Week 6

This week we had the great opportunity to hear from Ms. Lauren Wagner. Ms. Wagner is a Ph.D. student and formerly taught in elementary schools for 13 years. She shared many creative ideas of how to use formative and summative assessments. One example Ms. Wagner included for formative assessment is if a student is struggling with a specific blend before you start the week have the student read to aloud a passage. You as the teacher will time and mark their mistakes. This is a quick way to find what percent the student is at. I really liked this example because you have an idea of how the student is doing at the beginning of the week and after instruction, you can read the passage again and see how the student is doing. An example Ms. Wagner gave for a summative assessment is to have students at the end of a poetry unit create a poetry portfolio. As the teacher, you can create a student-focused rubric for them to evaluate their work and evaluate their works as well. I really liked this idea and I think students would have a lot of fun with this project. 

This week we also talked about the importance of alignment. We were given a good example of a teacher making his lessons fun but were not aligned to his exams. So when he would give an exam, students would perform poorly because that's not what they were taught. To avoid this we should follow the backward design: 

Step 1 is to start with the standard by following your school's curriculum. Step 2 is to create an objective based off that standard. Objectives should be adaptable and if the standard you are using is complicated, you can break the standard into multiple objectives. Step 3 is to create the assessment. You can alter you objective to make an assessment.