Friday, July 16, 2010
How Will You Know if You Have Learned????
A former administrator told me once what gets assessed gets taught! He was so right about that. In this age of standardized assessment teachers are running a little scared and I think in lieu of shrinking budgets it is going to get worse before it gets better.
In my district we are asked to state and/or post our objectives for all lessons. I cope with this mandate by posting it using a word document projected on a screen. Then I save and post the document in MOODLE should any one ever ask. Administrators also partake in learning walks and ask individual students "What are you learning?" (They can usually answer this) and "How will you know if you have learned?" Students have a harder time with this question.
On one particular visit we were writing a persuasive essay, and all students had a rubric in front of them. To my dismay, the selected students still couldn't answer the question. After that, I spent two or three minutes each day explaining I don't pull their assessment or grades out of a hat. I use rubrics, quizzes and observations to assess them. In other words I am always assessing them! The next time some administrators took a learning walk, they asked the same question about assessment. A young man with a big grin said, "I will use the rubric." The only problem was there wasn't a rubric for that particular lesson. That was my assessment. I will work harder to help students know the many ways they are assessed.
This week the assessment in e-learning class practiced writing objectives with three parts; behavior, condition and criteria. I think this much detail will be helpful to my students when I post my objective for each lesson. We read a wonderful unit on journalism with interesting content. However, just what the teacher wanted her students to do was a little vague. In addition, some of her objectives could be changed to help students think at a higher level on Bloom's Taxonomy. Objective, activities, and questions were somewhat blended contributing to the confusion. In all fairness to her she probably explained it in more detail in her on site presentation to the students. The unit was an excellent example of how an on site lesson could be easily turned into an online lesson, but for the online student's sake the writing of the objectives, questions and activities should be separated and defined more succinctly. Otherwise the teacher will bombarded with emails with questions from frustrated students.
# posted by pamelag @ 10:15 AM 
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