Brittany,
I hope you are settled back into the swing of things. I know I have found it difficult trying to get back into school and motivating myself to complete the last few projects. After being out in the field made me want to start internship right away. I enjoyed every minute of pre-internship, and I can hardly wait for our experience in internship.
I found our entrance slip interesting to reflect back on our experience with assessment. Throughout my experience I notice mainly summative assessment and little formative, and diagnostic. However, when I was able to teach, I tried to develop as much formative and diagnostic assessment within my lessons to be able to monitor student process and to see what they already knew. Another thing that really stood out for me was the lack of assessment in Physical Education. Students normally rated themselves on a scale from 1-5 and that was the mark they received that day. We are taught to provide a variety of assessments through things like exit slips, observations, analyzing etc. It was hard to see the lack of assessment in the Phys. Ed program. I am very excited to start my internship and to continue working on a variety of assessments. This is still one aspect I have a lot to improve on, and wished I had gained a bit more knowledge around while in my pre-internship experience.
What was your experience with assessment at the school you were at? Did you find any challenges? Was there one thing that really stuck out for you in regards to assessment?
I really enjoyed both activities we did in class on Monday. I like the “Big Ideas: self assessment checklist”, this allowed my to self-assess where I am at in regards to different ideas around assessment. Overall, I checked the box “on my way”, I fell more comfortable using the following practices and strategies to improve assessment practices, however there is still improvement needed, and I still need a bit of guidance. Where have you assessed yourself, and what areas do you still feel need improvement?
The other activity was also interesting, and I was expecting to hear more debate around the following items relating to ones philosophy. When combing answers with others in my subject area, we were all relatively the same on what we thought. For the most part we were under either the statement will be part of my assessment practice, or we were unsure at this time. A few things we were certain of included applying fair consequences for academic dishonesty and reassess to determine achievement, provide clear descriptions of achievement expectations, don’t assign grades using inappropriate or unclear performance standards, as well as involving students in their own assessment, don’t leave students out of the grading process since it’s a valuable opportunity for promoting achievement. This was one area in which I learnt to be important this year. Before this year, I never considered allowing students to be involved with their own assessment. I believe this is a great way in allowing students to have voice, and it provides them the opportunity to know what exactly is expected of them.
Even though it was a little difficult hearing the YouTube video’s on Ken O’Connor I would encourage you to take a look at fixing the late homework one which is number 2 if you not yet done so. I found it interesting to listen to the different advice, and it definitely invites one to consider being unsure to applying it to ones assessment practice.
Here is an article I found in regards to summative assessment and only using summative assessment to determine grades.
I am interested to here what you think about this article in particular, and what you think about not using formative assessment for grades, only summative.
Thanks, Michelle
michellesweetingblog 
HI Michelle,
I have settled back in to the swing of things now after our amazing pre internship experience. I am also very excited for the internship experience this fall. I was so happy to be able to apply what we have been learning in university to real students, in real classrooms and also see what others teachers in the field are currently doing right now in our area of study.
In reply to your question “what was your experience with assessment at the school you were at? Did you find any challenges? Was there one thing that really stuck out for you in regards to assessment?”
My experience with assessment in the school that I was at was very similar to your experience described n your post. The school I was at also had a self rating scale where students rated them after every physed class but instead of being out of 1-5 it was 1-10 and this was worth a large part of their grade. I do not believe my philosophy agrees with this approach but it is one that is being used and practiced obviously in a lot of schools. I believe TPSR is really important to implement into classrooms but from classes taken I think there is others ways to implement it. Some challenges that I found were having students who were very mark driven not wanting to complete something fully if it was not going to be put on their online grade book. I believe that when I have my own classroom and class I want to build an understanding in my students that we do things not just for a mark but for learning. I will implement more formative and diagnostic assessments into my classrooms rather than everything being summative as I viewed in a variety of instances in my placement.
This Mondays class experience was great! It gave me an opportunity to look into my preintenship around assessment, analyze my beliefs in regards to assessment in comparison to the checklist we were to complete. Many of my checklist points were in category one with a few in category two which were because I either have not experienced them fully enough yet or were uncertain as to how they may look in my classroom in the future.
IN the activity of comparing my views with a peers it was interesting because him and I differed a bit in our beliefs but both had the same understanding that it all depends on the situations and one we have our own classrooms we will be able to further understand all of the concepts. Him and I did not have a debate over much and felt fairly similar to many points but own philosophical beliefs definitely showed through.
I was really impressed with the Ken O’Connor videos. I did watch number 2 and I also found it interesting because it gave me a perspective as to what I had experiencing in the past in my own schooling experiences verses what I may do in my future classroom.
I believe to be good professionals we need to read, listen to, and observe a variety of ideas, beliefs, and methods in assessment to be able to form our own way of assessing and continuously developing our assessment skills as teachers. When i find time to watch all of the video clips from him i want to go back to my points that I had in column to and reassess my thinking towards them.
I was pleased to read your article that you found. It provided some great ideas and points. My opinion about only using summative assessment to determine grades is that I think that is how it should be. Why apply a grade to someone when they are first trying to learn something in a formative or diagnostic assessment. Everyone must learn something or how to do something and assigning a grade to that beginning learning process is not something that I believe is a beneficial practice.
In class Rhonda discussed the book Redefining Fair by Damian Cooper and this is a book that I am wanting to get my hands on to read over the summer in preparation for internship. I believe that the more we can educate our selves around assessment practices the better prepared we are going to be to use it in our classrooms.
When I was doing some research around differentiated instruction and assessments I came across this online book. I have not fully read it but have skimmed it and it may be something your are interested in viewing also. I believe it raises some beneficial points to consider and some things that we would be able to apply to our internship experience.
https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=OmiaaeNRCX4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR4&dq=differentiated+instruction+&ots=Z7X0qiBWHX&sig=kHi6939VvmVQwt1H7iSLgtdA3Yk#v=onepage&q=differentiated%20instruction&f=false
here is the link for it I hope it helps you in your journey of figuring out assessment practices.
Throughout this Mondays class I appreciate the entrance and exit slips. I appreciate that our last class is going to be based around what we put on the exit slips. This I feel is something that we could utilize in our own classrooms when it comes to the end of a learning activity, school year, or before a long break. I think having students participate in where there learning is going to be going is a very beneficial practice for both the teacher and students.
I have enjoyed reading your blogs and comments on my blog posts. I wish you success in the coming week of wrapping the semester up. Also good luck in your internship and your developing understanding of assessment.
Thanks,
Brittany Haidt
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