Assessment in Classrooms

This week in class we had the opportunity to discuss assessment and ways to make assessment meaningful for the students. Students often flip through the assignment missing all the encouraging comments the teacher gave in order to find the only important thing for them, the mark. As teachers we need to find ways to help students improve and assess the students by giving them more than just a letter grade or percentage.

The following are three tips that I found the most helpful when thinking of ways to assess students.

Tip 1: Focus on important concepts

This tip considers two things in one. When providing assessment pieces teachers should try and stay away from the miniscule details and really focus on the big ideas of the unit. When focusing on the big ideas try to create assessments that examine one idea at a time. Assessment pieces that focus on multiple ideas will confuse students and can wear out the students when they are completing the task. The second aspect of this tip is that when you are marking only look for the big ideas and the successes of the student. If there is a majority of the work that is filler allow the student the chance to redo it so that they are able to meet the expectations

Tip 2: Grades are not the best policy

Grades can cause anxiety in students especially if they feel pressured that they must receive a high mark every chance they can. Instead of a teacher focusing on the grade he/she should try to use comments that focus on the success of the student. If comments and grades are used students will not improve their work. The students will read the grade and bypass the comments not understanding the areas for improvement or where they excelled. As future teachers we should focus on giving the students comments on their work unless giving a grade is absolutely necessary.

Tip 3: Don’t be like Mr. D

Friends of teachers may think teaching is easy if they just watch Mr. D. Mr. D provides teachers with an example of how not to mark papers or how to administer assessment to students. The following two videos are examples of reasons as to why students may feel anxiety around assessments. Teachers should strive help students feel confident around assessment and give the students multiple opportunities to succeed.

Assessment practices should not be used to put fear into students. Teachers should not feel a need to include pop quizzes, or unit tests weekly but look for the other ways that they are able to assess students without the pressure of a test setting. The growing success document has fundamental principles that as teachers we should constantly be referring to. The most important of those fundamental principles is that the teacher should support all students and provide multiple, varied opportunities to demonstrate their learning. Assessment is no longer about how well a student can score on a test and now examines the students’ progress of understanding as a whole.

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An Online World

When I was in elementary school I would have never imagined being able to use the internet as a method of education. Classrooms are now immersed with technology and blended classrooms are becoming more and more common. The internet has provided teachers with resources that can help create lessons that provide substitution, augmentation, modification or redefinition. The online portion can help students become more engaged in education and provide access to content that traditional teaching methods couldn’t.

Throughout teacher’s college I have been able to gain firsthand experience of the blended learning model. The blended learning model combines traditional classroom methods with independent study that uses technology. Students are still receive in school education but their learning is not confined to those walls. The blended classrooms help teach students about the resources that are available online before having students conduct research and create their own learning. The blended learning method helps change the way students approach learning and gives them an opportunity to establish their own learning path. A blended classroom is a model that I will hopefully be able to use within my upcoming placements as well as later in my own classroom.

 

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As a teacher the plentiful amount of resources can make it hard to find the exact resource that fits your classroom needs. This week I was introduced to the pedagogy wheel and think it might be one of the most useful resources I have seen. The pedagogy wheel seen above helps teachers to identify the online app that coincides with their needs. The wheel is broken down into five sections, Analyze, Create, Evaluate, Apply and Remember/Understand. The sections contain action verbs for the teacher to look for, activities to be used in the classroom and the apps that are connected. The pedagogy wheel provides the teachers with multiple ideas and can be referred to for multiple subjects.

 Using technology in the classroom does not only have to be about students working independently online. Dr. Catherine Bruce’s article “Technology in the Mathematics Classroom” explains how interactive whiteboards can be used to enhance student interest and learning. Interactive whiteboards should be used as a tool that engages the students and not only a presentation tool. The most important aspect of this article that I took away was using the interactive whiteboards as a tool for production and not consumption. Many people will use the interactive whiteboards as a presentation platform and not as a tool that the students can use to explore their problem solving skills.

With the vast amount of resources available for teachers including technology in the classroom should be a key component in every school.