Reflection 9

Chapter 9- Making Assessment Meaningful

                                                                                                               Ricki Feuereisen 

This chapter was short but had some very useful information to talk about. When starting a new unit/topic as a teacher you want to know what your student’s prior knowledge is, so you know where you need start. There are many ways to assess what student’s prior knowledge is, but in this chapter it talks about using a K-W-L chart. Before starting a new unit/topic, you pass out the K-W-L chart; you have your class fill out the K (What you know) and W (What you want to know) sections.  It’s very important to know what your students know about a topic before you start teaching.

            Next, the chapter talks about establishing anchors. The importance of establishing anchors for a project is so “you gain a sense of where students are starting off and how far they are going as they work to meet learning goals”. (Pg. 140) What this means is you want to see the growth of your students, are they learning anything new? Do I need to do a review? Do some students need extra help? Etc.

            There are many ways to assess what students learned during a project. One way is having your class fill out the L (What you learned) section of the K-W-L chart. This allows students to write about what they learned or do quick bullet points. Another way is formative assessments, which could be giving students a test. Teachers can walk around and listen to their students’ conversations to collect data on if students have learned the key concepts that you wanted them to grasp on to. Another way of assessment is having student’s create a portfolio of their work so far. This is a fun one, because students have the chance to be apart of it and choose the work that they are proud of that they want to put in their portfolio. It also talks about how a teacher interviewed his class and asked questions to each student, while videotaping them. The teacher said, how surprised he was with some of the answers that students were giving because it showed him how much they learned but students also talked about their learning styles. Lastly, a teacher had her class, who were in elementary school, create their own books based on works that they learned and have been blogging about. This chapter talks about a few more assessments but I thought that these ones were interesting and different.

            These concepts relate to our project because with each assignment that we are completing, we are being assessed on. There is a rubric that is completed, that helps the teacher grade our work. With every class period, we have an assignment to complete, and when we complete the assignment it shows if we really understood it. Also with these reflections, we are getting feedback from our classmates, which will help improve our work.