Weekly Writing Oct. 21

This week I read a large amount of information on assessment. Every topic on teaching that I study begins the same way. I always think back to my days in school and how I viewed these topics. I also think about how some of the best teachers and worst teachers did these in their classroom.

When thinking about assessment, I get a bad taste in my mouth. I especially think back to my college freshman year when I was taking the general "weed out" courses. These were math, chemistry, and biology. Each class was like a cookie cutter mold of the semester before, and everything was so systematic I couldn't grasp the learning concepts. I guess you can say I changed majors into education because I wanted to not have other students have the same experience as I did. It seemed in those courses the educators didn't take responsibility for the learning, but made it all be the student's fault. As I read through the ASCD article on classroom assessment, I read a wonderful statement that said, "indeed, teachers and students share responsibility for learning."

From this statement, I thought of the different types of assessments I have done throughout my schooling. I took essay, matching, short answer, true/false, identification, and performance exams to manage how much I learned. Most of the classes had only one form of assessments throughout the whole year, which when I look back, were very poor representations of how much I learned. There were exams at the end of lessons, maybe a quiz here or there, but some classes had no projects or anything else to represent student's knowledge.

Since my perspective has changed from sitting in class to now teaching a class, I see the importance of dealing with assessments. Along with the variability of teaching a class, there needs to be variability with the assessments used. When I think of my classroom, I definitely want to have weekly checks of the material taught, so maybe a weekly quiz would be a consistent way to judge retention. I hope to at least have one project, and presentation, for students who learn in different styles.

One of the biggest problems is anxiety of taking tests. It is something that affects every student, and I still can't understand why teachers don't change up how tests are approached. I want the graded work for my students to be beneficial to them, and not something that they are more worried about failing then revealing how much they actually know. Changing the view on assessments is something I look forward to do as a future educator. Hopefully with new changes to assessments, there can be some changes in grading. Although that is a whole different story, both end up going hand in hand.

Thinking about assessment is one of the best ways a teacher can gain insight into how much students learn, but more importantly it provides feedback to the teacher on changes that need to be made on strategies for more retention of content knowledge.