This week was the second Learning Circle Discussion, and I think my group's discussion went quite well. Our group consisted of the same people from last week except for Abigail who I believe was absent from class this week. My group went into the discussion prepared with talking points, as we had decided last week what our roles in the discussion would be for this we. Because of this, we were able to get right into our discussion. This discussion centered around chapters three and four of the textbook, which I found much more engaging than last week's chapters, meaning I had more input in this discussion than our last.
Our discussion began by addressing that expectations are key to the creation and assessment of a lesson. The textbook talked about how making expectations for assessment clear helps students, parents, as well as the teacher in understanding the assessment and learning process. I shared with my group that I would have felt much more confident in assignments in both my K-12 and Post-Secondary classes if expectations were made clearer. I feel that I could have had the opportunity to be more successful in some areas if I had known exactly what was expected of me. Expressing expectations to students helps to guide them to reaching the goals that have been set out for them, giving them a view of what success could look like in an assignment. We found it interesting that these two chapters heavily focused on expectations helping more than just the students. One of my group members mentioned that she has always found assessing to be daunting because she does not always know what she is looking for, so the idea of using examples to guide yourself as well as students in the assessment would be really helpful to her. I completely agree with this. Having a clear idea of what I am looking for in assessment will help to assess student work in a way that is fair to all students. After discussing how examples could help in the classroom we began to talk about how they can help outside as well. For many of us dealing with parents is quite scary. So, we noted that the textbook shared that many questions parents might have about assessment can be answered by showing samples of success. In this way we can show parents exactly what we are asking their child to demonstrate in relation to the outcome we are teaching. This was such a comforting idea for us. Our discussion about samples came to a close as we spoke about the ways we can acquire samples as teachers just beginning our careers. We talked about working alongside colleagues who have taught similar lessons and using their examples for our teaching. But, one of my group members brought up that we could also create these samples ourselves. When teaching a lesson for the first time, we do not always know how it will go. So, in creating your own samples you can begin to get a feel for how the lesson might work out with the group of students it is planned for, allowing for some insight to be gained before diving into a brand new lesson plan.
The second part of our discussion moved away from creating and using samples in assessment to getting to know what assessment styles work for each student in the classroom. Classrooms can be very diverse places, making it difficult to settle on one type of assessment for the whole class. We discussed how our goal in the classroom is to give all students the space to be successful, and creating one way for them to show learning is not very reflective of this goal. The textbook emphasizes that all students learn differently, so we believe that all students should be able to show their learning differently.
We came up with a few ways students could demonstrate their learning:
Oral testing rather than writing down
Showing their learning artistically
This assessment could be paired with an oral component to help teachers interpret the artistic representation
In older grades students could propose their own way to share their learning
Students know themselves better than anyone. We believe it can be so valuable to give students the space to let them guide you through their learning.