Formative assessment is a way to assess students work in an informal way after each lesson.

The purpose of formative assessments are to see where students are struggle and help them, if no one gets it the you must reteach the lesson.

I did a unit in science that had a summative assessment but I could have several formative assessments to make the summative assessment. When studying plant and animal habitats. Have the students come up with a creature and a plant every day the student should journal about how the plant and animal (creature) survive in the same habitat based on what they learned that day. They should include climate, adaption, shelter, food and so on. At the end of the lesson the student can man dioramas of the habitat along with their two creations.

In my placement we studied landforms. The students then made their own islands including each land form. The students were given a list and after we taught them to make the dough. We had the students look at a model for while and then left then to their own devices. Before we the dough was dry we asked the students to point out their landforms. We then reminded them what the landforms they missed looked like and sent them to add them. The islands dried over night we add the water (blue paint) then land (brown paint). The final day of painting, we added grass (green) and lava (red). The last day the students were given a card and number stickers. The card had the list of landforms numbered. They labeled each one and then brought it to my host teacher or me. We read off the list and had them point to where the landform was this was their assessment grade for this lesson along with a few points for participation.

Some strategies for making an effective formative assessment are use manageable chunks assess and then move on to the next task. Provide detailed feedback that helps the students understand their strength. Finally don’t hover and assess when needed instead of over or under assessing.

High quality formative assessment help the teacher identify students who need more help and their misconceptions. It encourages students to engage in more complex thinking and problem solving.

Challenges are they take time to complete and perform. Many teachers don’t know how to use high quality formative assessment.

Student Observation

I get to the school at 10:15
I wanted to see in the first ten minutes how many times the student would be distracted by what was going on in the back of the room. The student looked back 13 times, that observed as I poured paints into cups. When the students began I handed her paint first. As the other student began to paint she watched as I walked around the room. I attended to other students and walked around the room as the students began to finish their project she was the last to finish. I noticed that she was tuned into other peoples conversations and looked up at everyone who walked their completed project to the back.
I was then sent to help another class and then took half the class outside for reading followed by going to the star-buck store. When I returned to the class they were doing grammar worksheets. I watched in the back and helped students that raised their hand. I helped her a few times but then I realized she knew the answer to all the questions she need me to talk too. I pulled her and another student to the back one that needed help seeing the things on the board so I copied them and her to keep her focus. I tried to catch her every time she lost her focus but every time I moved or helped the other student. By the end of the day I was exhausted from trying not to catch her eye to much.

"They invent scenes and stories, solve problems, and negotiate their way through social roadblocks. They know what they want to do and work diligently to do it. Because their motivation comes from within, they learn the powerful lesson of pursuing their own ideas to a successful conclusion. "


"Research comparing 50 play-based classes with 50 early-learning centers found that by age ten the children who had played in kindergarten excelled over the others in a host of ways. They were more advanced in reading and mathematics and they were better adjusted socially and emotionally in school. They excelled in creativity and intelligence, oral expression, and "industry."


"The creation of a healthy balance described above has been blocked by current policies and government-imposed practices and programs, including No Child Left Behind and Reading First. These well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed mandates rely on testing and on didactic and scripted approaches—especially for teaching children from low-income backgrounds—in spite of the fact that these practices are not well supported by research evidence. Indeed, many of the current approaches to kindergarten education are based on unfounded assumptions and preconceptions about what is best for children and schools."

I picked these because I strongly agree with them. Play is important not only as a child but as an adult too for many of the same reasons. Children have become so programmed to believing that their is one right answer and one way to do things, that they are lost when you let them be creative. One of the girls in my third grade class, is so smart but when we color or paint she is lost. She sho usually is done and helping other students has to have some help her or they finish painting for her because she wants to quit. I think that the NCLB limits teachers and prinicals. I see it all the time especially now because WESTest is coming up. Teachers change their lessons to more reading and english because this is what they "need" to learn so that they keep their jobs. It's there to prevent teacher from not doing their job but it keeps teacher from excelling at their job and reaching out to the student that really need help. There is so much drill and kill going on and the student that haven't been doing well still aren't and they won't test well but enough of the students that have been doing fine or better will keep them from being in trouble.

PLAY=LEARNING

BENEFITS OF PLAY

Journal 8

Some challenges with inquiry based approach is that students can't design meaningful or "driving questions and so it doesn''t need much investigation. Also teacher have trouble understanding and carrying out the method. Therefore they don't scaffold or assess properly. Students have trouble developing logical arguments and finding evidence to support their claim. Students have trouble with working together and time mangement. Inquiry approach is tough on teacher because of all the role the have to play.

Simulations and games

Like project based learning, simulations and games add variety of ways for the students to learn. the more students use multiple systems of representing knowledge, the better they are able to think about and recall what they have learned (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Simulations often provide students with a real world experience. They get the chance to visualize and model what they are learning. Games and modeling activities can elicit curiosity, create a demand for knowledge, and enable students to discover knowledge through exploration (Edelson, 1998). Games becoming more geared to a goal rather than pure excitement. I have alsways believe games help the student want to learn so they can be better players of the game and at being a teammate.

Cooperative Grouping

Cooperative learning is similiar to project based learning because the student have to do more than just know the information they have to share it with their students. Effective cooperative learning occurs when students work together to accomplish shared goals and when positive structures are in place to support that process (Johnson & Johnson, 1999). The teacher must put the student in a group that they will succeed in order to do the teacher must examine different aspect of the childs learning style, gender, friendships, and possible things that could go wrong. Students need to be in groups with a variety of learning levels and each student has been assigned a task. If one student fails they all fail or don't do as well. This drives student to break barriers and help without one person ending up with all the work which often happens in group work.

Cues, questions and Advance organizers

This is a much different approach to learning. This is one that is already in place and with a little bit of fine tuning can be very effective. Cues and questions are a way of prompting students responses. The article for advanced organizers give k-w-l charts. I disagree with that example but there are several other graphic organizers that help students. Such a alphabet vocabulary, making a book or magazine, making 3-d trinagles and cube and then writing about them on the shape. Asking questions and prompting students' replies with cues are strategies that come naturally to most teachers. In fact, some 80 percent of student-teacher interactions involve cues and questions (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). This should definitely not be the only strategy in your classroom.

It takes a lot of stragegies to make a successful classroom. These are just a few to look through but you have to find ones that work for you and your students.

What does the research say about the impact of negative teacher attitudes about students ethnicity and language variations on student learning?

The teacher attitude toward students difference with culture and language are deeply connected to students performance. When a student feels disconnect do to the othering effect placed on them by the teacher they do not participate. Participation is part of learning that some are okay with missing it's not their personality so they can still achieve by listening to the conversations in class but when someone is learning a new language or dialect their input and active engage in the classroom are needed. Teacher with negative attitudes put these student in the back of the class. It's hard to be engage when you are in the back.
These student are not only struggling to find their identity in the classroom but at home too. They need their teacher to be a driving force in their learning and fitting in. Students being grouped into this other category begin to give up and become a self -fulfilling prophesy in which they believe they are outcast and can't succeed.

What are some assessment pitfalls?


Assessment are very one sided and do not take the child's background into consideration. Also a teachers pre-judgements about students hinder how they feel a student will do. Teachers even the best have a way they feel about students that make it hard for them to see passed that. two strategies I learned was hiding the name and grading papers or using a very specific rubric and grading what they have not what you think they meant.

What three approaches can be used to transform students’ dialectal diversity into an asset (funds of knowledge) rather than a liability (cultural deficit).

Take a course in lingustic diversity or cultural awareness the reading compares learning to deal with diversities like taking math and science course you take these course to learn to deal with the problems that will arise and learn to teach one thing many ways so your students understand them. Bialectal instruction in another approach that leads to less mistakes caused by non stadard dialect student can see the difference and correct mistakes on their own without the inference of their dialect confusing the situation. This approach leads to the last approach I liked which was to take a second language course it changes your attitude when you can put yourself into the situation of your student. I think back to high school taking foreign languages and I took another one in college. Trying to learn the words and then how put them in a sentence it was such a struggle. Then I try to imagine if the whole class was speaking the language and I was trying learn science, my hardest subject, instead of just the language and my head is ready to explode. These are children dealing the same situation. It changes my attitude just to think about it.

How prepared do you feel to teach in a culturally diverse classroom?



I feel completely unprepared to teach in a culturally diverse classroom although I have strategies and and reading, i learn beast by doing and we just don't have very diverse classes. I think that is one thing I learned through the Where I am project. We are all different but we have many similarities. I want to be more prepared but I think it a learning by doing type experience such as with the teacher under assessment who found her self even though she believed she was ready, stereotype and black student.

The PowerPoint activity was very frustrating it did not take into account what people had access to or allow for creative difference. I had non linguistic representation to reflect on. "Learners store knowledge in two primary ways: linguistic and non linguistic. They need both.(Marzano, Pickering and Pollock 2001)." This did do some non linguist representation by add pictures instead of just words to the PowerPoint and colorful text and background. It would have been more helpful if the directions were the same way. The directions were also confusing and so needed to be read twice maybe more. It was ironic that what we were creating was a great learning tool but the way we were learning to make it was very one dimensional. Another suggestion would be to have us work in groups. We were not allowed to ask our partners questions. In the reading it says to "have students work in small group when creating visual representations... discussion will help them communicate and refine their thinking." And last section is the assignment could have been modeled showing us how to use the tools would keep everyone on the same page. "Models, graphs, imagery, and other tools enable students to engage in actively constructing representations of their understanding."