Educators implement effective planning, instruction, assessment and reporting practices to create respectful, inclusive environments for student learning and development.
Standard 5 strongly relates to a teacher’s ability to create effective learning environments and experiences for their students. This involves several facets including creating a classroom community, effectively planning and flexibly adjusting plans, giving instruction that connects with students, and building assessments that motivate students and improve the learning process. Throughout my practicum experiences I had chances to practice all these different skills particularly in my 491 practicum where I had a more complete opportunity to get to know my students and build a classroom community. I was also able to build a rhythm of planning based on individual student needs and became more efficient with my use of time throughout the 10 weeks. I was able to give instruction with student engagement that helped students connect ideas. I also learned and practiced various assessment through all my practicums and I will explore some of my learning on the subject in the discussion below.
Assessment
Outside of a school setting assessment is still part of daily life, we are constantly giving and receiving feedback with others and are always comparing the work and actions of ourselves and others to a set of standards and values that we hold. Self-assessment is something we do even more often as we are constantly making choices based on the outcomes of our past decisions. It is important that we prepare students through our learning environment to properly self-assess themselves and to prepare them to be assessed in life and the workforce by scaffolding them through assessment processes that encourage self-motivation, self-confidence, and affirmation by rewarding good decisions, hard work, and learning. To accomplish this scaffolding, it is important to avoid causing hopelessness or destruction of self worth through ineffective assessment that is vague or poorly timed, but to create experiences that lead to agency and efficacy from their actions and decisions. At the same time, we want to still challenge and grow our students as White (2017) says “Ultimately, we want to support a story of learning that contains the right balance of success and challenge, wonder and consistency, creativity and competence.”
To create this balance where we encourage student self-esteem and avoid frustration to the point of hopelessness, we must also understand our learners and the context that surrounds them. Students enter any learning environment with their own personal context that includes their own experiences and opinions on various types of assessments based on their past encounters with them, as well as a certain expectation of their own opportunity for success based on these past assessments. In creating assessments for theses students, we must also reconcile our own pedagogies and views on assessments with those of our students and those of the school and district that we work in. To complicate this further we also need to consider the expectations of parents in our work, for the most part they will have been raised in a different environment and may take some help to understand why we make the assessment decisions that we do. All these factors contribute to our decisions on how we assess students, and we must be able to communicate our ideas to all interested parties, but most importantly, the students we are assessing.
Assessment in a Learning Design Context
In the spirit of giving context to assessment it is also important to give context when discussing assessment practices to give a framework for discussion. One such framework that I had was the joint Education 399 and Education 421 class that gave the opportunity to look at assessment through the lens of a maker project. During this class I explored using an erosion control design project to delve into the Environmental Science 11 curriculum and determine how this design process and product could be assessed. The learning design for my theoretical classroom would start with a demonstration of erosion using a paint roller tray, loose soil, and a gravity fed sprinkler to simulate rain. I would also lead a discussion about why this process is important including environmental and human concerns that would position the class to start the creative process of designing their own erosion controls. Students would be given the same soil, a paint roller tray, homemade sprinkler system, an array of possible materials to build erosion controls, and any additional materials that the class and teacher could agree upon. The process would take place over three weeks with the first two weeks being used to through the process of design thinking once; determining why and for whom this problem is important (empathize), determining what we are trying to accomplish (define), apply learning to create an initial design (ideate), build the erosion control (prototype), and then use the prototype (test). For the final week, the students would take their results and restart the process by defining what issues they had and where improvements could be made. Throughout the process students would be given time during each class to work on their projects in addition to discussing topics in the Environmental Science 11 curriculum that relate to the design challenge including the abiotic characteristics of soil and water, matter cycles, human actions and their impact on ecosystem integrity, resource stewardship, and restoration.
This entire process has opportunities for pre assessment, formative assessment, self-assessment, and summative assessment starting with a discussion before the demonstration being a great opportunity to pre assess to get an idea from the students what prior knowledge they may have about the topics that will be discussed over the next few weeks that would help me structure the learning going forward. Following this discussion, it is important to make it clear to students in multiple skills and ideas they will be learning over that period and make all expectations clear. This clarity can help to reduce confusion and control the level of frustration that students feel, it will allow them to better direct their inquiry and thinking about the unit and increase efficacy of learning. Once these learning objectives have been made clear, an initial lesson is delivered on abiotic properties of soil and water, and the teacher demonstration and measurement of erosion has been completed, the class can then decide in concert with the teacher how the summative assessment will be structured. We can then decide as a group what parameters in the water we need to test and what observations we need to make as our summative assessment of the project. Once the class’ ideas have been gathered the teacher can then create a clear and detailed rubric for the skills and outcomes that will be the end goal of the project. This gives students a clear path showing the waypoints towards obtaining the skills they need and gives a tool to help the teacher be consistent and timely in their assessment.
Once these learning progressions have been made clear and students have an idea of where they are going, they will be able to start the creative process. Throughout the process of building assessment tools and in the creative process there are countless opportunities to deliver formative feedback in many forms whether it is verbal in class discussion, or one on one time with students, or on various written or visual steps through designing the project. It is important to be intentional about providing this feedback and gathering information, as it is an integral part of the process of learning and must be used to guide what instruction and resources the teacher gives the students. It is also important to intentionally provide formative feedback to all learners, not just the ones who seek it, as this is a major way in which students can monitor and direct their own learning and it is a way for teachers to gather evidence to inform their teaching (Black & William, 2018). An additional advantage of engaging in formative feedback with all learners is that it is a way to also build relationships with students. Richer relationships with students will not only build trust in the classroom, but also help the teacher make more accurate and meaningful assessments.
In the process of designing and building erosion control there are many opportunities to use documentation as assessment whereby collecting evidence at various stages of the project you can show that the student is going through the learning process. I would collect written evidence of empathizing with the problem where the student can show that they have identified the effects of erosion on downstream waterbodies, the ability of the soil to support diversity, and the impacts these factors have on wildlife and people. I would then have students create documentation of their design as text, drawing, or model to document learning as well, which leads into the importance of allowing students to express their learning in different ways. If the class has a student that is stronger in writing the written option allows them to put their best foot forward in that way and show their learning that way, if a student is more artistic a drawing or model may be the way they are best able to show their thinking. In this documentation I will be able to get a view of each student’s best work at the same time through the same learning target.
Lastly this creative inquiry will have summative assessment in the form of testing each student’s erosion control after the first design followed by an additional assessment on the second design and the changes that were made. Summative assessment should be part of a cycle and lead to new learning so that it not only showcases what the student knows at a given point in time, but also is a chance to learn and move on two new learning. By testing the erosion controls that students have built it shows what they have learned to that point as well as what assumptions they may have wrongly made, or ideas they may have overlooked. This summative assessment also leads to new learning as it may lead to new questions, such as how I can further improve this design, or what other ways can we protect and improve water quality in our province. Overall, in the classroom it is important to consider all possible ways that our assessment practices, and how we interact with students, influence how our students are learning, and how we can show it.
Personal Practicum Experiences
Through my practicum experiences in 391 I was also able to begin to work on my assessment practices and observe the assessment practices of other teachers. One experience I had was developing learning progressions for Bridging Math 9 students whereby creating the progression I was able to better understand how I would need to go about teaching certain skills. In this case the act of building assessment better prepared me to provide my students with useful learning opportunities. Later when using a proficiency scale to assess students on their measurement skills it became clear how important it is to have a relationship with every student in my class. When trying to determine if students had reached the learning targets it was important to see how the did on worksheets, but also to know them individually and spend time in class observing or formatively assessing them to know if the results of the worksheets were even likely to be their own work and evidence of their learning. When looked at together a worksheet and some in class observation gave me confidence in assessing where a student was at, but when missing one or the other it was difficult to make a solid judgement.
Another difficulty I encountered and observed was the difficulty myself and other teachers had in communicating the significance of using a proficiency scale rather than a letter or number grade. Particularly with students who were unfamiliar with the concept, they reverted to trying to convert their proficiency to a number or letter to gauge where they were at. I believe given enough time, exposure, and explanation that the shift to grading students on these scales can be very useful as it changes the focus from an arbitrary number to the actual skills they are expected to learn. As well as observing grading and alternate summative assessment practices I also had the chance to observe a problem-based learning classroom that had an excellent use of learning documentation and formative feedback. The classroom explored three intertwined courses a year that allowed for many cross-curricular connections through the projects that learning were centered around. The entire class used school laptops and did all work on Microsoft Teams which meant that the entire learning process was documented in one place where the teacher was able to see what everyone was working on and provide immediate feedback through Teams or in person in the classroom. This ability to provide immediate and in-depth feedback made the learning process very natural and effective which is something I would like to bring to my future classroom.
Throughout the 391 practicum I have expanded upon my knowledge and understanding of assessment greatly, but have also come to the realization that assessment is an extremely complex and nuanced aspect of practice that I will have to continue to learn and evolve in. I have learned that I need to consider assessment in all aspects of teaching and properly incorporate my personal pedagogy with sound holistic assessment practices. I will also need to continue to self-assess my own assessment decisions and learn from other practitioners as I enter the profession of teaching and begin to establish myself as a teacher.
References
Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (2018). Classroom assessment and pedagogy. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 25(6), 551-575. doi:10.1080/0969594x.2018.1441807
White, K. (2017). Softening the edges: Assessment practices that honor K-12 teachers and learners. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.