from Terry Haik
Evaluation problems are one of the most successful bugs of good teaching.
The evaluation may take an exceptional period of time. This can also demoralize students, bring them home, or prevent them from entering a particular college.
This can also demoralize teachers. If half the class fails, every teacher who is worth the salt will take a long, heavy look at himself and their craft.
So over the years as a teacher, I have gathered a kind of system that was the most important student-oriented. He was oriented towards the student in the sense that he was created for them to encourage understanding, to increase confidence, to take over property and to protect themselves from themselves when they need it.
Part of this approach was covered Why did this student fail? Diagnostic approach to teachingS See below for the system – really, just a few rules that I created that, although it is not perfect, it has been a long way to eliminate the problems with the assessment in my classroom.
Which meant that students were not paralyzed by fear when I asked them to perform increasingly complex tasks that worry were beyond their scope. It also meant that parents did not breathe on my neck “for this,” they saw in the endless campus, and if both students and parents were happy, the teacher could also be happy.
How I Eliminated (Almost) All Problems With Your Classroom Evaluation
1. I chose what to appreciate carefully.
When I first started teaching, I thought about “tasks” and “tests”. The quizzes were also something.
But in the end, I began to think instead of “practice” and “measurement”. The whole assessment should be forming and the idea of a “summary evaluation” makes as much sense as “one last tooth cleaning”.
The big idea is what I often call the “climate of evaluation”, where photos of understanding and progress of students in organic, hassle -free and non -threatening ways are taken. The evaluation is ubiquitous and always included.
“Measurement” is only one type of evaluation and even the word implies “checking your growth” in the same way you measure your child’s vertical growth (height) by marking the threshold in the kitchen. This type of assessment provides both the student and the teacher marker-DATA, if you insist-where the student is “at this point with the clear understanding that another such measurement will soon be made, and dozens and dozens of possibilities for practicing them.
Be very careful with what you appreciate because it takes time, as well as mental energy – and extreme resources, crucial to the success of every teacher. If you do not have a data plan before you give the assessment, do not give it and certainly do not call it a test or test.
2. I created a job to be “published”
I tried to make students – writing, graphic organizers, podcasts, videos, projects and more – the least visible to the students’ parents. Ideally, this work will also be published on feedback and cooperation peers, and then to the public as a whole, to provide some authentic function in a community that the student is interested in.
Through public training of students (insofar as it encourages students’ education while defending any confidentiality problems), the assessment is largely made by the people for whom the work is intended. He is authentic who makes the feedback cycle faster and more diverse than a teacher can hope to do so.
What this system loses in the expert feedback that the teacher can give (although nothing says that it cannot be public and take advantage of the teachers’ reviews), it offset by providing students with significant reasons to do their best work, adjust and create higher stands.
3. I made a rule: No FS and no zeros. A, b, c or “incomplete”
First, I created a kind of policy for zero. It is easier to say than to do, depending on who you are and what you are teaching and what the school “policy” is, etc. However, the idea here is to protect the zeros from the mathematical destruction of the “final assessment of the student”.
I try to explain to the students that the assessment should reflect understanding, not their ability to successfully navigate the rules and bits of gamification, full in most courses and classrooms. If the student receives a grade D letter, this should be so because they have demonstrated almost universal inability to master any content, not because they have received as well as BS for most of the works they are interested in, but CS or less in the work they are not, and with a handful of zeros thrown for work, they do not finish, end with D or F. F.
Another factor of work here is to mark the work with A, B, C or “incomplete”. To put it another way, if the student did not achieve at least the average assessment of C, which should reflect the average understanding of a standard or topic, I would note “incomplete”, give them a clear feedback on how they can improve and then require them to do so.
4. I often reviewed missing tasks.
Simply enough. I had an issue on Twitter from all “measurements” (a job they knew was reported to their assessment), so they didn’t have to ask “what they were missing” (though they did it anyway). I also wrote it on the board (I had a huge white board that stretched in the front of the classroom).
5. I created alternative estimates.
At the beginning of teaching, I noticed the students say in different ways that “they understood it, but they were not fully fully.” Or that they believe that they did, “take it”, but not the way the assessment is required (reminder: The English Fight/ELA is a highly conceptual area of content, except the literacy skills itself).
So I would create an alternative assessment to check and see. Was the evaluation incarnate more than revealed? Why defeat my head to the wall, explaining the logistics of a question or subtleties when they assign and the question was not the points at all? These were just the “things” that I used the way a carpenter used tools.
Sometimes it’s easier to just get a different tool.
I would also ask students to create their own grades at times. Show me that you understandS It does not always work the way you expect, but I have received some of the most productive and creative expression I have ever seen from students using this approach. As with most things, it just depends on the student.
6. I taught through micro-ads.
The output slips were one of the most great things that ever happened to my teaching. I rarely used them as “Tickets to go out” so I could leave the classroom, but I used them almost daily. Why?
They gave me a steady flow of data on the aforementioned “climate of the assessment” and it was daily and fresh and disarming to the students because they knew it was fast and if they failed, another would soon come.
It was a “student -oriented” practice because it was defending them. They had so many opportunities and, in mathematics, so many results that if they did not fail everything every day, they would not “fail” at all. And if they were,
I could fit a standard or topic from different angles and complexities and levels of Bloom, etc., which often showed that the student who “did not receive it” last week is more likely to “not” get “my question.
In other words, they had not failed my assessment; My assessment had failed them because it failed to reveal what they actually knew.
7. I used diagnostic teaching
You can read more about the diagnostic teaching, but the general idea is that I had a clear sequence that I used, which I communicated very clearly to students and their families. It usually took the first month or two to feel comfortable with all this, but after I did, the problems with the assessment were * almost * completely eliminated. The problems are still arising, but with a system on the spot it was much easier to identify what exactly went wrong and why everything was communicated to stakeholders involved in supporting the support of the children.
