My prof for Problem Solving with Communication Technology shared this TED Talk with us via Moodle. It is a fabulous example of how to scaffold learning properly. I want to take these principles and apply them to any subject I teach.
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This quote from Jim Lloyd (Chappius et al, p. 7) strongly resonated with me: "Classroom assessment for learning ... is a way of being. It is a type of pedagogy that when used as a matter of practice makes a profound impact on the way the teacher engineers her learning environment and how the students work within it." The key ideas wrapped up in this quote (and the rest of the readings) are: 1) effective teaching integrates assessment into lesson planning and execution systematically, and 2) it is possible and desirable to engage students in the assessment process.
By integrating assessment into lesson planning, I will develop much stronger lesson plans and be able to support, guide, verify, and report on student learning much more effectively and clearly. By making assessment overt and inviting students to participate in assessment activities, I'm confident that the students will take more ownership of their learning and pride in themselves as learners, and that they will develop skills that will enable them to be lifelong learners in academic and non-academic areas. One notion that stuck out at me was that attendance, effort, and behaviour should not be accounted for in the grading system and that focus should be on what students know and can achieve. In my schooling experience, it was common to get some nominal marks for participation. On the surface, attendance, effort, and behaviour seem important, but I realized that all three affect student achievement. Measuring achievement would make things more simple (because you aren't trying to consider those factors separately) and accurate (because the criteria for achievement are tied to the learning objectives set out by the Program of Study). I also recalled that both formative and summative assessment criteria were hidden from me throughout my education in non-core subjects, including physical education, art, music, and dance. I tended to do well in them, but I had no idea what I was doing to get my good grade, nor what I could do to improve my grade when it wasn't as high as my grades in other subjects. That was frustrating for me, and, while I liked these subjects and the activities we did, I didn't feel I was learning anything, and skill improvement just seemed to come with practice. When I put myself in my teachers' shoes now, I envision structuring these classes much differently. I find that the Keys to Quality Classroom Assessment figure (Chappius et al, p. 5) outlines a logical progression in designing lessons that assess, further, verify, and communicate students' learning progress, as well as engage the students in their own learning. I feel confident that, as I gain knowledge and practice of each 'key', I will be able to, say, take the learning objectives for grade 10 art, design assessment methods to match the targets and provide quality feedback, and empower students to assess themselves and set goals. Having this logic and structure in place is reassuring for me, because it also allows me to systematically check what might have gone wrong if things don't turn out as I predicted they would, and to know what I need to tweak, ditch, or improve. On a related note, I learned that descriptive feedback helps students identify specifically what to continue, improve, and avoid based on comparison to an exemplar, sample, description, or criteria. Evaluative feedback helps students understand whether they need to improve, but not how. Therefore, as a rule of thumb, teachers should increase their descriptive feedback and decrease their evaluative feedback. Research says, however, that evaluative feedback may interfere with learning (Davies, p. 18). This made me wonder whether the time spent designing and implementing evaluative measures are really worth it if the goal is student learning. Evaluative feedback seems to be used primarily to summarize (often average) students' progress (individual or aggregated) to people outside the classroom, who likely don't understand all of the intricacies associated with generating that report and therefore cannot properly analyse and act upon it. Even if I had a clear understanding of how stakeholders will use the assessment information and identified what level of detail is required, I'm not confident that I could generate any reports that explain things thoroughly yet briefly enough for certain audiences to use them properly. I experienced this very problem often in my job as an occupational health and safety analyst. Perhaps evaluative feedback is useful in identifying whether certain teaching strategies are more or less effective, but then it seems that one would have to analyse reports of student progress alongside teachers' lesson plans, classroom management plans, assessment plans, and other tools used in teaching. Alternatively, if descriptive feedback supplements evaluative feedback, it may become more effective. I think this is what the 'balanced assessment system' table (Davies, p. 21) attempts to promote. Looking at this table makes me wish that the school and community leaders would ask more questions related to formative assessment, or at least understand that the questions they are currently asking indirectly pushes teachers to evaluate students in ways that actually interfere with their learning. |
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