dont mess with assessing!

Assessing is NOT EvALuAtiNg!!



Assessing your students is a great way to understand where they are before during and after an activity. It allows the teacher to also assess their teaching..

Do my students understand what I am teaching??

Is this a good lesson?

Am I teaching the information properly?

It is truly a process of collecting data of the student progress. The teacher collects the data using tools to measure it, Interprets that data, and then makes judgements on it. The process helps the teacher meet the needs of their students and allows them to give feedback.

TOOLS! the tools used to collect this information MUST be:

Valid

Reliable

Fair

Cost efficient

There are types of assessments.. When i filled out my concept map I thought i was on track, but i do not know why I did not think about the most obvious answer. The answer is the types of assessment that we have been working with since the day we started our education program... Diagnostic- this allows you to ask questions an assess whether the student has prior knowledge of t he concepts.  The students can brain storn, create graphic organizers and so much more. It really gives the teacher concrete evidence of this diagnostic information. Formative- this is the assessment you get throughout the lesson. whether it be a worksheet, discussions, a game. Last is the Summative assessment which is where you get to assess what the students learned it also provides feedback of how you did with teaching. You can do this by having your student create something... construct something.. its your choice! have fun!

Authentic assessment

THIS IS NOT a punishment for the students which a test may feel like... and it is not just grading

It is a multiimensional, task oriented way to assess your students.

HMMMMM WHAT CAN WE ASSESS YOU ASK!!!

well we can assess the students

 Readiness - this provides us with the information of whether they have the skills and contecnt knowledge to move on.

Interests - using interest surverys and interest centers provides the teacher with the information of the student is. This way they can make the lessons more exciting for the student.

Learning Profile- This is your student all around, their strengths and weaknesses, work preferences, and their self awareness.

A simple message

Never hold your students back!

They must realize that they have the power to imagine anything, things that we have never even dreamed of.

They need to realize NOTHING is impossible! If they can imagine it.. they can make it happen!

Learning for the future

Throughout this semester we have learned soo much in preparation for the future that is going to come. From science corners, writing and doing inquiry lesson, providing our classmates feedback. Every single experiment such as the balloon activity and every single lesson was truly enlightening. I have learned things that I will never forget and things that I can use in my teachings now and in the future.

I have the knowledge to understand that the world is a growing place. it is never going to stop advancing. I as a teaching of this century need to remember to stay updated and attempt to stay ahead of the children coming into the classroom. When it comes to technology I know that it is crucial to implement it in as many lessons as possible. It is a growing world for students and there are going to be hundred or thousands of ne jobs in the next decade that are due to technology. I want my students to be prepared for this. I want them to feel comfortable when t hey are going out into the world. Even if it is a lesson on seeds or the space, technology can be used so that students can work collaboratively and share ideas and perspectives.

I also have learned that the world is full of different perspectives. My students are going to come into my classroom with many different alternative conceptions. I must keep an open mind and realize that they arent wrong, in fact it may have been something they were taught. I need to provide them with the information and knowledge they need so they can develop those conceptions into something right.

DISCOVERIES! if you lock your students down with the theories and the concepts they will never realize that they too can make discoveries in the world. They need to realize they are scientists and make that a fun and exciting part of their learning. They should want to discover and build knowledge through t heir own doing. If I simply give my students the information... do they truly understand it? most likely NO! they need to be given the tools and the guide to figure it out on their own. This will be the most powerful tool you provide your students.

My germination

            Throughout the last 2 weeks I have attempted to germinate seeds. I have done so by placing some seeds into a moist paper towel and I have kept it wet throughout the weeks. I have decided to become a scientist and try to figure out what the best approach for growing the seeds is. I placed some seeds by the light and some in  the dark. I actually found that I had a much hard time keeping the seeds in the sin light wet, I had to consistently water them unlike the seeds in the dark. On day 1 I found no change in the seed. When I looked a few days later the seeds had started to get slightly larger and one had even cracked open. I did not see any other big change in my seeds. I was starting to get concerned a week into the process, many of my seeds had opened and a goo started to come out. One of the seeds did have what looked like a little tail coming out. That one seed I thought might end up growing. I kept at it watering the seeds and keeping an eye on them. Nothing else happened to my seeds. The seed with the little tail decided t o stop growing and I got very discouraged. There was no significant difference between the seeds that were placed in the light or the dark. In fact the seed that sprouted was in the dark which was against what I ha hypothesized. I wish I was able to get the seeds to grow and it is unfortunate that they didn’t, but I learned a valuable lesson. If you are going to do this lesson in your classroom you should make sure that you provide are always prepared. Start germinating seeds at home in case a seed fails to sprout you can always replace it without the child knowing.

GENERAL RULES of SEED SOWINGSeeds need water and oxygen to germinate, so are best started in a light, loose soil that will not compact, get soggy, or crust over. Free flow of water & air are a must. Cover seed with 2 - 4 times their thickness of soil, unless they require light to germinate. Sow shallowly in cold wet spring, more deeply in warm dry summer. Large seed can be soaked overnight and planted singly. Barely cover small seed, and sprinkle fine seed on the surface and water by misting. Plant flat seed edgewise and winged seed with wing uppermost or broken off. Sowing too thickly wastes seed and weakens the crowded seedlings, but some kinds sprout best if crowded. Lightly tamp soil to insure good contact with the seed, unless heavy. Keep soil moist, not soggy, and do not allow to dry out.
Common causes of failure are soil too heavy, wet or cold, or allowed to dry out, not giving slow seeds long enough to come up, pests eating the seeds or seedlings, and not giving dormant seeds the proper pretreatment. Careful attention to the instructions in the catalog and on the packet will help insure good results. Common causes of seedling loss are damping off due to poor air circulation & overwatering, drying out or burning due to placing in full sun or outdoor conditions too quickly, transplanting shock (best done on a cool, moist day), and predation by insects, slugs and snails at night.

Cooperative learning

How do cooperative learning groups encourage meaning making for students?

This really allows the students to get together and brainstorm, through brainstorming the different ideas the students can then come together and pick the best possible solution. Giving your students the chance to see others view points and their own gives them an even larger range of knowledge. The students then want to problem solve and figure out if their decision was in fact the best one. Problem solving gets the student asking why?? it encourages them to think and discover which will provide more meaningful experience to them. Making it meaningful takes a lot of effort on the teacher because the teacher must understand where the child is coming from. They must get to know the students and their background so that they are able to relate the content to their lives.

Considering that you sometimes have to “let go” of your plan, why should you plan in the first place?

I believe the main reason you must plan is so that you are organized and have a overall understanding of what you would like your students to gain from the unit of lessons. As teachers we are supposed to align our lessons with standards, even though there may be alternative conceptions within the classroom it is crucial for us to keep a specific lesson in place. Those conceptions may drive us away from the plan there is still a baseline for what you want and need your students to accomplish. It just may be that you need to adjust your plan to meet the students needs and understandings.

Because you are allowing the students to go off and make their own discoveries they may find something different or new that you did not intend for them to discover. This is ok and can be a great things because you are allowing the student to be a true inquirer!

Why is it important for cooperative learning groups to include students of diverse backgrounds and abilities? In your answer, consider all the members of the group.

We come from different back grounds, cultures, and abilities. When working with any group of student you want there to be diversity among the students for an array of reasons. First t is crucial that there is respect among the students. To help build this respect and understanding we must have them work together and not segregate them. This gives students the chance to bond with other students and allows them to see alternative conceptions that may have arised because of their different backgrounds. Along with respect it gives the students that may have a lower ability the chance to work with someone who has a clear understanding of the content and can help them understand what is going on.

Becoming a teacher!

Wow! I actually taught a lesson! After teaching my lesson I must say that I feel as though I accomplished something great, it also showed me that this IS what i want to do with the rest of my life. The day before I felt anxious about whether my lesson was going to be good enough, are the students going to understand what i am talking about, will the learn anything. Once I actualy performed the lesson I learned that the students did understand and they even learned something new. This was a wonderful feeling and I want to share how I think I did on my lesson.

Overall I feel that I had a great teaching voice, I made sure that the students could hear and understand what i was saying. However trying to cue the students to quiet down was where i struggled. I am glad i went through this process so that I could understand that if i want to get the attention of my students I should not yell over them. Having a system that my class understands as a cue to quiet down will be important to have in my own classroom. Yelling did not work!

Activating their prior knowledge i felt was very successful, I was abe to get the students thinking of chemical reactions, the chemical equation, and the different types with a short introduction. I also was able to get the students thinking as scientists, I informed them that we are going to become scientists. I did not just list the steps of inquiry instead we went through them step by step as we were developing the experiment. I made sure they understood that now we are going to write our hypothesis, I asked question to help them development them and walked around the room to make sure they were on task. Then I initiated the experiment by saying "OK now we have our hypothesis. Lets test them" the students knew exactly what they were asked to do because it was written on the paper and they had my verbal cue. I made sure to walk around asking questions to keep them thinking like a scientist. I also make sure they were staying on task, gave them praise and academic feedback.

 Through my observations you can see the difference immediatly in the students work. It was clear that some knew exactly what was expected and were able to go through each step without any support, where others needed a lot of support and guidence. Many of the students wrote in comeplete and clear sentences. Others wrote one word or it was very messy and hard to read. This shows the drastic difference in student work and allowed me to analyze the different amount of support i will need to provide each of my students. Closing the experiment the groups were able to present their findings and each group was able to provide the right answer with a great explaination as to why it was the specific reaction they chose.  

IMPROVE! I believe there were two things that I needed to improve. The one thing I have already mentions which is a different way of getting my students attention. Instead of yelling and trying to talk over them, which was NOT working, I should have a system like turning off the lights or clapping. I also feel that to avoid confrontation I should have had the roles assigned to the students. I did not take into consideration that they are young and will fight over the roles. Assigning the roles will allow each student to get a new role, avoid conflict, and may even allow the quieter student to get a more dominant role.

Watching my peers teach was a wonderful experience, I was able to see different teaching styles and even get new ideas for when i am a teacher. Faith and Jennifer both successfully assigned roles and used a different system to get the students attention. Both of them gave wonderful introductory lessons, they engaged the students and asked diagnostic questions. There were somethings that I would have changes, for one i would make sure that i give clear directions to my students so that they understand the lesson. Also I will make sure they understand why i am asking specific questions. If the questions do not seem to relate to anything then they were asked for no reason. Both had great experiments that the students were highly engaged in. Overall GREAT JOB!

Hooking! Activating! Assessing!

WOW, this is the word that comes to mind when i relate this class to the class that was previously observed. Today we did observe three different grade levels and the difference in the environment from the 4th grade and the previously observed 5th grade was astounding. The students in this class which was the first one observed for the day came in and were very loud and did not settle down very fast. The teacher had to keep reminding many of the students to stay on task and to focus. This is very different from the 5th grade class whom were seated and highly focused on the lesson. There was an aid in this classroom, she spent the majority of the time walking around reminding students to be quiet and pay attention.

Fourth grade lesson!

The main idea for today's lesson is natural resources, the teacher did a great job of activating their knowledge about this subject. She initiated a conversation about trees and basically if we didnt have trees we wouldnt have........

Student responses:

Air, Paper, Apples, and then they got a lot more in depth talking about the food chain. If we didn't have trees we wouldn't have specific animals that depend on the trees to eat and then we wouldn't have food to eat. 

One boy stated- It would be more then food! if we didn't have trees we wouldn't have air so we wouldn't even be alive. 

The teacher gave a lot of feedback and praise during this entire lesson, even if a students response seemed out of the box she did not criticize them. Instead she tried to understand why they came up with that answer and then corrected their thinking.

Other praise that was observed was simple phrases such as "Good job ______ I really like how you are taking notes neatly" This informs the student that they are doing a good job, but also informs other students what she expects

THE PROBLEM!

What are our natural resources that are both living and non living. The students gave a variety of answers. Some of the answers the students gave were things like pencils and jeans. To understand their thinking the teacher engaged them in a conversation about it and described that pencils and jeans are actually not natural resources BUT they are made out of natural resources. Getting the students back on track and understanding there thinking is a huge part of being about to properly educate them. As an educator you want your students to understand the concepts, therefore placing yourself in their shoes so that you understand their alternative conceptions can help to be the best teacher possible. 

Something I noticed that I really liked and shows great teacher qualities is she saw a student that was making noises and not paying attention. He was sitting close to me and i had noticed he did not pay attention for most of the lesson, I did not know why, but after the teacher asked him the question she did I feel she shows how important it is to get t o know your students. She first called on his name and asked a very complex question, in fact i did not even know what she was referring to. I though that he was going to have difficulty answering since he was not paying attention, I WAS WRONG! He got very excited and answered her question with a very clear and in depth answer. She quickly grasped his attention and i feel as though this boy may be bored in the classroom. That answer was very advanced and shows my initial judgment of why he was not paying attention was wrong.

Third Grade class!

This class even though they were younger quickly got to their seats and the teacher was able to start the lesson without constantly reminding the students to focus. The lesson was about Measurement, and she activated their prior knowledge with a simple question, "yesterday we discussed measurement, can you tell me what types of measurement we used?" This shows how the lessons should flow together and is why it is importyant to plan ahead. The teacher went over specific measurements one day and introduced what they were and this class she was taking it one step further. The hook was simply going through the measurements that we talked about in the previous lesson and WHAT they measure (length). 

THE PROBLEM! What tools can we use to measure matter.....

We have already discussed rulers and a scale, but how would we measure this (the teacher held up something that resembled a key, which had lots of different side and even wholes in it. she went through a series of steps of how to do this, by measuring its volume, the amount of space that it takes up. She did this used a granulated cylinder and water. By placing the key into the water you measure how much it rises, this number will give the students their answer.

Be a good investigator! the teacher made sure to show the students how to take good measurements. They need to be eye level, and then talked about why that is important.

FIFTH GRADERS

The last lesson of the day was the 5th grade science class, the teacher made the students aware that we would be coming into the class to teach them a lesson on chapter 12. She wanted to make sure that they understood the concepts of this chapter so that they can make connections. They will be making those connections during our lessons. We will need them to have prior knowledge of these concepts so that when we come in to teach they will have prior knowledge to relate back to. The students took time to break down the concepts and talk about examples of each, this provided me with feedback on what the students already know about the concepts and what they need to investigate further.