EDUC 410
We have still been taking a look at formative assessments this week. Formative assessments are key in every lesson to gauge where students are. Even just a quick check of whether students feel they understand the material with the thumbs up method. Or walking around making observations on how students are doing on their work. Asking questions during teacher input and guided practice. These are all simple formative assessments that can be done and should be done in a lesson. This only scratches the surface. Then there are formative assessments like short quizzes or worksheets, these are all useful to you as a teacher. These checks should be used to figure out what students are getting or not getting and should be used to help the students. We put this into practice with our lesson for Task 4 this week. We finished our plans from the data received from a formative assessment conducted in a 4th grade classroom. Then we taught this lesson in our small online group. This was an interesting experience, but I found it difficult doing a lesson over zoom like this, mainly because the lesson was created for a physical face-to-face classroom. However, it was still an experience. We also discussed how to make grading rubrics for students. When giving an assignment students should always have a clear idea of what success looks like on that assignment. Rubrics help to show this by giving them a guideline of what their work should show. I am glad to be practicing this application of formative assessments and using the data collected to improve lessons because I know this will be a high priority in my future classroom.
Outside
On the Twitter Chat that I attended this week the discussion was on how the workforce is always changing and how we should prepare our students. What should we focus on to help our students in a workforce that we cannot predict? A big theme among the participants was to put emphasis on critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and teamwork. These are highly important to every student, actually every person. It does not matter what career field you are going into. These skills are important in every field and even everyday life. Everyone should know how to work with others through teamwork and to do this they need communication skills. These communication skills not only come in handy with professional relationships but personal ones as well. Critical thinking and problem solving skills have also continuing to become a huge focus in schools. There are always problems in any type of career or life, and critical thinking is a must when finding solutions to these problems. The teaching of these life skills goes with standard 3d from NCTCS stating that teachers make instruction relevant to students. It says that teachers must incorporate life skills into their lessons which is exactly what we were discussing in this chat.
