Chapter 8: Effective Assessment (Class Abstract and Synthesis)

Abstract:

The introduction of this chapter is a story about a student who was not a very strong writer, but was a really amazing guitar player. The teacher knew that if they gave him a summative test over the book they just finished this student would get an F, so the teacher decided to give the student other options that they could do to prove they know the information. The student ended up making a song and preforming it on his guitar showing full understanding of the information. This is an example of good assessment. The chapter then continues by explaining what makes assessment effective. Some of the things that the chapter suggests are: defining clear goals, make the work motivating, giving students choices for their culminating activity, and using various formats to name a few. The final section of the chapter begins with two sentences that really impact the reader. They are "Good assessment is easy to grade. Complex assessments aren't difficult to track." When making assessment criteria that is what we should keep in mind.

Synthesis:

In the blogs there were some very specific things that a majority of people focused on. One of those things was standardized testing. It became very clear to me as I read the blogs about this that no one is fond of them, and would much rather find some other form of summative assessment to view students understand of information. The other thing that was really popular with the blog postings was appreciating the ideas and options that Wormeli gave for making effective assessment in the chapter. This chapter gave many people really awesome ideas for making their own assessment in their classrooms.

Chapter 8: Effective Assessment

Chapter 8 is all about how different types of assessment can impact a students grade for that assessment piece/class. A quote that I really liked in this section was by Jay McTighe. He said that "assessment should promote learning, not just measure it." I agree with this 100 percent. When I take quizzes I look at them like they are learning experiences, that they shouldn't count too much because I will use them to learn from my mistakes and master the information from there. If there is a lot of pressure on things like quizzes or checkpoints then students will be less likely to want to learn the information. As a teacher I would like to make quizzes not a thing to be feared, but something that the students can rely on to help them completely understand the material before the summative assessment piece happens.

Chapter 7: Differentiated Instruction--Fitting the Lesson to the Learner

I felt that the most important part of this chapter would be the essential features of differentiated instruction. In this there were five parts. Early and Frequent Evaluations of student's was the first one. I completely agreed with what this section was saying with the quizzes and tests and other forms of evaluations being used frequently. The next section, Adjusting the Complexity or Range of Assignments, this again is important because sometimes as teachers we focus in so much on the struggling kids that we forget to alter our assignments for the gifted kids. The last three are self explanatory and with these I also agree. I think that a good key phrase that sums up this chapter would be to vary ones teaching techniques slightly and often. If you do this then you will reach the maximum number of students.

Chapter 6: Accountability for High Standards`

The very first section of chapter 6 was talking about holding students accountable for late work. I very much agree with this. If teachers never have/give consequences for late work then the student will always talk advantage of this policy and turn in things whenever they want. In my middle school experiences if you were the teachers favorite, or one of them, they would let you turn in projects late, or homework late, and I know in one instance a student never turned in a project and got an A anyway because the teacher knew that they understood. This to me sends the wrong message to all of the students. It's kind of like you telling them that if they kiss enough butts they never have to do the work.
There was one thing that I did not agree with in this chapter and that was what they were saying about extra credit. The book suggests that teachers should never use extra credit so that students don't feel like they can slack off sometimes because they know they will be able to make it up. I disagree. If the student is willing to do the extra work that extra credit should require then I don't see the problem in making it available. We all have bad weeks where we simply can't seem to keep up and a test or quiz turns out badly because of it. Extra credit should just be a way to make up that bad week.

A Whole New Mind

I really liked how you split up the sections and the introduction. The way that you split it up really assisted in my making connections between the different sections. As for the book I really like how they are thinking about learners in different ways. Schools have always looked at education in a similar way. By looking at it through the eyes of right brainers is going to make the difference for kids, however it is going to be up to the teachers to completely understand how to incorporate this into our lesson plans all the time. I know that I will need to look further into how to incorporate these ideas into lesson plans. All in all I really liked the new ideas the book had.

The different activities and quizzes that we you had us do in the groups made the ideas really stick with what you were telling us. I enjoyed that you took the time to make the wiki artifact that was so complete so that we can look back at it.

Chapter 3: Brain Research Applied to Middle School

I really liked this chapter because of the different way that Wormeli suggested making connections in more than one way when introducing new ideas. I liked when he wrote "When we make the right kind of connections for students, we can help the content catch a ride on one of the senses as the thoughts enter their brains." I've found that when you make connections between what you're teaching and the things that connected to their likes and passions. I also thought that it was interesting that our memories remain remarkably intact but we have a very hard time retrieving them. Something that I found very neat, and will come in extremely handy in the long run, is the fact that emotional cues help middle school students retain information. The more we know about the way the brain works the easier job we will have as teachers for getting our students to completely learn and remember the information that is important.

Waiting for Superman

I am so glad that we got to watch this movie. I was absolutely amazed and at the same time appalled at the way the education system works in the country right now in regards to firing teachers. I couldn't believe the footage from the student that carried a camcorder around in his backpack. Even worse than seeing teachers do absolutely NOTHING during a class period and even mock the students about it, and seeing other kids physically harassed there was nothing the school could do to change the situation. There is no way to fire a teacher with two year.

Thats another thing that I had no idea about before watching this movie. I had never heard of two year. This is a completely ridiculous contract that ensures that all teachers who have taught past a certain number of year cannot be fired without going through this huge process that costs the schools more money than if they hired another teacher and allowed the terrible one to leave with pay.

I could go on and on about the things that I learned in this movie, lemon dance, lottery, unions..... The one thing that I concluded form the movie is that we need a drastic change in way the education system is run before we can begin expecting our students to improve their scores. We need good teachers to help create great learners.

Chapter 13: Outdoor Adventures

I was so pumped at the idea that this was in a wide spread education book. I think that many teachers leave out the outdoors in their teaching because they believe that the kids are not getting all of the learning if they are outside and distracted. I don't think this is so, and neither did the chapter. This chapter expands on so many benefits from the outdoors. One thing in particular was really powerful. The chapter said "There are two dimensions to substantive outdoor experiences. The first is the focus on our physical, emotional, and intellectual selves...found that outdoor experiences gave students greater peer acceptance and more control of their lives, thereby creating greater confidence and self-esteem." The last few pages of the chapter also give helpful examples of fun games that the students can play while outside that will help them mature or bond or make connections while still being just that, a game.

Chapter 4: Active Learning

I'm really glad that this book went over Active learning. I believe that it is really extremely important to have students move around and have hands on experiences, and I know that almost all people think that the only time this happen is in the Science Labs, but thankfully that is not correct. I really liked the math teacher example. This was the one where the teacher knew that one of the students was not understanding the new material that was being presented. Instead of just letting him slip through the cracks the teacher thought of a new way to present the material. It worked.

The other really helpful part of this chapter was the list of "Additional Ideas for Making Subjects Physically Engaging." This is going to be really helpful for people like me who has always learned the best through reading and plain old discussion. I really lack in ideas to help these learners so anything like this is awesome.