Description
Middle School range of students is 6-8 grade.
module_5_assignment_instruction.pdf
Discussion:
For a more meaningful class discussion, please include the following information in your discussion: Grade level and/or subject matter you teach. If you are not teaching currently, you can describe your current role as an educator or your past role.
*Besides your discussion posting, remember to also comment on your fellow classmates’ (minimum two) responses.
From a scale of 1 (Poor) to 10 (Excellent), first 1) indicate your rating of how well you think you or your colleagues use learning outcome data to guide instructional decisions. Please explain your reasons for the rating along with your professional thoughts on ways to improve that cyclical process. If you are not currently teaching, please share your professional thoughts on ways to use learning outcome data effectively to guide instructional decisions.
Select one of the prompts for the second discussion prompt:
A. How do you communicate learning outcomes with students and parents? What challenges have you encountered in the process? Also, please share any effective strategies you have had or observed. (For your thoughtful discussion, you can read many good course readings about this topic.)
B. As we wrap up this classroom assessment course, first (1), what concepts or strategies do you find most helpful or interesting among the ones you learned? Second (2), what assessment strategies do you want to learn (more about) that can be helpful in your classroom or campus.
Responses:
Devin Coen:
My current role is a speech-language pathologist in an elementary school (kindergarten through fifth grade).
Part 1: From a scale of one to ten, I would rate my use of learning outcome data to guide instructional decisions an 8. I also think is easier to achieve most of the time due to my specific role, as I can see kids individually or in small groups. I focus on student specific goals over the course of an IEP year and progress towards those specific goals. I am able to take performance-based data during my sessions which are either individual or small groups, which is a benefit to my ability to make instructional decisions using data. I use and review this data to plan lessons for the subsequent sessions. I give myself an 8 because although I have the benefit of seeing smaller groups, the number of students I work with is high, the number of sessions I provide a week is high and the needs are greatly varied, and there is only so much time to get things done and planned.
Part 2: I selected topic “B” for my response. I learned many concepts and strategies from this course that I have found to be helpful, however of these topics, the use of rubrics as well as ensuring students have feedback have been the concepts/strategies I have found most useful. I have already created a rubric and have already added and/or increased my feedback to almost all of my students. I have also further promoted peer feedback, self-monitoring skills for students to provide feedback on their own progress. I would like to learn more about portfolio assessments for my classroom of speech students. To be specific, I would like to learn about video portfolio assessments, showcasing progress in the area of articulation/sound production skills from the beginning of the IEP year to the end of that IEP year.
Response:
Ashley Oakes:
I am a 5th grade Reading Language Arts teacher at a Title I magnet elementary school in Dallas, Texas.
On a scale from 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent), I would rate myself and my colleagues with a score of 8 when it comes to evaluating learning outcome data in order to guide our instructional decisions as a team. We take time in PLCs to analyze specific students’ data from this year, including TEKS they have not mastered from previous grades. We use this information to design small groups and specific small group instruction. These small groups are consistently changing as students master the TEKs taught and then are divided into new groups to learn or reinforce other skills.
A way to improve this process would be to bring students into the reflection/ evaluation process with us. We do overall goal setting with students, and they track where they score in the areas of vocabulary, author’s purpose and craft, and multiple genres. But using TEK trackers and reflective exit tickets at the end of class would help make individuals aware of their more specific goals and the way each days’s learning will help them progress overall.
As we conclude this course on assessment and data, I am taking time to reflect on how to build rubrics into my RLA assignments. I have already added a short rubric to help guide my students in our grammar notebooks. But I believe students would benefit from rubrics attached to each performance assessment as well. In the future, I would also like to continue learning how to better teach spelling patterns in the upper grades and assess both spelling output and fluency (measuring words per minute in cold reads and warm reads in word study). I look to continue growing in the way I adjust my practices to teach mastery in vocabulary as well.
Module 5 consists of the following tasks and assignments:
Read the journal articles.
Complete the class discussion.
Complete the Module 5 application assignments.