Author: saramcmanus

Week #7 – February 17, 2022

Chapter 5 – What concerns or queries do you have about assessment

in relation to what you are teaching in your practicum?

I feel like I had a million questions before my practicum started, but I’m a week in and now I feel slightly better, but I still have many questions. The classroom teacher that I have been assigned for my practicum is amazing! It’s a Grade 6-7 split, and I love-love-love how structured her classroom is. She has made me realize that I could definitely take on that grade as a contract in the future. I have always been comfortable with the age group, but it was the vast amount of work and subject matter that they require that I felt was overwhelming. The simplicity of her assessment and reporting practices is inspiring. Last week, as I sat beside her, I heard her ask herself, “Do I have enough evidence for developing yet?” After scrolling through her posts, a moment later, she answered, “Yes, I do!”

In my Week #4 Journal Reflection, I had frustrations regarding the process of breaking everything down only to smush them together for a letter grade; however, I have now learned that digital reporting is the key to cataloguing and summarizing all of a learner’s evidence of content knowledge, curricular and core competencies. Now that I have seen just the tip of the iceberg, I cannot imagine using any other system or grading elementary students using anything other than a proficiency scale. I admit that I am an inexperienced novice, but it makes so much sense. Digital Reporting is the missing link that I was looking for that makes using a Proficiency Scale and the three focal points of the BC Curriculum into something manageable.

Classroom Teachers need something manageable. How can you focus on relationships and building an inclusive environment for a broad group of learners when you are overwhelmed with the administration? Digital reporting allows teachers to capture moments that could not be caught in the same authentic way. It creates a shift towards student responsibility for their learning and assessment, and the students love the technology aspect.

I hope that my next practicum has digital reporting too! I’d love to see a class start up with it in the fall to see how they implement it at the beginning of the school year. My practicum teacher deeply integrates her formative feedback before each summative assessment the students have. Their summative assessments are digitally recorded by either the student or the teacher. Students are explicitly given a lesson, time to practice and develop their skills, work on their project and then at the end, something is always uploaded for their parents to see, which is tied directly to the BC Curriculum and Proficiency Scale. I suppose my questions are detail orientated about how things are worded and how the technology is applied. It’s all so exciting. I love it.

Week #6 – February 10, 2022

Chapter 4 – Choose a question from the “Pause and Ponder” section on p. 75 of the text.

What quote or passage encapsulates your biggest takeaway from this chapter?

What immediate action will you take as a result?

 

This question asks that we discuss our biggest takeaway from this chapter. I don’t know if the section I have selected is my biggest takeaway in learning; however, it is the most deeply resonating section of the chapter. Under the heading of Accuracy and Reliability, the section of “A Focus on Strengths” seemed to strengthen my pedagogical thinking regarding my inclusivity approach with learners.

Not long ago, my nephew came to visit me. He is a former French immersion student whose teacher told him that he would never need to read or write. He is diagnosed with ADHD and is in Gr 9. He told me how much he hates school and getting very down on himself. I told him my theory, and it made him feel much better. I started by telling him about how I knew that he was brilliant. I told him about his fantastic navigation skills in Disneyland and how smart he is with money. I explained that before creating the modern school system, he probably would have been born and rather than going to school, he would have learned things at home from his family. As he grew older, people would have recognized his natural talents, like his attention to detail, and they would have steered him towards careers that matched those abilities, or he would have been trained to follow in a family business, like farming. Similarly, others would be identified for their love of reading and writing, and they would have been sent to fancy schools and then to higher education (a very long time ago, maybe into the clergy etc.) I continued to explain that it has only been in the last one hundred years that we have started asking students to sit in a chair all day, and most classrooms are not designed for brains like his. He needed reassurance that his brain was perfectly normal. At the end of our chat, he thanked me and said he had never thought of it that way. I reassured him that he was a competent learner and listed many different ways to prove that he could learn.

I think that just like my nephew, knowing where your students’ strengths lie allow you to have conversations and that “(d)ata promote possibility and inspire action when a culture encourages a focus on strengths and uses that data to help teachers and learners see themselves as successful” (Essential Assessment pg 80). Without assessment, be it formative or summative, it is tough to gauge where students’ strengths can be found accurately. I fear that it may be true that some educators focus too much on what is wrong and what needs to be fixed.

EDUC 346: Indigenous and Aboriginal Education
Sara McManus
February 7, 2022
UNBC School of Education
Instructor: Charity Peal

“The World is Better because YOU are in it!” is what I want every student to understand when they are done their time with me. They should know they are seen, heard and valued in this world, that their presence matters, and that they can make a positive difference. As an emerging practitioner, I am developing the foundations of my pedagogy. Life is in constant motion, and experience has taught me that learning something new tomorrow may change my perspectives from today, and therefore, I am committed to the process of life-long learning as an educator.

I am a relationship-based practitioner. I believe in seeing each learner as an individual human first. A unique person who has a history, needs, and can learn. As practiced in the Circle of Courage, inclusivity through a sense of belonging aligns with my instinctual teaching methods. As an inclusive teacher, I want to engage all my students in the classroom by making them feel safe first. Students under toxic stress do not learn, and I understand that stressors can come from many sources, especially invisible ones like intergenerational trauma—the climate and culture of my teaching value a social curriculum equal to that of an academic one. Students of different learning needs, ethnicities, religions, cultures, languages, socio-economic factors, LBGTQ2S+, and physical and mental health will find community in my classrooms through my use of Universal Design for Learning and whole-class approaches to social-emotional learning.

I ask my students to “do their best” and believe that everyone is good at something; similarly, to the fair is not equal, mastery is flexible in its definition by the holder. I allow formative assessment to guide my lessons and consider collecting evidence over time to be the truest form of assessment for learning. I promote leadership among my learners with increasing self-governance by age and find a democratic classroom generally an effective engagement strategy.

Reciprocity is why I am a teacher. With every moment I give to a learner, I am returned it ten-fold. I have always felt an incredible sense of duty as a Canadian citizen. When I began teaching in May 2019, I did not know about BC Educator’s Standard #9; however, I am very honoured to be entrusted with its responsibility. I am beginning to clearly understand how I can move forward to create a classroom where I am not teaching Indigenous epistemologies like a foreign culture but instead integrate it fully as our own First People’s cultures, which exist nowhere else on earth.