My central question as I enter my three week block is the following: how do I know my students are learning from assessment? Things like performance vs. learning oriented assignments blurs the lines of authentic understanding and evidence of learning. I am concerned about my own expertise in the content I am teaching. I have learned several complex topics throughout University but there are many concepts in the curriculum I am far less familiar with. How do I ensure I am in the position to recognize when a student is demonstrating mastery of a subject or skill? I would also like to know more about efficient scaffolding. How do I balance familiarizing students with a topic without over covering it and losing students in repetition. I particularly struggle with this when it comes to the varying abilities in a classroom. How many students need to grasp a concept before I move on in class? Is there a certain percentage where I begin to work with struggling students individually?
In regards to assessment, I would ask my Coop teacher the following questions:
- How do you use assessment to ensure students are an integral part of their own learning process?
- What are your favourite assessment strategies/ formative assessments and why?
- How do you know when responses reflect authentic understanding?
One of my peers was placed in an unconventional classroom specialized for the varying abilities of students and this taught me how different assessment looks like in different contexts. As an example, visual components of assessment do not serve students with visual impairments, meaning as educators we need to tap into other unique modes of assessments. Enhancing a students ability to demonstrate what they learned is just as important as providing a learning environment. Seeing or researching a non-conventional learning environment in action would be beneficial to me because it dawned on me that I don’t really know what that can look like. It makes sense that large takeaways are so enforced in school because we easily get lost in details like spelling or visuals. When you can’t use classes to enforce things like scientific terminology or note taking, you need a strong foundation of the concepts that are important for students to know.