Reflection #8 - Assessing Student Learning

Describe 

This week we completed tasks and read about assessment.  The reading covered topics such as the various types of standardized assessment and their purpose.  It then went into detail about constructing assessments.  Finally the reading covered performance assessment and its effectiveness. Our questions and quizzes this week focused on instructional objectives and how they relate and drive the development of assessments.

Analyze

Assessments and their creation is something that must be first determined after the development of learning objectives.  Objectives should drive the type of assessments that are created for students. First having an understanding of Bloom's taxonomy and the level and rigor associated with objectives helps tremendously.  If objectives are written for students to perform on the lower end of Bloom's taxonomy than it would be fitting for them to complete a written assessment.  However, when using higher order levels of Bloom's taxonomy it requires higher level of assessment such as essay, constructed responses or to real-world application with a performance assessment.  These concepts are important when teacher write learning objectives to meet state standards.

Reflect

When I first began in education almost ten years ago assessment was a difficult thing for me to get right.  I had taken only one real course in college on assessment and it did not fully prepare me for the classroom.  However, being a part of an impact learning community it helped me to realize my weakness.  I began to read about assessment and its various forms and attended a workshop on differentiation and assessment which helped me tremendously.  The change that made this a strength for me was being able to take part in assessment reviews and training with the state of Georgia during my second year teaching.  Getting an understanding of the development and revision process the state uses for assessment items helped me to understand the connection between state standards, learning objectives, and assessment design.

Once I became the department chair for social studies, I wanted to use assessments even more to drive changes made to our daily lessons and unit revision process.  One of the first changes I made was to develop formative assessments that would be shared or common among all common content area teachers.  This process allowed us to share good test questions and performance assessments to create a set of common practices for all students.  Once this was complete we worked on summative assessment and performance assessments.  This allowed my department to ensure a viable curriculum for all students and make sure that everyone was getting as similar as possible feedback specific to the state standards.  After state testing was complete we looked at assessment data to determine areas of strength and weakness within each content and began and still continue to revise assessments to meet the needs of state test takers.

Currently every unit of instruction in our department as a performance assessment that allows students to show what they know and understand. We are working now to develop differentiated performance assessments to meet the needs of all our students.  As of today, the differentiation is in the product they produce however we are looking to change this to differentiate even the level on content required to complete the task.

Reflection #7 - Motivating Students to Learn

Describe 

This week our assignments focused on the ways to motivate students to learn as well as engage them in the learning process.   The reading for this week started with motivational theories and their importance to helping us understand the students we teach.  Next, the reading discussed how achievement in school can motivate students by looking and even changing the goals we set for our students.  The most interesting part of the reading this week for me was about learned helplessness and what it means and how to interpret and deal with this concept in students.  The questions for this week focused on motivation and how teachers can create and kill it in our classrooms.  I enjoyed sharing how I try to motivate my students in the classroom.

Analyze

I believe that student motivation is extremely important in order to get them to accomplish any learning objective or activity in class.  This starts with a rapport with students.  Having knowledge of the motivational theories helps this by developing the "toolbox" of tricks and effective rapport it takes to help students.  That is why the topic this week in the reading of learned helplessness was important to me.  I wanted to have a better understanding of why students feel this and how to manage it.  As a history teacher a lot of students always start by stating how they hate history because they are not good at it.  This fear is important to get over as early as possible before the content becomes cumbersome.  Having knowledge of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for students can also help.  Students that are intrinsically motivated by school and grades are not the students you have to focus your time on.  The students that suffer and need extrinsic motivation are the students schools find with struggling circumstances.

Reflect

To this point this summer, the topic of motivation has been extremely important to me.  I want to have a relationship with the students I teach to be one of mutual respect and shared learning.  I want my students to believe in the educational process that I am putting in front of them and I want them to develop into a life long learner.  In order for me to do this I must be able to motivate students to complete tasks that they may not always be "all in" to do.  I also believe that school should be about creating experiences for students that last a life time.  That belief is a major reason why I became an educator in the first place.  Having a better understanding about motivation can help me to better connect with the students that I teach.  Sometimes as hard as you try the content that I present and facilitate is just that hard and unfulfilled.

Reflection #6 - Accommodating Instruction to Meet Individual Needs

Describe 

This week we completed a reading about differentiated learning as well as grouping.  The reading began with grouping and tracking students, a process that as gone away in high schools in recent years but is making a comeback lately with AP courses etc.  Differentiated instruction was an important part of the reading, it described and than gave ways to differentiate instruction.  One way that caught my interests was using peer tutoring.  The last part of the chapter was about intervention programs as well as after-school or summer school.  The questions to answer for this week focused on ability grouping and the technology we would offer students in our classroom to facilitate differentiated instruction.

Analyze

When looking at ability grouping it is a difficult topic for me.  I believe that all students can learn and can learn at high levels.  The first idea of tracking is especially hard for me.  Tracking was once a tool to allow students at high school to determine their future.  Whether you were tech prep or college prep especially here in Georgia.  However, after attending college and seeing the data about schools and the graduation rates.  Tracking was setting students up very early in their high school careers for failure.  Students not on a college prep track and having a change of heart half way through high school suffered tremendously.  I do not believe in setting students up for failure or restricting their educational options.  Ability grouping is also a tough subject for me.  I understand that we want to separate some students from others in order to help them go further.  I however struggle with this concept when teaching AP courses.  I want to have any student experience a tougher curriculum if they are interested in pushing their academic abilities or learn new skills.  Differentiation is a way to have the best of both or all these worlds.  It allows schools and students to become part of a shared learning community.  I have had many students learn unexpectedly from others no matter what their ability level was or what kind of test scores students have had in the past.

Reflect

Early this summer I was given a promotion at school!  I am moving on to become the Director of Academic Success at Metter High School.  My new job will be to use an online learning platform to help students recovery lost credits as well as to accelerate students that want to take courses not currently offered in the traditional classroom.  I am really excited about this opportunity.  This will allow us to differentiate school curriculum and tailor it more and more to an individual students needs.  Its not the greatest of learning opportunities just yet being that this an online program provided from a corporation.  It does however, allow me to help students in my small rural county to experience courses in video game design, entrepreneurship, AP Human Geography etc.  It is the start of the future of education I believe!

I will also be responsible for the after-school as well as summer school programs we offer.  This is something very new to me and I have been working very hard to develop the protocols and the timeline and activities for this after-school program.  The part of the textbook that talked about after-school programs helped me tremendously to develop my concept of what this needs to accomplish.  The program has time for homework, acceleration/remediation (using the online course platform), and also time for extra-curricular activities through the sports offered at Metter High School.  The best part of it all is that it includes time for dinner for all students!!!

Reflection #5 - Effective Lessons

Describe 

For this weeks reading it covered effective lessons and the various types of instruction.  The reading began with direct instruction and how to create an effective lesson using this strategy.  Although everyone may teach a wide variety of students the parts of an effective lesson are the same for all learners.  These key parts are objectives, build on prior knowledge, and figure out the best way to reach these goals while assessing understanding and providing feedback.

Analyze

Developing effective lessons must be a systematic process.  It must start with a clear set of learning objectives.  Once those are complete, an effective lesson than gets a list of all prerequisite skills or concepts needed to complete the learning process.  This phase is extremely important to know them as well as assess your students for them.  This process allows an educator to then create organizers and activities to help students better understand the concept.  After an understanding of prerequisite skills and concepts is developed the learning of new material can begin.  This is the only part of lesson development that does not give me anxiety!  Being about to develop examples, gather images, charts/diagrams, videos, activities to help students understand concepts is exciting.  I love finding new ways to share with students as well as other staff members at my school.

Reflect

When writing lesson plans the part of the whole process that I forget about and struggle with during implementation is allowing for ample student response time and also providing the right amount of independent practice.  When reviewing material in class and asking students questions I struggle with giving response time.  As a history teacher, these ideas/concepts/dates have come easy to me and I have been working with this material a long time.  Sometimes I tend to get a little impatient.  I must continue to work on this!  The other area of struggle for me is when I develop differentiation for students and they are working in their ability groups I struggle with giving them appropriate time to complete practice and than share with their group.  The struggle is ensuring that all students have time to work and than have time to share.  Technology does allow me to balance this a little better but it is an area of weakness for me.  The last area of weakness for me is providing students with ample feedback in the appropriate time between completing activities.  When grading performance tasks for over 100 students it is hard to give feedback to everyone that can help them to improve.  My problem is dealing with time to get it all back and allow them to get better.  This is especially hard with essays and feedback with my AP students for preparation for the exam in May.

Reflection #4 - Behavioral Theories of Learning

Describe 

Readings this week focused on behavioral learning theories.  From the beginning, the reading started with Pavlov and Skinner both which have been a part of every course I have taken in school.  The reading also discussed primary/secondary reinforcers and positive/negative reinforcers.  These concepts are important for teachers to understand because we need to know what we want students to do/know and use reinforcers to ensure those things happen in our classroom.  Lastly, the book discussed punishment/consequences.  As an educator it is important to remember that our consequences for actions need to happen quickly in order to be effective.

Analyze

The reason we need to understand behavioral learning is to have a better understanding of how students learn.  These ideas about behavior are important for educators to understand when developing classroom rules and routines.  Using the concept of classical conditioning, teachers can develop ways for students to respond when hearing hands clap together or hearing a bell ring.  When looking at developing a positive classroom environment teachers need to be sure to understand the concept of reinforcers.  To understand what people remember it is important to recognize that people remember in two ways with short-term or long-term memory.  Short-term memory is concepts or knowledge that is about to be remembered.  This is information that is currently active and will be discarded by the brain if not needed or seen as valuable.  One way to ensure that this memory is stored is to practice rehearsal, the more a concept is rehearsed the likelihood of it being stored increases.  Long-term memory is concepts/ideas that have transferred from our short-term memory to be kept for longer periods of time.  This type of memory deals with how we know when to complete a task, also called procedural memory.  Ways that teachers can teach procedures is by rehearsing them numerous times and create routines in a student’s day.

Reflect

This week one topic was extremely interesting to me.  I want to have a better understanding of metacognition!  Metacognition is how we learn.  This topic is important to me because it helps with the development of learning activities and projects that I give students.  If I have a better understanding of how we learn the better chance I help students learn new material.  When classes are over for the summer I want to do more research on this topic and hopefully find some new ways to develop lessons to help my students learn!

Reflection #1 - My Schooling

My educational experience began with preschool.  I attended KinderCare beginning at age four and do not remember very much about my days there.  I do know that this happened because I was a child of a teenage mother that was attending college.  We lived with my grandparents and they wanted me to have time with other children.  My mother took me everyday and she tells the story of the whole place erupting with excitement with I arrived; mainly because she made sure that I took breakfast with me everyday.  I do remember though getting picked up everyday by my grandfather who made sure we got snack everyday heading home.  Many of my favorite memories revolve around food.

During my time in elementary school, I remember going everyday with my grandmother.  She was a physical education teacher there.  I remember her always talking about how much she enjoyed working everyday and the massive number of hugs she got daily.  When comes to remembering the teaching strategies and activities from class I do not remember the day to day every well.  I do remember going to what we call today the connections classes, like art, music, and etc.  The moments I remember focus around my 4th grade teacher Mrs. Heaps, she was just so loving, caring, and genuinely interested in my future.  I remember at Christmas us working on making presents for our families and how she helped me to make a key holder for my grandfather.

Today, however, when I walk around our elementary school in my district kids are talking about content and doing activities that I never would have completed in my school.  I did some observations of some students in a third grade social studies class last year that were looking at sets of images from events in history and making determinations about the context of the event and time period.  Those things did not happen for me.  I have also been in classrooms where the technology available to students is extraordinary.

Attending middle school is a time period where memories of the level of instruction as well as the strategies are easy for me to remember.  Taking part in the accelerated reader program during my English class and having time to read novels of my choosing.  The freedom to make choices was exciting for me.  I remember sitting in history class and watching videos of re-enactments and working in stations to make observations about primary and secondary sources.  Those types of events still happen in middle schools today.  The remarkable things is the access students have and want to have to the internet.  They see it in ways that I can and have not imaged to date.  I think today we as educators do not give many of our students credit for being the digital natives that they are because of the fear we see in the technology.

High school was very different for me as a student than I remember.  I was a part of the college prep and technical prep "track" plan for graduation system of the 1990s and early 2000s.  I was pushed in to the college prep track naturally and did not have classes with many of the students that I teach today.  I sit in meetings with people all the time and think about how I do not know how to make a connection with this child or make this part of my content more "engaging."  These are areas that are of a weakness for me.  As an educator I struggle constantly with trying to find ways to make school interesting or thought provoking for my students.  I do not remember this happening when I was in school.  My teachers lectured and gave examples for us to work and then gave quizzes or tests and moved on.  Today as an educator, I am constantly changing, remediating, and accelerating my students that I am sometimes lost in the chaos that can be created in my classroom.

When thinking about extra-curricular activities the system in which I work offers many of the same things that I participated in.  These were the times that I got to see my classmates from different "levels" or "groups."  I played football, golf, basketball, and soccer.  I have spent time coaching all of these sports as well.