How to Measure Student Growth Beyond Summative Assessments

As teachers, we write engaging lessons and labs. We implement interest approaches and problem solving methods, while including guest speakers and video clips. However, how do we know if all this matters? How do we know if it is worth all the phone calls, emails, digital searches and sharing? To know how, we must realize that everything must be purposeful to help students grow their knowledge.  To ensure growth is occurring we assess.

From this week’s reading, I have learned that assessment is not just about writing multiple choice questions, creating unit projects and counting participation points. Below I have shared how we can assess students beyond the summative assessments that provide students a grade on an exam, project or course activities.

Formative Assessment:

Formative assessment is not a part of the grading process, but a part of the instructional process.  It is when students receive input and guided feedback on their relative performance to help them improve or increase their thinking.

Check out this awesome infographic I found on formative assessment! Since my school is not one to one, I am trying to implement this form of assessment through non-digital sharing. I plan to create exit tickets, moments of pair and share, and implement color cues or thumbs up and down to show understanding.  

Self-Assessment:

Self-assessment is the ability to be a realistic judge of one’s own performance.

Self-assessment can be a powerful tool to give students ownership of their own progress. To me this means that the students are able to reflect and have growth mindset. I plan to implement this form of assessment through questioning. By asking questions, it sparks higher level of thinking. Here are a few questions I had in mind to do so:

Creating- What should I do next?

Evaluating- How well did I do?

Analyzing- Where could I use this again?

Understanding- What was important about it?

Remembering- What did I do?

Peer-Assessment:

Peer-assessment allows instructors to share the evaluation of assignments with their students

I strongly believe in creating a classroom environment where students feel comfortable giving and receiving constructive criticism from their peers. I want my classroom to be an environment of respect where my students constantly work to build each other up. I also believe that this would allow opportunity for the stronger students to help coach the weaker students. 

Overall, I look forward to implementing during my student teaching experience.

Reference:

Assessing Student Learning. (September 20, 2017). Retrieved October 08, 2017, from https://www.cte.cornell.edu/teaching-ideas/assessing-student-learning/index.html

Implementing 21st Century Skills in Problem Based Learning

After reading this week’s readings for our Weekly Investment, I have this urge of wanting a classroom and students to be forward thinkers and career driven. I realize that this means I must be innovative by creating inquiry, applicable and discovery. However, all this will engage students’ minds for Project-Based Learning.

Although the readings were very informative, I chose to share the five points that stood out to me the most about project-based learning and inquiry in the classroom.

1. 21st Century Skills: Project-based learning naturally develops 21st Century Skills into interactive and innovative outcome. In addition, project-based learning enhances problem-solving and other Life and Career Skills. This teaching method also cultivates collaboration, technological, communication and other incredibly valuable and marketable 21st Century Skills that I want to see my students gain from an agricultural science classroom.

2. Effective Questioning: Multiple readings shared how the success for project-based learning is credited to asking the right questions. A good 'Driving Question' captures the heart of the project in clear, compelling language, which gives students a sense of purpose and challenge. The Question should be provocative, open-ended, complex, and linked to the core of what you want students to learn. Questioning can help strategically scaffold throughout the project-based learning process. Lastly, questioning can help facilitate reflection and revision throughout the learning process.

3. Student Voice and Choice: I am thrilled that project-based and inquiry based learning gives students ownership on their learning experience. It provides chances for hands-on application, which is something that agricultural education classes do quite well through incorporation of classroom instruction and SAE. The discovery that happens through this method provides power and purpose to student's learning. It allows them to feel as if they are the drivers of their education that leads them into a journey with a successful destination.

4. Keep It In Context: To keep it in context means to allow yourself to create and make connections from the project or problem needing solved directly to a real-life application or situation that students in my agricultural program can understand the relevance. According to the reading, I can accomplish this by aligning the process with goals, or essentially learning objectives. Keeping the last point in mind, it would be best to have these goals designed by students, in efforts to keep them invested through ownership in their learning process. 

5. Feedback Creates Purpose: There is a difference between doing projects and doing project-based learning. The completion of the project should require that students are learning the material presented. In addition, formalizing a process for feedback and revision during a project makes learning meaningful because it emphasizes that creating high-quality products and performances is an important purpose, and often times requires more than one attempt. I want my students to know it is okay to face error, as long as they are willing to fix their mistakes to be successful in the future. 

Reference:

John Larmer & John R. Mergendoller PhD. (2010) 8 Essentials for Project Based Learning. Retrieved October 1, 2017, from http://www.sbcss.k12.ca.us/attachments/article/1058/8_Essentials_article_small_file_size_Oct2012version.pdf

Planning For Instruction ... What’s the Plan?

What’s the plan? This is a common question presented during many situations. Whether we are planning a meeting or planning a family gathering, we want to know the details of how we are going succeed at meeting our purpose.

As a future educator, I ponder this question as I begin to develop learning objectives and interest approaches for unit and lesson plans.  Methods of Teaching Agriculture outlines three necessary components of learning objectives to planning:

These three requirements explain how learning objectives that outline performance, conditions and criteria helps to provide clarity for my students and I.  Methods of Teaching Agriculture shares how if teachers do not have a clear sight of where to go or how to get there, then the resulting instruction will become confusing and cause students to be lost. Overall, clarity tells students where we want them to end up, how we will measure if they made it there and the conditions that are expected during the performance.  Therefore, it is more desirable for me to have written instruction that includes action words, such as ‘identify’ and ‘measure’, verses ‘do’ or ‘can’. In addition, presenting the conditions and criteria with correct wording will allow for clarity. Being as clear as possible with instruction is essential to helping your students and me as a teacher answer "What's the plan?"

Once the objectives (plans) are created, it is time to create student interest by answering the question, “what is in it for me?” Although I will understand and know the importance of a topic as an educator, I have to share the relevance. However, it is important to create a desire in the students to want to learn about the topic. Methods of Teaching Agriculture suggested that to create an interest approach it is important to understand a true felt need for students to connect to from personal situations, so they can see the value. After reading this, I felt it is important to reflect back to last week’s reading because this importance is directly relates to in Caine’s Principles of Brain/Mind Learning Principle Two: The search for meaning is innate. Overall, the information I can learn about each individual student can easily be used for student engagement throughout upcoming lessons in my interest approach.

Knowing what is the plan, and what is in it for me helps create an outline of relevance to the importance of planning instructions, while developing students’ interest through interest approaches.

References

Mager, R.F. (1997) Preparing Instructional Objectives. (3rd ed.) The Center for Effective Performance. 
Reardon, M. & Derner, S. (2004) Strategies for Great Teaching. Chicago, Illinois: Zephyr Press