Adjustment to Practice

The second element of the Candidate Assessment of Performance is 1.B.2: Adjustments to Practice. The CAP rubric describes proficiency in this element as follows: “Organizes and analyzes results from a variety of assessments to determine progress toward intended outcomes and uses these findings to adjust practice and identify and/or implement appropriate differentiated interventions and enhancements for students” (Massachusetts DOE, 2016).

If you cannot adjust your teachings to your students there is no reason you should continue the practice. In my first week of my program my mentor teacher told me that “a teacher makes as many decisions as a surgeon in their classroom as a surgeon does on an operating table”, while they may not be a drastic or life threatening a decision she got her point across. Adjustment to practice is not just about how you change your lesson plans after seeing how the students perform, but also how to adjust your lesson plan on the fly when your students are not understanding what you are trying to explain during class. It is also having a deep knowledge of the subject you are teaching to be able to teach the students in more than one way.

For example, when I am in my classroom for my Algebra/Geometry 2 class we have done a lot of math that requires a new level of thinking that the students are not used to. The math we are doing can be very visual and they have not been pushed to think this way yet. When I first started teaching I would do everything on the board, with equations until I realized they did not understand what I was saying. On a whim in one of my classes I made dance moves for the different graphs we were looking at and the body movement not only woke them up, but helped a lot of them connect what I was doing in the board because they could see it in a different way around them. I then decided to do this for the next unit and made up a dance to visualize domain and range and the kids love it.

I mentioned above that being an expert in what you are teaching is huge for adjustment to practice. This is because you must be able to explain what you are teaching in more than one way in order to get through to your students. Not everyone learns the same way, so this is incredibly important.

Besides being able to change your lesson plan on the fly, adjustment to practice also come in when you are looking at how the students are performing. When your students take a test, do classwork, homework, exit ticket or warm up problem you have to be able to take that immediate feedback from them. Each of these assessments are meant not only for them to realize where they are with the learning but also for you to realize where they’re at.

For example, I like to give my students do now problems and exit tickets on Woot-Math. Woot-Math is a website that gives me immediate feedback on how they have done on the problem. This allows me to focus on different parts of my lesson plan more heavily if I see they are excelling in one aspect of the lesson rather than another.

In terms of changing lesson plans from a quiz or test, since it may be after the unit finishes, this is good adjustment to practice for the following year. If your students do poorly on the same part of a quiz/test you would know for the next year how to fix it. It's the same for if every single one, or close to every one of your students gets a problem right, you know you did a good job on that problem and not to change how you taught that part of the unit.

In my time student teaching I feel as though adjustment to practice is something I have excelled at from the beginning. In my first announced observation the feedback I received, was “When Julie asks if students have questions about the homework, and there is no response, she prompts: If we have a quiz about the homework now, everyone will be OK? At this point some students start saying: well, maybe, oh, I have a question about #2”. I remember this class, the students were not motivated and I could not get them to give me any feedback in where they were at with what we were learning until I asked this question.

In another one of my observations I got the feedback that “Students were solving problems, and at one point Julie noticed that many were asking the same questions, so she stopped the activity and reviewed/explained the issue to the whole class”. We were drawing in graphs of direct and inverse functions based off of a description. This is something we had worked on extensively, but when more than a few of them asked me the same question, I figured it would be a good use of time to go over it as a class.

Beyond in the classroom, during my practicum I had given the students a short homework quiz to see where they were at with function families to see if we needed to go over them before the unit test, the average was a C so I spent a day going over them for the students before they took their test and they average for that page on the test was an A. This is a perfect example of adjustment to practice, because I had to adjust my lesson plans before the test in order to make sure the students understood the topic.

From my last observation, Irene wrote “Julie adjust to practice appropriately, she attends to ALL students” which is high praise and I feel that I do attend to all students and have achieved exemplary status in the standard of adjustment to practice.