Field Week 14: Assessment for Learning

 Field Week 14: Assessment for Learning 

Woooo let's hear it for teaching my unit this week!! A few weeks in the making, and now I've taught it! Overall, it was a very fun experience! I really enjoyed being able to work with my students more and actually teach.

Before I even knew what this weeks focused observation was, I was already using assessment for learning in my classes. After going over a task or problem, I would ask my students to give me a thumbs up or down depending on if it made sense to them. Another quick assessment I used to gauge understanding was having students rank how they felt about the topic introduced on a scale of 1-5. This helped to show me if students needed a refresher for the next day if done at the end of class, or if I needed to go over a section more in depth when conducted after a section of notes or problems. Along with that, this helped students to start thinking about their own understanding, especially when I asked how they felt about their own understanding in relation to before and after an activity, notes, etc. This allowed my students to do their own self assessment while providing me with valuable information as to how they were doing. When monitoring student work,  I also asked quite a few assessing questions to see how students were doing, what their thought process was, and in turn how they were understanding the concept. This is more of a conversational way of assessing, but I find it tends to be the most accurate and realistic overall. When you actually have a conversation with your students, they tend to actually tell you where they are struggling and what they are doing well with. 

When I'm not teaching, my mentor teaching tends to use more formal ways of assessing. While she doesn't grade homework, she does use tests and test corrections to see how students are doing with the material. On the informal side, she tends to assess by asking questions during note taking, and when working one on one with a student. 

This week has been honestly probably my favorite out of the whole semester. Even today when I was leaving, a few of my students said bye to me!! Some of the students were ones in the hallway from the period before, and they went out of their way to wave at me and say "Bye Miss Beechler!" Little things like that make me really happy and help me know that I am in the right career field, and makes me so excited for student teaching. If only a week of teaching made such a difference with my students, I'm excited to see how a whole semester will be! 

Sadly, only one more week left... but, that's one more week closer to student teaching!

Until next time,

Keri

part of my explore activity for incenters of triangles. it made me laugh a lot, and some students as well