Blog for Classroom Assessment: Minute by Minute, Day by Day
11-4-10 Blake Stanger
This article was a great change of speed from the text. I enjoyed reading an article that came from an educational journal; it made me feel like a real teacher in the field. The first thing I gathered from the article was a feeling of changing methods in the teaching field. I felt like a focus of the article was the more effective use of assessment in the classroom. One of the major changes was to use assessments to evaluate student progress through out a lesson or unit. In this way teachers can make sure that learners are progressing well during the lesson and not be blindsided by poor student lesson comprehension. This use of assessment better serves learners and teachers.
Another subject of the article was using assessment effectively as feedback. One of the big problems with assessment today is the fact that it shows where learners progress after it is possible to help them move forward. Progress is impossible after an assessment, there is no more time to teach; but, with a feedback method that was discussed in the text learning can continue. Teachers can give feedback that encourages students to work back through the problems and ideas that students didn’t understand.
I really liked the example that was used in the article about using “traffic lights” as a formative assessment. This type of quick immediate feedback would be so useful and extremely easy to accomplish in a classroom. It would also take away the “stupid question” stigma that some students feel when they need a more detailed explanation or to cover material again in order to understand it.
I wasn’t to implement some method of quick formative assessment like the traffic lights in my classroom. I might have something more suited to a literature class, or more customized to make it mine. Something along the line of a little figure the students can place on their desks and if they are understanding then the figure can face me, but if they aren’t then the figure will have its back to me. I would have to make sure that this assessment also had a more detailed component so I was certain that students were understanding to the level I need them to; furthermore, that I knew what the students who weren’t understanding needed to cover.
I want to use the interpretive listening method discussed in the article in my class. Rather than just focusing on the right answer in the student’s discussion I will try to listen for the students thought process and learning ideas. In this way I will connect with students and understand better how to teach them.
How fast will the assessment structure in today’s schools change?
Best-
Blake
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