"I don't care because at the end of the day, I'm still getting my paycheck!"
In this weeks reading of the Bronzo-Simpson chapter, there is a discussion on the basic principles of teaching. One topic they discussed was having assessment based on meaningfulness and relevancy:
"The assessment tools we use for these purposes should therefore be designed to provide insights into students' reading, writing, and thinking strategies with the actual texts they must use daily and in the actual, authentic contexts of their use. In this way, the information gained from assessment can be immediately translated into action"
Meaningful criteria is important to follow, because if you assign something to your students that you yourself aren't really even sure about, are you really being fair to your students? As future teachers, we should be meaningful in our rubrics and really make sure our students know what we want them to do. It's not a matter of "spoon feeding" students, but simply having clear guidelines as to what we are asking. At the end of the day, we're grading our students off of what we think they know, but if we screw up in the rubric, they're gonna screw up in showing us what they truly know, and thus everything gets messed up. Other statements from this article stem off of this, by mentioning that assessment should also be based off of real world interest or student interest. What the article argues is that if you tie something relevant to the students' lives into your lesson plan, it will be more memorable and retain it better (again, something everybody should know). Standardized tests were also mentioned near the end of the chapter, showing what they are capable of and their downsides. Naturally, we would think that this is a basic topic that every teacher should know, but based on my experiences, it is a shame this has to be repeated time and time again. In general, the foundational lessons we learn in this class should be a basic understanding, but from what I have experienced, common sense is not common. There are however, teachers who I have deeply appreciated because they take on this perspective that they too are students themselves and that it is an ongoing process. Teachers who always ask for feedback, explain things crystal clear in an organized manner/rubric, and can connect to their students are teachers I admire and motivate me to do the same. At the end of this rant, I have a couple questions for you, feel free to answer one, all, etc.
Can you reflect on a time during your academic career where you've had teachers who did not care/were unmotivated? How did that make you feel? What did you learn from this experience?
Feel free to vent to your hearts content.
In a more philosophical sense, what does assessment mean to you?
In what ways do you plan on challenging standardized testing? How are you going to get creative with assessment? Do you think standardized tests are important or relevant?
Are you going to include feedback into your lesson plans? How inclusive will you be of your feedback system? Do you think feedback will ultimately lead to students wanting to do the bare minimum or do you think feedback will help you better your teaching skills?
The problem with standardized testing is that it's so prolific and such a strong part of how students get into the higher levels of education like college that it would be hard to dismantle standardized testing entirely. In classroom assessment, like we were talking about last week, it'd be good to have a balance between letting students have some degrees of freedom in how they show what they learned and also typical assessment like exams, if only to prepare them for the inevitable SAT's/ACT's/AP's/other various alphabet soup exams and all.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point of us absolutely needing to be as clear as possible with our students when we talk about what we want to see from them. This kinda ties into a lot of other things that would improve performance and understanding too, such as if we express that we believe our students can reach high standards, they'll rise to the occasion. Also, I was talking to my cooperating teacher for observations recently, and one of the main pieces of advice she gave me was similar to your point - we have to be very upfront with students and very consistent as well in order to establish mutual respect. We can show we respect students' agency and that they have the ability to make their own decisions given a set of options, and they in turn will likely respect us more if we show we follow through with what we say - such as making a rubric as clear as possible, thus enabling us to assess each student in a fair way. That also ties into your point that teachers need to show they truly care about how they teach and grade students; even something as subtle as good communication w/ the students about what they want to see in the classroom can go a long way in showing the students that the teacher truly wants to see them do well.