wrote narrative evaluations of each student and had the chance to provide students with some of the feedback we had been noticing over the last few weeks. I also found some chances to wrap up lessons with student self-assessments, but I am eager to learn more about the application of student feedback to the actual assessment process. I am especially curious about using student interests or special skills to design assessments. Tomlinson (2014) talks about assessments such as contracts or entry point projects which involve the student choosing the type of assessment they will complete from a menu of options designed by the teacher (Tomlinson, 2014). Tomlinson also suggests that teachers may design these choices for individuals or groups of students based on student interests, skills, or learning styles (Tomlinson, 2014, p. 133, 144). I would love to know more about how this works in the classroom and the kinds of preparation that I can do to give students some choice in the ways they are assessed. I could easily envision a pre-assessment of some sort that allowed students to reflect on what they wanted to learn about a particular topic, or the ways in which they learn best.

 

 Although I have not had the chance to create many assessments thus far at SummerPrep, I have developed a few goals for myself in the future. I hope to continue creating strong essential questions that will guide my assessments and help students realize the important role that assessment plays in the classroom. I also want to focus on creating different types of assessments so that I can assess a wide variety of learners in a way that is most accessible to them. I will place a special focus on incorporating student feedback into the types of assessments in our classroom and designing assessments that “teach as much as they assess”. With that said, I realize that some assessments in my future classrooms may not be of my own design, such as state standardized tests. In these instances, I plan to focus my attention on student responses to assessment. It is my goal to foster confidence and knowledge of assessment so that students understand why they are engaging in certain tasks. I think I can frame this successfully by introducing the notion of assessment as an opportunity for setting learning goals and improving teaching practice.




 

 

References

 

Duckor, B. (2014). Formative assessment in seven good moves. Educational Leadership, 71(6), 28-32.

 

Duckworth, E. R. (1987). The having of wonderful ideas. Retrieved from, http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/files/Having%20Wonderful%20Ideas.pdf

 

 

Tomlinson, C. A. (2014).Differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners.Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.