6. Assessment
“The teacher understands and uses multiple methods of assessment to engage learners in their own growth, to monitor learner progress, and to guide the teacher’s and learner’s decision making.”
Standard Components
Formative
Keeping tabs on where in the learning progression my students are at is vital to their overall success. Knowing what they know, understand and can do is crucial to guiding them further down their educational path. I am constantly finding new ways to integrate simple and streamlined methods for collecting data on my students' progress and using it to adapt my practice.
Summative
My integrity as an educator rests on my ability to clearly communicate and provide evidence of what my students know and can do because of it. Getting a clear picture of what has changed about my students because of the learning activities I lead them through is a top priority in my practice. I aim to assess my students in a holistic and equitable way so I use broad measures and multiple means.
meeting the standard
When I was in high school I wrote a research paper on standardized testing and the No Child Left Behind Act. It left me with a distaste for assessment, a bitterness that despite graduate level coursework and ample time in the classroom still remains. What has changed though, is the wider lens through which I view assessment and the experience I’ve gained trying out different methods.
In my student teaching, assessment was a consistent struggle. One unit in particular in my U.S. History class was especially challenging. We were studying the Gilded Age and focusing on the economy. My students were tasked with researching a modern case using the Sherman Anti-trust Act, and the cases ranged from Microsoft and other tech giants to the NCAA and healthcare conglomerates. When I received a stack of Chat Gpt generated reports, I offered a redemptive new assessment - a Canvas exam. When my students bombed that, we tried again, this time writing on the court cases, using a guide of their own notes and completing an in class essay.
Ultimately, the information I had collected as proof of my students learning felt less like evidence and more like a mirage. When I really felt like I could gauge their understanding was when I spoke to them about the case they had researched and discussed the influence on the economy their selected company had.
My most recent role, lead teaching in an alternative high school setting, has provided me with the opportunity to refine more nuanced forms of assessment. Aligned with the feedback provided by my mentor teacher, I am now implementing project and portfolio based assessment to best garner what transformation my students undergo.
