Category: EDUC 421

Week #8 – 10 Practicum – Feb 22 to Mar 11, 2022

Reflect on the assessment practices you carried out and/or observed during your practicum.

This submission may be longer, to a maximum of 2 double spaced pages.

 

I have focused this journal on the formative and summative assessment strategies that I applied in the English Language Arts (ELA) portion of my EDUC 391 Practicum. To find more detailed information on my ELA Unit: “Digital Mini-Book Unit – Writing from an Inspiration,” please read my EDUC 391 Practicum Lesson Plan and Reflection, submitted on April 2, 2022. During my Practicum, I taught seven one-hour Math blocks on geometric concepts of 2D shapes, perimeter, and circumference. I used many similar formative assessment strategies to ELA in the Math blocks. However, I applied a very different summative assessment strategy based on collecting small pieces of evidence over time. I provided the Coaching Teacher with reporting information on each student’s placement on the BC Proficiency Scale on the content I had covered in both ELA and Math.

When I look at the assessment in my ELA Unit through the lens of the Six Tenets, I feel like my Unit was a total flop. However, with that said, I know that it was an “Experimental” Unit, my Coaching Teacher did remind me to go easier on myself in my reflections, and sometimes the best learning opportunities come through our mistakes in life.

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Assessment Purpose: I used formative assessment daily to guide my lesson planning by tracking student progress with attendance and daily notes on student progress. During my Formal Observation, I created an exit ticket to determine if any students required additional help with the app they were using. Unfortunately, I did not use any form of assessment at the beginning of my time with the class to find out where the students thought they needed the most help in their writing. My highly detailed summative assessment rubric proved to be less helpful to the students in their learning, their self-assessment, or providing my final reporting to the Coaching Teacher than I anticipated it would be.

Communication of Results: I believe that the students appreciated my feedback when I was able to work with them one-on-one. As we worked together formulating their story ideas and editing their digital versions, I could sense that I was the first to give them feedback that pushed their writing boundaries based on where they were at in their individual writing levels. I was only asked to provide the teacher with a simple report of “emerging/developing/proficient/extending” on each student at the end of the Unit. I will never know what the Coaching Teacher showed to the students or put in their digital report cards for this Unit. I feel a little sad knowing that my entire day of meticulously editing their books, providing them written feedback, and detailed comments on their rubric was likely for my learning opportunity only. Yet, the further away from my practicum I get, I also can understand why the Coaching Teacher may not pass it back to them. I imagine the return of my feedback could have been overwhelming to some students. Now that I think about it, I had some hesitation from my alternate students at the start until I was able to add a relationship piece and they could see the learning opportunities one can gain through working through corrections.

Accurate Interpretation: The good thing about my rubric was at the end of that very long day, I could say that my summative assessment of the student’s projects was fair and jam-packed of evidence to support my position on why I reported where each student landed on the Proficiency Scale regarding the Unit. This was really a lesson in breaking it down and putting it back together. It was hard sometimes when a student fell in between two of the columns to decide where to place them on the Proficiency Scale, and then it was hard again to find a balance when a student was “Extending” in some criteria and “Emerging” in others.

Assessment Architecture: In reflection, I need to work on adding in more purposeful formative assessments throughout lessons. I know that I am really good at gaining consensus feedback and love democratic classrooms, but designing assessments on student learning that is not for purposefully gathering summative evidence for reporting is a skill that I will need to acquire in the upcoming months. I enjoyed learning about project-based assessments for Curricular Content and Competencies in this Practicum; this is one thing that my Coaching Teacher excels at with her students. It is also something that works very well with the Digital Reporting system. Had I not needed to give a set number of “lessons” in my practicum, I would have liked to have tried this.

Instructional Agility: After reading my Coaching Teacher’s notes on my Formal Observations, I felt much better about how often I pivoted off my lesson plans. Her notes were evidence of my response to the needs of the students in the classroom. It was a collection of a few minutes to review a concept from the day before, or an adjustment to bring together two students struggling on the same area, or quick moments to bring the whole class back together for an explanation.  During my practicum, one of my biggest realizations was that we never finished one of any of my lessons. My super people-pleasing drive was the primary culprit.

Student Investment: In the class of 25 students, I conducted a poll with the students using emoticons on day one. I knew instantly it was going to be an uphill struggle, as most of the emoticons were sad or neutral faces in regard to the Unit idea I had pitched. As I built relationships with the students, especially on the ski days, I could see their buy-in slowly growing for the Unit. By the third week, some of the students who were very oppositional the first week had become invested in their stories and in advancing their writing skills. I know in my next practicum that I will be spending more time with the students, building relationships during those observation days to reduce that transition time.

 

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.