Reflections on Week 9 Reading and Discussions

This week's reading focused on lesson objectives and assessments.  Reading the section on "backward planning" gave me some insight into why my school requires that we outline our units before we plan our daily lessons.  This begins with creating unit objectives and tests that will assess these objectives.  Then, as a history department, we discuss the objectives that need to be tested, and plan our daily lessons to make sure we reach our teaching goals by the review session date.  Since we adopted this method, we are finding that we rarely run out of time to cover all important topics in the school year.

Assessments can be summative or formative.  Summative assessment is used to determine whether or not the student mastered the required objectives at the end of a unit of study, and, in the case of my school, counts as a test score in our grade book. Summative assessments can be criterion-referenced (graded to determine how well a student understands certain material) or norm-referenced (graded to determine how well a student scores in relation to others). Formative assessment is used diagnostically--students are questioned or required to do some other activity that helps the teacher determine how much of the material the student has learned, and how well the teacher is teaching what is required.  In my school, we are not allowed to count formative assessments as grades in the grade book...only as a measuring stick to gauge how well material has been learned.  Formative assessments are most often criterion-referenced.

Discussion this week regarding the use of formative assessments reinforced how important it is to measure how much a students is learning and how well I am teaching.  I learned a few new formative assessment techniques (one, journal-writing, that I use every other day, but haven't thought to use as an assessment) that I will use in my own classroom this year.  It was interesting to see that my school is not the only one that is requiring the frequent use and reporting of these assessments.