Competency 3: Plan teaching and learning situations

Is this an assessment tool that you would use in your class? Why or why not?

I would use rubrics as an assessment tool as I find they allow me to visually see what each student should be able to do at their grade level. Even if I don't use it for grading purposes, it's a good way to keep track of student progress and gives you an understanding of where they may be having difficulties or if one student is progressing slower than others.

During my 6 week practicum, I used three types of rubrics. Although they were mostly used to practice it gave me a good sense of which ones I found easier to use or which ones would work best with which assignments. The following are some examples of rubrics I used, all rubrics were made by consulting the Progression of Learning as presented by the Québec Ministry of Education as well as some elements that I deemed important with where the class was at.

My earlier learning objectives start with "I can copy..." as students would, for the first two lessons, have to copy down definitions of the vocabulary they learned, which aligns with the bottom of the pyramid: remember. In those same lessons they would also work on the next two steps: understand and apply. Learning objectives would begin with "I can identify..." or "I can draw...". Later on, learning objectives start to use vocabulary such as "I can match..." and "I can describe..." or "I can create...", which aligns with the upper echelon of the pyramid, namely analyze and create. Although none of my learning objectives touched on the evaluate portion of Bloom's Taxonomy, I did use it indirectly: students would have to support their own thinking using what they had previously learned. This was often practiced in class as students worked on reflecting, something that can be relatively new for grade 2 students.

  I found these objectives to be the hardest out of all of them as the tasks I am asking of my students are not something that is easily done in grade 2. Being able to match two cars together is harder than it sounds as students have to be able to read the cards, understand the characteristics and then find another card with similar characteristics. As for the second objective, students are asked to be able to make links to either previous work they have done in this LES or in their own personal lives and then transform it into writing. However, out of all my objectives, I ended up being pleasantly surprised by how well my students were able to complete these mentally demanding tasks.

All of my learning objectives can be linked to my assessments, however, some are not linked to ones I wrote out but rather ones where I mentally took note of difficulties that presented themselves. Whereas the second objective mentioned is linked to the analytical rubric I presented previously, the first objective I mentioned was one such assessment I took note of mentally using a holistic rubric. From the activity, I got an understanding of what my students' ability was, how confused they were and where they went wrong. As mentioned earlier, due to this particular objective being linked to a very specific task, it was easier to use a holistic approach to assessment rather than an analytical or checklist.