I'm sitting at my dining room table with stacks of books and papers around me dwelling on assignments that seem to be multiplying like gremlins. This is what graduate school is supposed to be like, right? In any life transition it takes time to acclimate, and there's usually a turning point in that acclimation period where you remember why you started the crazy ride you hopped on. I seem to be coming around that bend, and as fate may have it, this realization happened while I was simultaneously doing work for Teaching Science and my Assessment class. I FINALLY CONNECTED CONCEPTS FROM TWO CLASSES WHICH MADE SENSE TOGETHER... This week's science reading was focused on Foundational Knowledge and Conceptual Change, and I was assigned a unit on Formative Assessment to teach my other class. Guess what, guys? They're about the same teaching style! ::woo hoo! bells! whistles! happy dance!:: And its a teaching style that really excites me.
If we, as teachers, are setting out to really structure little brains then we must teach those brains accountability, responsibility and useful concepts. The reading booklet for my assessment class offered some really helpful teaching tactics. Like, allowing students to utilize red, yellow and green cards in an effort to communicate their current understanding of a lecture-style lesson, which allows a teacher to adjust their teaching angle in the moment. The information that struck me the most in the two readings however was that deciding upon a few useful curricular targets and defining a few, definite learning pillars to reach that curricular target is infinitely more effective than setting many different small goals and knocking those out in a more traditional teach - study- test scenario. While, both readings do emphasize that this teaching style takes a lot more preparation and active participation they both clearly note that these foundational assessment tactics actually set up students for le real world!
Here's a picture of my planner!
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