Assessing Student Learning

Describe

This week’s reading and class discussion gave us an opportunity to look further into assessments.  The premise of school is for students to come in and learn facts, skills and qualities that will allow them to go on and become successful participants in society.  Teachers work endlessly to achieve these goals and we need a way to see how we are doing.  In addition to teachers needing guidance, students, parents, and administrators need ways to see how their school is doing in their goal.  Assessment is what teachers use to do just this.  There are several different forms of assessment including norm-referenced testing, criterion-referenced testing, achievement tests, formative, and summative tests.  Different assessments are used for different purposes.  Norm-referenced testing is used to look at students test scores in relation to other students (Slavin, 2010).  A criterion-referenced test is more focused on students overall mastery of different skills, without accounting for how other students performed on the same skills (Slavin, 2010).  Achievement tests show what students know, they are closely related to standards and the content that was taught (which should keep the tests close to the standards).

Analyze

Assessment cannot simply occur, it has to be based on something.  Teachers base assessments on the standards that governments provide, which outline what students should be taught.  When preparing to teach these standards teachers write what is called objectives.  Objectives are simply what students should be able to do once the teachers has taught a certain skill, or piece of knowledge.  Objectives normally require fairly precise wording when they are written into a lesson plan.  Things like “know how the government works” or “be able to think critically” are not good objectives because there is not a measurable assessment that can gauge how well a student can do the objective.  Objectives are the other side of assessment and should be seen as equally important.  Test scores will never be as high as a school or teacher want them to be simply because what is being tested may not line up with what was taught.  There are two basic types of objectives, instructional (or teaching) and learning.  Instructional objectives are what teachers plan to teach, or what teachers plan for students to learn, learning objectives list what students should be able to do after the lesson has been taught.  As I read through this chapter it became apparent that objectives are just as important as assessment, if not more.  Objectives act as a road map for my classroom, where assessment is the destination (pardon the metaphor, I’m an ELA guy).

Reflect

Assessment to me as an educator is like candy, we need it but not too much of it.  The need for assessment in schools and our education system as a whole comes from our need for approval.  We rely on assessment to show us that we are doing good, or bad.  Assessment should be a part of making the student and the school as good as they can be.  I have personally never understood why a student spends 180 days in a class with a teacher, yet the main indicator of the student’s (and slowly the teacher’s) success comes from a test they take in one day.  Teachers should be trusted and held accountable to giving effective assessments that guide instruction.  I personally do not give a high number of assessments in the traditional sense, which are commonly referred to as summative assessments.  I like the idea of assessment in more of a formative roll, where it gives the student and the teacher a clearer viewpoint of how they are doing.  I plan on using the information in this chapter to make sure that I am writing very clear and concise objectives that will allow me to have full faith in my assessments that the material was taught and the test is an accessory to the objective.

Classroom Management

Describe

This week’s class reading was focused on classroom management.  Classroom management is a critical part of being an effective teacher.  Our job is to teach kids.  Most teachers get into the profession for the love of young people, the chance to make a difference in our future, and a love for a specific discipline.  No teacher sits at the forefront of a career choice and says, “I’d love to repeatedly say be quiet, and stop hitting each other, for a living”.  The fact of the matter is that without efficient classroom management strategies these requests will be a mainstay in our classrooms.  One of the big things from the chapter that I enjoyed learning was that the amount of time spent learning is one of the biggest indicators of success for a school (Slavin, 2010).  I felt like I already knew this, but seeing it in a researched setting was reassuring.  Some of the other pertinent points in the reading (for me) were the excerpts on maintaining momentum and starting the year out right.  In my own practice I found out that I didn’t start my first year out the way I should have.  Knowing this made reading this chapter much like walking through a haunted house, I knew it was going to be in there, I just wasn’t sure when.  Maintaining momentum was not something I felt like I struggled with until reading this portion of the chapter.  In order for students to truly learn we have to teach effective and engaging lessons (Slavin, 2010).  Part of these engaging lessons includes keeping a good flow and not allowing interruptions to throw us off course.  Starting out the year right is rather self-explanatory but its importance cannot be stressed enough.

Analyze

Classroom management is just as important, maybe even more important, than content knowledge.  If our classrooms resemble that of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s breakdown in Kindergarten Cop then we will never get the chance to show our passion and knowledge for the subject matter.  Two things from the chapter that truly sum up effective classroom management are prevention and clear rules (Slavin, 2010).  By having clear rules that do not allow for a lot of discussion and deviance it makes enforcement easier.  When we combine simple rules with effective enforcement we can arrive at prevention.  One of the hardest things to deal with is being in the middle of a school year and yet you are still addressing minor incidents that really only take away from instruction.  This type of prevention goes back to having a very productive first week of school.  I recently completed my first year teaching and I can’t wait to get into year two, simply for the management aspect.  Classroom management is all about being proactive instead of reactive.

Reflect

My first year in the classroom was…trying… to say the least.  I taught Read 180 at an inner city school.  Read 180 is designed specifically for students who read 1 to 2 grade levels below their current grade.  Needless to say there was more than a fair share of behavior issues.  The mistake I made was going from college senior to first year teacher.  Things like bathroom breaks and punctuality were things I just assumed kids could handle.  This assumption did not lead me to address these issues proactively at the beginning of the year, by the middle when they had become a problem I had no real way out.  I learned that kids desire direction.  They don’t always want to be told what you’re telling them to do, but they want to be told what to do.  Kids don’t hate rules, they hate rules that they don’t understand.  I feel like I made the most progress when I would explain rules and why they are the way they are.  Skipping is a great example.  I have explained to kids that if they are supposed to be in my class and are not and they were present to the class before mine then I have to write them up, not writing them up is not documenting that they are missing, and that could be negligence.  When I would explain rules to kids they would have little “aha” moments.  That type of reasoning combined with an effective first week is what I hope to employ to make my second year a much more controlled year than the first.

Grouping, Differentiation, and Technology

Describe

This week as a class we examined the ideas surrounding different teaching methods including differentiation, grouping and technology use.  The day and age where students walk into a classroom with the same relative amount of knowledge is done, if it ever existed in the first place.  Kids come from different backgrounds, including culture and education.  It is important to know that students will have very different levels of background knowledge, which has shown to have an enormous effect on student performance (Slavin, 2012).  With varying levels of background knowledge and different levels of performance it is a teacher’s job to do everything that they can in order to make up ground for some learners while expanding the ceiling of others.  This week’s chapter focused on a few instructional techniques that can help teachers with this task.  The first issue addressed was grouping.  There are two distinct forms of grouping that occur in schools.  Although there are several different methods most result from either between-class ability grouping or within-class ability grouping.  Between-class ability grouping occurs when students with similar learning abilities and needs are placed into a class together.  This type of grouping makes it easier for teachers to provide instruction that can accommodate and address these student’s difficulties.  One of the drawbacks of this type of grouping is that the classes are formed out of standardized test scores and not individual performance in certain classes.  In addition to the grouping criteria students can be made to feel ostracized by being in different classes than some of their peers.  In-class ability grouping occurs when students are in a mixed ability class but do work in groups that are based on their abilities.  This is effective when the only option is a mixed ability class.  In-class grouping allows for the teacher to plan according to groups ability levels, rather than each individual student.  Another way teachers and schools can address different ability groups is through differentiation.  This is a technique in which teachers alter the content, delivery, and assessment in order to bring different ability levels to their highest potential.  Examples of differentiation include, providing presentation outlines, different test sheets, and allowing a range of assessment topics for students to choose from.

Analyze

Our class’s discussion topic for the week was building a rapport with at-risk students.  Students that are classified as at-risk are normally in danger of failing grades or dropping out.  Some of the notable reasons include family structure, socioeconomic status and ability level.  This does not mean that students with learning disabilities cannot succeed, but when paired with a bad home life and a low motivation for school it can critically impact their performance.  Our discussion topic paired with the week’s reading did a great job of presenting both sides of mixed ability instruction.  The weekly reading provided a great set of tools and things that can be concretely described as interventions.  We can differentiate our content as well as work our classroom groups to effectively accommodate different students.  These are tangible things that can be documented for our own success through our lesson plans, IEP’s, and portfolios to show that we are trying everything possible to reach all learners.  The discussion topic showed the more abstract side of reaching these students.  Strategies such as identifying student interests, maintaining a trust with students and working to raise motivation cannot all be documented as they are all different in each student.

Reflect

This week’s discussion topic may be the single biggest factor in what we do, building rapport with students.  The topic was for at-risk students but in my professional opinion all students could be considered at-risk.  Even students who perform at a high academic level are at-risk of not realizing or achieving their full potential.  We have to be able to combine research driven techniques and practices with a productive professional relationship between our students.  For my own classroom I have to be aware that I can know every technique and pedagogical tool in the book, but if I can’t relay and apply it to my students because they don’t trust me then those techniques are useless.  Some of the reoccurring themes of this week’s discussion were trust and patience.  Some student’s only nurturing relationship may be between them and a teacher.  It is our job to gain student’s trust in order to teach them, not only academic criteria but also life lessons in character and integrity.  Gaining a trust between me and students can be difficult.  Often time’s students don’t trust adults and even worse, don’t like them, especially authority figures.  Having the patience to seek out new ways to reach these students is an absolute must to become an effective teacher that can impact lives year in and year out.

Student Centered Instruction

Describe

This week we focused on different approaches to instruction.  Some of the different approaches include Constructivists approach and the cooperative learning approach.  The constructivist approach has often been called student centered instruction because it focuses on students and how they interpret new information.  Information that can only be taken in and regurgitated is of very little use in real world settings.  An example of this would be allowing a student to memorize all of the times tables from one times ten to ten times ten and upon conclusion the same student wouldn’t be able to give the answer to eleven times four.  When students take the learning in and are given the knowledge of how to bend and mold it to work for them in practical settings they are truly considered to be learning.  The constructivist approach is centered on this type of instruction.  The book uses the terms “sage on the stage” and “guide on the side” to illustrate how we should look at instruction.  By facilitating students learning we are able to give them more autonomy over their processes and applications of new knowledge.  The aim of constructivist approach is to give students the vital information but allow them to put it into working practice.

The second big focus of Chapter 8 as well as our weekly discussion was on cooperative learning and its benefits in our classrooms.  Cooperative learning is when students work in groups.  Group work has benefits beyond the classroom.  Cooperative learning can lead students to a team oriented atmosphere as well as help students make up deficits by working with their peers (Slavin, 235).

Analyze

As with any instructional method, implementation is key.  I referenced a college professor that I learned from in one of my discussion posts this week.  This professor’s method of instruction was to question us on the assigned readings and allow our answers to lead the discussion.  He was the thoughtful and intelligent pilot of our conversations, he knew what questions to ask and how to mold our answers into viewpoints that would ultimately give us ownership over the concept.  This type of leadership in our book is known as “cognitive apprenticeship” (Slavin, 219).  The book gives several different attributes of constructivist instruction that can all be utilized in the classroom.  The key to this instruction is to find what would work best in our individual classrooms.  A point I enjoyed reading more about was self-regulated learning.  This type of learning comes when a student is equipped with the tools they need and they begin knowing when to use these tools to best fit the desired knowledge.  Knowing when to skim a passage and when to read for detail is an example of this.

Reflect

The purpose of this chapter was to examine constructivists approach to instruction.  In true accordance with this pedagogy it is essential that I take in my new information and effectively apply it to my own classroom.  While reading this chapter there were two things that stuck out in my mind regarding this type of instruction, classroom management and student motivation.  Cooperative learning is a great tool that can find a home in any class but I believe you have to have control of that class before you ever try this strategy.  There have to be clear cut rules and consequences, not just for the class itself but also for the particular group activity for the day.  Having these rules in place will assure that students are learning and not taking advantage of this type of instruction.  The next factor for constructivist instruction is that students have to be motivated and take charge of their own knowledge.  Our college classes are a great example of this.  Professors assign different discussion topics and allow our input to serve as a potential new viewpoint for some and a refinement for others.  I can post a topic and look at the replies and instantly learn something that I did not know, and the professor simply asked the question.  The thing that a college professor has that most high school teachers don’t is students who are actively involved in their learning.  The challenge is to get students motivated to the point that they do participate in discussions and critical thinking questions.  As a teacher I know that I must address these two potential hurdles before using these strategies.  I already base much of my instruction around this type of pedagogy and this chapter further proved that these strategies are effective and very much worth the extra time and planning they take to implement.

Chapter 7: Lesson Preparation

Analyze

This week as a class we looked over the idea of preparation in the classroom.  I truly believe that being an effective teacher (not just a teacher) is one of the most demanding careers that someone can take on.  We work tirelessly in order to learn the academic portion of the content that we teach as well as effective pedagogy to teach it.  Teachers work both as psychologists, field experts and mentors all in a single day’s work.  I recently finished year one in the classroom and I had consistently heard that “you will learn more in year one than college can ever teach you” and that statement could not be more true.  In my first year I was able to learn so much about time management.  Not only is knowing what to do important, but knowing how to apply those skills is equally important.  Many teachers point directly to best practice and pedagogical tools when they speak of lesson planning but my group partner made a great point about planning for student behavior and possible interventions and how effective preparations can lead to a more efficiently managed classroom.  Things like this are great examples of knowing both the what and the how.  There are two types of lessons that can broadly overlap most classroom instruction, whole group lessons and small group lessons.  Slavin details seven important parts to an effective whole group, or direct instruction lesson in his text.  These seven steps include, state learning objectives, review prior knowledge, present new material, conduct learning probes, provide independent practice, assess performance, and provide additional practice and review (Slavin, 185).  Each of these steps is very critical in becoming an intentional teacher, something Slavin believes should be the goal for teachers.  Each of these steps require additional prep time for the teacher.  These steps are all very useful items and must be given the proper attention that they require.  The intentional teacher must be able to take each one of these seven tasks and decide where to place certain activities, as well as execute them after planning.

Reflect

When I read through this particular chapter I was consistently reminded of things that I need to be doing better in my classroom.  The process of starting at a clearly stated objective and moving to new information and wrapping up with independent practice requires a lot of preparation that I was unaware of as a first year teacher.  The biggest one of the seven steps is conducting learning probes in my opinion.  No matter if you call it learning probes or formative assessment it is simply a tool that teachers must use in order to gauge whether or not the students learned what you intended to teach.  Effective learning probes allow us to decide if we did a good enough job with the material that we taught.  Having clearly stated objectives is your road map to determine how well you did in the classroom or on the particular lesson.  I learned from this chapter that in order to relay information more effectively I have to start with clearly stated objectives and end at a well thought out learning probe.  As a young teacher I consistently think that there has to be a curtain of mystery between my students and the teacher jargon that goes into teaching them, things like learning targets, objectives, methods and assessments.  As I have reflected on this past year I have seen that to be wrong.  In the coming school year I want to be able to show my kids the standards; I’ve even put a copy of them in my new syllabi.  In order to be a better teacher I intend on starting each unit with a clearly stated objective, something of a roadmap to where we are going.  I want my kids to know that we are going to be learning about this in this certain time frame because it is standard number so and so.  Allowing students to see the method to what goes into instruction will hopefully open them up to the big picture, rather than me simply spitting out dates and facts that may or may not be on a test.  This chapter didn’t show me the importance of preparation, but rather, new tools to help my preparation become that much better, both for me as a professional and for my students.

Information Processing and Cognitive Theories

This week we examined the benefits and need for different instructional methods inside of our classrooms.  As instructors we know that different students learn through different methods.  This is somewhat of a culture shift within the classroom.  I (and most of my classmates) can remember the days of teachers having one or two ways to present information and it was up to the student to take it in and make it work.  I distinctly remember having teachers in school, all the way back to middle school, who were going to come in, put up the warm up, use the warm up to begin the instruction, and proceed to illustrate math problems on an overhead until the joyous sound of the bell came whistling through the loud speaker.  Looking back at the classes that did that it is obvious what turned me away from mathematics.  Simply watching someone do something over and over again doesn't necessarily make me better at it.  I can watch an instructor do something repeatedly and as long as the numbers are simply replaced and the process stay the same I can complete the same task, but I haven't actually learned the material.  Through this method I was never really able to translate that information into a working model that could be applied to different scenarios, like advanced equations and especially when graphing was brought into the fold.  For these reasons I find it critical that I present information to my students through a variety of methods in order for them to learn the material rather than just watch or hear me do it.

Analyze

The focus of this week's text reading was on the different functions of memory.  Memory comes in several different forms for our brains, the most noticeable being short term and long term memory.  Short-term memory is defined as "the part of memory in which information that is currently being thought about is stored" (Slavin, 146).  When reading this portion of the text I thought about short-term memory like "active" memory.  Our brains take it in and relate it to other information and decide where or if to store it into another place in which we can regain it later.  This speaks volumes to us as teachers because we have to work to make sure our information is relative and engaging enough for students to store it into long-term memory.  This is also where background knowledge plays a crucial role.  If students have or are exposed to some background knowledge related to material then they will have a bigger place to store the new information.  Long-term memory is where important information is stored for very long periods of time (Slavin, 149).  The storing of information in this capacity is determined by its importance and its rehearsal.  When things are important, like test questions or anniversary dates, we tend to store them in long-term so that they can be remembered.  When things have less long-term importance we must use rehearsal which Slavin refers to as "maintaining an item in working memory by repetition" (147).  This type of application is true for things that just need to be memorized in order to speed up future operations, like 10-10 times tables. 

 I recently got a glimpse of my upcoming school year calendar and I distinctly remember that August 3rd is my our students first day back to school, this is important to me so it has been stored into long-term memory and I'm sure that I won't forget it.  I enjoy most music that I hear, but I have to hear songs over and over again to remember all of the lyrics, this is an example of rehearsal.

Reflect

The implications of the brain and memory are very important for teachers.  As I was reading through the material and looking at different discussion posts I couldn't help but think about standardized testing.  The school that I am currently teaching in runs off of periods, seven 50 minute periods per day for the duration of the school year.  What this means is I am tasked with getting kids to remember things from August to October for a test in May.  This combined with the cultural and personal changes that a high school kid goes through in a school year make storage in long-term memory a must.  As a teacher I cannot afford for any portion of my material to simply be "working memory" which is where information is being used and rarely held on to after its use is up, like me trying to recite what was on last week's grocery list (Slavin, 146).  My instruction has to be filled with background knowledge whether the students have it or whether I have to present it before teaching.  Background knowledge helps build a "shelf" of sorts for students to put information on.  I teach Social Studies so a big tool that this chapter showed me I need to lean on is semantic memory.  Semantic memory is where things are stored in little categories; it's what allows us to group the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock, 1776, and Thomas Jefferson all into one category.  I hope to be able to implement this in a way that will allow my students to build their knowledge of history rather than simply remember it while I'm talking about it. 

Slavin, R. E. (2012). Educational psychology: Theory and practice. Boston, MA: Pearson.

Behavioral Theories of Learning

Analyze

This week as a class we looked at behavioral theories of learning.  “Learning is usually defined as a change in an individual caused by experience (Slavin, 116).  When we think about learning we (or I) automatically move into the things that I teach my students.  My students come in with very little experience in World Literature and after reading some short stories, a novel, and giving comprehensive background knowledge, I feel that they “learn” the material.  While this form of learning is critical and makes up the fabric of our livelihoods as teachers it is not the only definition of learning. 

Behavioral theories of learning seek to find out why and how we become conditioned to do new things.  Two of the earliest pioneers of this practice were Ivan Pavlov and B.F Skinner.  Pavlov observed how dog’s behavior changed when meat was placed in front of them.  Pavlov’s experiments showed that if you were to take something like meat, which he considered an unconditioned stimulus and pair it with a neutral stimuli, which in Pavlov’s case was the ringing of a bell, then you could ultimately trigger and control a response.  This is apparent in school students everyday with the ringing of a bell for class change.  Although the bell in both experiments is used as a neutral stimuli it is worth noting that trigger different responses.  A bell is otherwise just a sound until the early parts of the school year in which it triggers 1700 students (in my school) to get up and move. 

Skinner’s approach worked with “operant conditioning” which is where subjects are studied based on receiving positive and negative consequences.  Skinner’s experiments worked with a rat who at the press of a button would receive food.  After pressing the button a few times out of curiosity (accidental) the rat learned the association between pressing and receiving a treat.  Another focus of this week’s unit was on reinforcers. Reinforcers are anything that strengthens a behavior.  Our discussion for this week was centered on the idea of a child being sent to the office acting as a positive reinforcer.  Positive reinforcers are what we think of when we think of good grades, special privileges and attention.  Being sent out of the class and to the office is not something that usually falls into this category.  Our discussion as a group was very fruitful in determining that some students may actually seek out the opportunity to leave our classrooms and get sent to the office.

Analyze.

As a group our task this week was discussing why a student would seek out being sent to the office, the fact that it is sought out leads me to believe that it should be considered a positive reinforcer, which is usually occupied by things like good grades and special treatment.  I teach older kids each day, mostly 10^th graders who are between 15 and 17 years old.  I get to see kids truly changing in front of me.  Most change is for the best but not all of it.  I see students who have counted school out for whatever reason.  Most believe they will simply find a job that allows them to work 40 hours a week and go home.  When kids start to believe that they don’t need school they begin to focus their time on ways to get out of it.  Being an English teacher I see this behavior more than I wish, simply because kids who don’t enjoy English as a subject immediately argue with its validity and why they do or don’t “need it”.  Students who see our classes as a waste of time will sometimes act out as a way of getting removed from the environment.  As a teacher I now recognize this as a problem and know that it is something I simply cannot do.  If a student is causing a disruption it is easier to send them out than it sometimes is to deal with them.  What I have learned and must apply is that I would be giving them what they want instead of teaching them that they can’t always get what they want.  To me this unit really stressed the idea of remediation and differentiation.  The idea of reinforcers is that they strengthen a behavior.  I have to be able to modify my instruction and activities in order to allow these students to at least be willing to participate.  If I can tap into something they enjoy (or can bare) then I can use other positive reinforcers like grades and other things to strengthen their commitment to not only my class but school in general.  

Slavin, R. E. (2012). Educational psychology: Theory and practice. Boston, MA: Pearson.