Assessment
Prior Knowledge Assessment Lesson Plan
Understanding By Design Lesson Plan
Assessment of Student Learning
My assessment of student learning in my first classroom followed the framework set to me by my colleagues at Patrick Henry. I used focuses or warm ups to gauge student knowledge and recovered material as necessary to counter balance what was lacking.
I used multiple choice exams this year and they do not carry much weight in my grading scheme. I really hate them, but felt our day to day work needed more improvement than the summative assessments. The example linked here is from my Unit 9 exam. I choose specific activities from the standards (linked here) compiled by my mentor and his co-teacher to decide what to test on. I re-read the actual standards to double check their work, but did not have to really change anything. If anything I just extended it into a little bit more detail. I was very deliberate in my test choices and reworked questions as necessary based on another teacher's exam from a former year that my mentor deemed a "good" test.
Reflection on Evidence
I have included my Prior Knowledge Assessment, Understanding By Design lessons from Assessment class because they show my academic knowledge. I included my formative rubric for my Unit Plan which I use as a means of organization and tracking for my students. I included my exam from Unit 9 to show you the kinds of summative assessments I used.
For the tracking sheet: it bears stating that each of those listed tasks are monitored and students are given verbal correction or shown in writing. I wasn't recording their forming knowledge, but they were. It isn't really assessment, because I failed to document it anywhere else except my brain and notes written to myself. I over-estimated a lot of students' ability to reflect. I want to improve this by introducing exit slips, and a daily "effort" grade. I am switching to Google Classroom, so I will make the exit slips easier to monitor using technology. I think this will also aid in differentiation.
I altered my instruction to re-teach material they missed on their focuses as a part of going over their focuses. This some times means spending over half an hour on their focuses and pushing new material back.
I used my summative assessments to assess their learning in the way that I imagine the SOL exam would. Those assessments are quite inaccurate, and not very complex. I treated the summative like a formative assessment by having students do test corrections where they were given their answers and they corrected their test with what the correct answer is and an explanation of why that answer is correct or their old answer was wrong. This was done after school with me to help them step through the material and spot check them.
Again, moving towards Google Classroom and away from PowerSchool and Office365 allows me more flexibility in my assessments. Google rarely crashes, as opposed to PowerSchool that liked to crash constantly, especially when I was grading. I liked the way that the standards were torn apart and the way I aligned what I was working with closely to the standards. I want to keep that up in my new position. I want to include more authentic assessments to more thoroughly assess my students. I want to include more written tests, with fewer questions. I want them to draw and label more diagrams.