Learning Outcome 9: Use multiple and authentic forms of assessment to analyze teaching and student learning to plan curriculum and instruction to meet the needs of individual students
Assessments often get a bad reputation because they are thought of as only summative assessments that take the form of a test. While this is one way to assess students' learning, it is not the only way. I have found that it is necessary to perform formative assessments almost daily to gauge how students are developing and learning new material. One form of formative assessment that I have grown to love is the exit ticket. It acts as a closure to the lesson, it gives students a chance to reflect and summarize what they have learned that day and give teachers a snapshot of what is going on in their students' learning processes. The exit ticket can be a repetition of a do now activity that began the lesson, a reflection question or a brain dump of sorts- a place for students to put down what they knew, how it was either built upon or changed, and how they will use what was learned moving forward. For teachers, this is a great tool to understand if your lesson was effective, and in what ways. The responses to these exit tickets can help teachers tweak their plans for the next part of the instruction.
A form of summative assessment that I feel showcases the student and how they interact with the work is a portfolio project. In the prompt attached, students are asked to create poetry of their own based on skills that were learned in class, find published works on their own that reflect something that they have learned and create an image to accompany these poems. Not every student is a poet, but everyone can find a way to express themselves through one of these. I think that it is important to have student take an active part in the assessment process through peer editing and self assessment. When students become an active and reflective participant in their learning they want to continue and grow.
As a teacher, I find it important to reflect on my practice every day, multiple times a day. I find that this helps me determine what my strengths and weaknesses are and how I can work with that. I also find it important to ask others of the same profession to analyze your craft. Peer review and peer editing help people strengthen their skills; the same principals apply to teaching. For my reflective practices, I found I work best when I engage in a conversation with someone who watched me teach. I would often take my prep periods that landed in the middle of the day as an opportunity to discuss with my host teachers what worked, what didn't, why that was and how can I make the lesson better. As a result, I would often take notes on my lesson plans, or on my short hand lesson. For me, short hand lessons are bullets written on a post it note or index card that would help me keep track of the order of the lesson, how long each step was planned to take and the main focus of each part of the lesson. This system came out of a discussion that I held with my host teacher in my second placement. Often, I found myself verbally reflecting on my practice, while not committing these thoughts to writing. Going forward, I plan on keeping a teaching journal as a place to house all of my reflections, thoughts and ideas on teaching and how to teach a text. I believe that if I ask my students to commit their reflections to writing that i should do the same.