Essay #2
As a classroom teacher, I have served in two separate roles – as a teacher and as an interventionist. Both roles have required me to use assessment data differently to improve my practice, but both roles have also prepared me to make data-based decisions to improve the instructional practice within a school.
Rankin County School District mandates that 60% of a student’s grade must come from summative assessments and 40% of a student’s grade must come from formative assignments. As a former Spanish teacher and English teacher, my students’ assessment were the larger part of their grade. Therefore, any assessment I gave must be driven by data, and throughout my experience teaching high school, I used assessment regularly to determine
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At the beginning of the year, I was given a list of 67 students enrolled in Flowood Elementary School’s tier program. My job was to assess each student’s growth from the previous year, determine if he or she made adequate progress in their current intervention curriculum, and then use multiple forms of data (MCT scores, grades, and pre-tests) to recommend further intervention if needed, and possibly a change in curriculum. I met monthly with a “teacher support team” with my results, and I reviewed further data provided by parents, teachers, administration and counselors to make an informed decision on helping each child in the tier program. Any students who were recommended for Tier 3 instruction fell under my care, and I monitored their growth weekly through various intervention programs to assess their …show more content…
I also provided them with and trained the faculty on an Understanding by Design (UbD) style lesson plan to help further have our educators examine standards and assessment. While the data informing these decisions was more anecdotal based on the feedback from the leadership team, it proved helpful in leading data meetings into the first part of the 15-16 school
Current educational policy and practice asserts that increased standardized student testing is the key to improving student learning and is the most appropriate means for holding individual schools and teachers accountable for student learning. Instead, it has become a tool solely for summarizing what students have learned and for ranking students and schools. The problem is standardized tests cannot provide the information about student achievement that teachers and students need day-to-day. Classroom assessment can provide this kind of information.
Curriculum and instruction is impacted by assessment, and whether in the design, delivery or data interpretation processes, aligning these apparatuses is most challenging part of being a teacher. Teachers are called to exercise an alignment between assessment and curriculum, use assessment to guide instruction, and deliver assessment that truly evaluates achievement. Two forms of assessment used in the classroom, formative and summative possess important components, that track them into purposeful, designated uses. Even more so challenging as a teacher in using these two assessments is understanding how they work separately, together, and exploring how they might be used with and for each other.
Students come first. When teachers look at their curriculum and the overall design of their classroom they should have the students in mind. Everything that a teacher does should benefit the student which includes assessment, teaching style and the entire setup of the room. With that in mind, you should make sure you incorporate developmentally appropriate practice into your classrooms as well as using assessment in the correct way to help guide your curriculum and lesson plans.
However, a formative assessment is ongoing and is used to check for students’ understanding throughout a lesson. Both work samples “matched learning objectives” and I was able to identify the students’ strength and weaknesses. I was also able to “analyze assessment data to understand patterns and gaps in learning” to guide my future instructions. In the word problem assessment, I recognized where the student was struggling and gave “effective and descriptive feedback” to address the area that she needs work in.
Black, Paul. (2003). The Nature and Value of Formative Assessment for Learning. Improving Schools. 6 (3) 7-22
Regular use of formative assessment improves student learning as instruction can be adjusted based on students’ progress and teachers are able to modify instructions to cater to students’ individual needs (Black & Wiliam, 2010; Taylor-Cox, & Oberdorf, 2013). Various forms of informal and formal formative assessment methods are conducted as learning takes place, continuously through teacher observations, questioning through individual interactions, group discussions and open-ended tasks (McMillan, 2011). tests can tell us a lot about students and be used to inform and guide teaching, rather than simply to determine grades. Teachers can learn a lot from test results if they analyse the data generated to inform their teaching and learning programs (Perso, 2009). However, high stakes tests may result in students becoming stressed, leading to misreading questions, careless working and incomplete answers (Booker et al., 2010).
This being my first year of teaching I feel there are so many things that I have learned, and have helped me too become a good teacher. Yet I have so much more to learn, I still believe that students have the ability to learn and as a teacher it is my job to find ways to help them to become the best person they can be. Through being a reflective teacher, using professionalism, respecting diversity and having collaboration and community connecting this can be accomplished. When I am having fun teaching the student will have learning that material, this will help them to be relaxed and engaged in that lesson. I feel it is important to connect what they are learning to things that they have experienced in the real-world.
Classroom assessments can do more than measure learning. How educators access and communicate the results send a clear message to students about what is worth learning, how we expect them to perform as well as how it should be learned. Linking instruction and assessment is critical to effective learning. Educators should provide students with various options for learning that include: different ways to learning (style and time), di...
For my assignment I have decided to choose a group which I have just finished taking for level 1 Hairdressing and they have progressed on to level 2 Hairdressing. This is within my current role as a hairdressing lecturer at Hugh Baird College which I have done since October. Within this group there are a couple of people who have support workers. There is one student within the group who has severe learning difficulties and is a more mature student. She also has many health problems which results in her having to carry an oxygen tank around for when she has any problems with her breathing due to her having problems with her heart. There is also another student in the class who has learning difficulties, she is very clever but just needs someone there for when she needs something explaining. She also has a support worker that comes in to give her support. This student has also been going through personal problems at home and has attendance issues. There is another student within this group who has severe dyslexia. She doesn’t have a support worker but the support people who are in there do give her help as she can have a tendency to give up, not to listen and just needs to be kept on track so by sitting next to a person that does have a support worker she gets the help from them. These three students have all had their level 1 qualification extended for a year were the rest of the group have progressed on to level 2 Hairdressing. Two of these students may progress on to level 2 but one doesn’t have the ability to be able to do this as the requirements are too high for her. The reason the course was extended for them was because they were struggling with the work that was required for this qualification, but as the col...
As an educator, there is always room for reflection and growth. Being in this class has provided an opportunity for both. From my knowledge gained in this class I believe that I have become smarter and have learned how to implement different tool into my teaching as well as general life as a teacher. Of the topics discussed in this class, commitment to students, avoiding burnout and reflective practices had the biggest impact on my professional growth.
In spite of the importance of assessment in education, few teachers receive proper training on how to design or analyze assessments. Due to this, when teachers are not provided with suitable assessments from their textbooks or instructional resources, teachers construct their own in an unsystematic manner. They create questions and essay prompts comparable to the ones that their teachers used, and they treat them as evaluations to administer when instructional activities are completed predominantly for allocating students' grades. In order to use assessments to improve instruction and student learning, teachers need to change their approach to assessments by making sure that they create sound assessments. To ensure that their assessments are sound they need include five basic indicators that can be used as steps to follow when creating assessments. The first of these indicators and the first step a teacher must take when creating a sound assessme...
Through assessment students and teachers are able to determine the level of mastery a student has achieved with standards taught. Both formative and summative assessment should be purposeful and targeted to gain the most accurate data to drive further instruction (Ainsworth, 2010). While this syllabus does a good job of identifying the need for both formal and informal assessments, the way in which this is communicated does not provide enough detail for understanding. Simply listing assessment types does not give any insight into how these assessments fit in the learning process of this course. While some of the assessments mentioned could be common assessments chosen by the school or district to gain insight into the effectiveness of instruction, the inclusion of authentic assessments is most beneficial to students and demonstrates learning in a context closer to that of a work environment (Rovai, 2004). Unfortunately, this particular course, according to this syllabus, relies heavily on quizzes and traditional tests and essays to form the bulk of assessment opportunities. While other activities, such as formative assessments, journaling and discussions are mentioned as possible avenues for scoring, they are given a very low percentage of the overall grade. This shows that they are not valued for their ability to show progression and mastery. If this is indeed the case, this puts the students as a
Coming into this class, I figured we would learn about how to handle different kinds of situations from a teacher’s standpoint. As it turns out, the class is much more than just that. I figured there would be group discussions consisting of some controversial issues, but I had no idea how the course would make me feel as a person and as a future educator. So far, this class has brought to light the incredibly difficult decisions I will have to make as a teacher. Not only will those decisions affect the child and parents of that child at hand, but myself as well.
As I reflect on my past assessment process, I realized how much my assessments have changed over the years. In my early years, I used tests for informational recall as my assessments. I felt these were appropriate guidelines in which I needed to follow in order to substantiate a student’s grade. Every assignment or tests was given a point value and then based on the amount of points, a grade was given. Every student’s assessment was exactly the same, and the assessments did not contain any subjectivity. I felt confident in giving the grade based on a valid point system. However reflecting back, I see that I did not include any performance-based assessments or individual learning styles in my early assessment. I also did not take into consideration the individual needs of my students. My assessment approach was awful. I am embarrassed that I use to assess students in this manner.
Through classroom observation I was exposed to the different methods of teaching a lesson. The methods of teaching depends on how will the teacher execute the lesson well. I learned that modern learners today needs both modern and traditional way of teaching as for them to fully learned the lesson in a meaningful way.