End of Course Reflection – Standards-based Assessment EDU6613

Prior to this quarter, I have had limited practice using standards-based assessment, especially as it pertains to formative assessment. Having taken courses on instructional strategies, I have learned about various formative assessments, but not really how to incorporate it into an overall unit structure. Through this quarter, we have seen the value of formative assessment and how to incorporate this in our unit plans. We began looking through Embedded Formative Assessment (Wiliam, 2011) and creating our learning progression.

This process of looking through the trajectory of a unit and determining what the steps in the progression of learning looks like was a new task, particularly laying it out in some sort of format other than just looking through the book or curriculum provided. For me, this represented a start to really looking deeply at the focus standards of a unit and laying out what each step in reaching that standard looks like. My learning progression (Learning Progression) began as a rather well-defined process to get from one step to another, however, I was not sure how to determine whether my students had learned the material. I was afraid that my assessment of student understanding would not tell me what students had learned, similar to the story of Jy (Wiliam, 2011, p. 47). Through feedback provided by my peers, I was able to create formative assessments that I believe will be beneficial in correctly determining where my students are at in the progression. We then looked at ways to incorporate peer and self-assessment into the learning. This was once again aided by feedback received by peers and the professor and the opportunities that I have provided, I believe, are quality and will help me and my students a great deal to gauge learning.

The other major area we looked at was through our assessment into action paper. For this, I decided to research how to provide quality feedback to my students. This was a focus because I feel like I have either provided feedback that is too specific and does not really require thought to figure out, or too vague and is not useful in helping my students get to the next level of their learning. In order to figure out how to provide useful formative assessment, I found some good resources that allowed me a bit of insight into what it means to provide quality feedback. One of the articles I found provided some great information with a quote, “Feedback functions formatively only if the information fed back to the learner is used by the learner in improving performance” (Wiliam, 2012, p.120, emphasis in original). This quote really struck me because I had not come to the realization that it does not matter what sort of feedback I provide if it is not useful to help students improve their understanding. In my paper, (Assessment Into Action), I looked through several different resources, mainly articles by a couple authors, Dylan Wiliam and Susan Brookhart. Both authors have similar approaches to providing feedback which boil down to about three elements; feedback occurs while students are learning, feedback is appropriate for the understanding of a student (not too high or too low), and feedback must be used by students. One more element that I really had not thought about was provided by Brookhart (2012), where she asserts that feedback, “can’t work if students don’t have an immediate opportunity to use it” (p. 26). This was another element of new learning for me as I did not really think about immediate practice being necessary to build learning (although this seems a bit naïve now). The elements necessary for feedback to be high quality and effective are really informative and important to my practice moving forward.

This course really helped out with my approach to assessment, particularly formative assessment. We were constantly working with program standard 11, utilize formative and summative assessment in a standards based environment. This work is really important for me in becoming the teacher I want to be and will have a high level of impact on my practice moving forward. I will be able to utilize this information in any class and at any level. Overall, this class has provided me with a great deal of information to help improve my teaching, my analysis of where students are in their understanding, and ways that I can provide feedback to students to help them improve their understanding. Ultimately, my students will reap the benefit of this shift in approach as they will be able to build on their understanding far more independently than they could previously.  

Brookhart, S. (2012). Preventing feedback fizzle. Educational Leadership, 70(1), 24-29.

Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Solution Tree Press, Bloomington, In.

Wiliam, D. (2012). Feedback: Part of a system. Educational Leadership, 70(1), 31-34.

Meta-Reflection for EDU6524 - Curriculum Design

Starting this program, I felt comfortable discussing a curriculum, but not really critiquing or altering a curriculum. As this year has progressed, I feel my ability to do just that has grown with each passing course. During this past quarter I have begun to feel quite comfortable with both critiquing and altering my curriculum. With the initial discussion about what actually constitutes a solid curriculum I was forced to look deeply at the curriculum I am using. Luckily, I had some practice with this during this past school year as I participated in a curriculum adoption. I found this adoption process, along with the discussion and points of view of my peers, to be invaluable in helping me to determine what elements of my curriculum and lesson planning are good and what things need tweaking.

To start, I had to determine what my curriculum had going for it and what areas needed support or adjustment. Upon completing this (Module 1 Paper), I began looking at the standards, at least the major ones, to determine what is essential to the unit I was looking at in detail. This work is not something I have too much experience doing, but found that through our classwork and the guidance of my peers and professors that this was something that I felt comfortable doing. I was able to pare down the eight standards covered to a focus of three standards (Module 2 Paper). Moving forward, this ability to recognize the standards central to a unit is going to serve me well as knowing what is necessary for my students to understand and what is extraneous, or at least not as important, is vital.

Moving forward, we see began looking at learning targets and designing lessons. My school requires learning posted for student information, but we have not had much work around the aspects of a quality learning target. Through the readings, particularly (Knowing Your Learning Target), we see what it takes to have an effective learning target. The anecdote of driving somewhere without knowing where to go or how to get there really struck me as a key reason why having an effective learning target is so important. To guide my students as well as possible, I need to ensure that my students know where we are heading in a lesson and how we will know we are there. This learning and practice will prove instrumental in becoming the teacher I want to be.

To get students to achieve the learning target, we see the importance of engaging students in the learning. We first created brief engagement activity explanations and then completed several full lesson plans. This portion of the class proved to be the most challenging for me. I feel comfortable putting lessons together, but I often lack diversity in engagement plans. This is something I know that I struggle with and want to improve and as we created plans with more details I received several strong ideas and suggestions to change things up from my normal lesson routines. These ideas, although strong, are still difficult for me to plan and are pieces of my practice that I will be focusing on the years ahead. To show my progress, I have attached my brief and full lesson plans (Unit Plan). These initial plans and changes to my plans represent the most significant portions of my learning in this course.

Finally, the aspects of differentiation, evaluating learning and adjusting plans comes into play. These portions of planning are areas where I feel I have a bit of experience, but I definitely want to improve. One of the differentiation techniques (see lesson 6 in my unit plan) I borrowed from a peer (Erin Hocevar-Ortiz) is to create a handout of the definitions previously learned, including the terms we will define during that lesson, for students to tape into their journals. This acts as a resource for students to refer to and will help increase the use of the academic language. I also switched an exit ticket for an assessment problem creation (an idea from How to Keep Kids Engaged in Class)

to aid in evaluating student learning (see lesson 2 in my unit plan). This represents another shift in my focus from having students solve problems to them creating problems to show they understand how polynomial multiplication. These two examples of adjustment represent another step I have taken this quarter in improving my practice.

All of the work undertaken this quarter in Curriculum Design really has been beneficial to my overall process in planning lessons and units. Looking at program standard nine, evaluate and use effective curriculum design, I found many connections to the work completed in this class. We worked through a unit from start to finish, looking at strengths and weaknesses, essential standards covered, learning targets and preassessment, engagement activities, and complete lesson plans. This practice will allow me to move forward in my practice to become the teacher I want to be. 

Frondeville, T. (2009). How to keep kids engaged in class. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/classroom-student-participation-tips

Moss, C.M., Brookhart, S.M., & Long, B.A. (2011). Knowing your learning target. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar11/vol68/num06/Knowing-Your-Learning-Target.aspx