Weekly Journal Reflection – “Assessment Reflection for EDUC 391 Practicum”
For the UNBC EDUC 391 practicum, I was finally able to experience teaching primary grade students in a B.C. elementary school classroom. What I learned during this initial practicum was invaluable and this experience is only the first step of many on my journey to become a certified schoolteacher. Assessing throughout the week was important because it was not always obvious when to transition to the next level of difficulty in my lesson unit. Some students were absent, others had lower or higher foundational skills, and a few students even had special needs like ADHD or ASD. Giving ample time for students to practice what they have learned was imperative before I could perform any kind of individual summative assessment. The FPPL principle states, “Learning involves patience and time” (FNESC, n.d.) and this holds true to teaching and assessing learning.
When I taught English as a Second Language as an extracurricular activity in Japan, I did not always have the luxury of time. We had a set curriculum for the month, and not all students could reach proficiency. Of course, I did my best to promote student engagement and support students whose language skills were still emerging. As my lessons were once a week for a short, I think my inclination is to teach and assess a bit too quickly. I need to work on allowing more time for my students to practice, so they can fully absorb what they learned before moving on to any summative assessments. During my practicum, I used formative assessments to gauge student progress, and had the freedom to allow my students to practice more. I used educational math games to help keep my students engaged. I could understand my class better over time through assessment and reflection. This helped me to modify how I teach and gauge when to do a summative assessment. Having an experienced mentor teacher was invaluable, as I could get her advice, and confirm if my lesson design changes or assessments would be effective.
I hope to continue this collaborative teaching process with other teachers when I finally have my own class someday. My mentor teacher modeled this well, as she often collaborated with another experienced teacher who taught similar grades. They both used the literacy framework, “The Daily Five” (Boushey & Moser, 2006) and would often discuss classroom management, scheduling, and lesson design or activities for the week.
Learning about “The Daily Five” (2006) was kind of a “eureka” moment for me, as it demonstrated how to organize a classroom in a way that promotes student-centered learning by giving students a structured choice on what and how they are learning. However, this learning environment also meant that my ELA lessons had a maximum lesson time of 10–12 minutes. I was told that for elementary students to remain focused, the lesson time should be an average of one minute per year of their age. Based on this knowledge, I slowed down the unit progression and taught the same lesson in ELA or Math throughout the week. I used formative assessments such as student observations, guided questions, worksheets, pair-based educational games, and other learning activities to help me to track my class progress.
For Math, my summative assessments were differentiated so that the higher-skilled students had slightly more challenging questions. Lower-skilled students were encouraged to use ten-frame visual aids, but students of all skill levels were permitted to use them. The class was already divided into two groups based on their skill level. Two students had intermediate math skills despite being in a higher grade, so they received the easier version of the summative worksheet. My mentor teacher recommended that I mark a few questions as they progress through the worksheet, so that students could know if they are on the right track. As they did their worksheets, I circled any errors and gave them hints so they could re-examine and self-correct their work. My teaching goal is to help all of my students to learn to mastery, thus the purpose of my summative assessments are not to assign a grade or label, but to verifying student learning.
Official Website for Daily 5:
https://www.thedailycafe.com/content/what-daily‑5
Overview of the 5 daily choices for self-learning:
https://www.commonsense.org/education/lesson-plans/digital-daily‑5
References
Boushey, G., & Moser, J. (2006). The daily 5: fostering literacy independence in the elementary grades. Portland, Me.: Stenhouse Publishers.
First Nations Education Steering Committee (FNESC). (n.d.). First Peoples Principles of Learning. FNESC. Retrieved from https://fnesc.app.box.com/s/vk9ovfe78fxo3qji3sw9r12ru562cyt4