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.