Assessment

Over the years I feel as if I have grown as a teacher and grown in my understanding of assessment for learning.  I do ongoing daily assessment as well as formal assessments in reading, writing and math.  I use my assessments to differentiate my instruction to meet the needs of all of my students.  I know which students need to be challenged and which need extra support and  encouragement.  Which students need more teacher time, visuals, different working environments, etc...  I take every child from where they are and encourage them to strive for their own personal best.  But this is all me.  I am doing the encouraging, reminding and they are doing the listening.  They are not actively participating in using their assessment to decide their learning pathway.  At the end of the day, I am still in charge of deciding their program.  I realized upon self reflection that all of this assessment was me in control.  Although I reminded the students of the criteria before writing and reminded them to edit their work before turning it in it was still me doing the reminding, being in control.  What we want is our students to be in control of their own learning.

I thought that by having student led conferences after every report card  and that by making the criteria known to the students that my students were taking ownership of their own learning but I was missing something.  My students were doing two stars and one wish but it wasn't effective.  Something was still missing.  It was still me reminding them of the criteria and organizing the student led conferences.

Last week I heard Anne Davies, Ph.D speak at the Kelowna Reading Summit When Vulnerable Readers Thrive and I realized what I was missing.  I was missing having the students self assess.  After hearing Anne Davies speak, I went back to school on the Monday and started teaching my students how to self assess.

First we brainstormed criteria for "what makes a good reader".  My students gave me the criteria in their own words which I wrote up on the SMART Board.  All of their ideas were included in the criteria.  As  I wrote we discussed the ideas and then I printed out copies for each of them.  Then before reading they looked at the criteria.  After reading, they again looked at the criteria and decided which things they did during reading and came up with a plan for the next reading time which they then wrote on their own sheet.  The next day, after reading I could hear them telling each other what they worked on and what they were going to work on next time.  I conferenced with a couple and could tell that they were very excited about using the criteria to assess their own reading.

So then I tried it with writing.  We brainstormed our writing criteria and then sat down to write.  For the first time, when they were finished I didn't have to remind them to use capitals correctly or periods.  They were editing their own work without me asking them to.  Next week, we are going to learn about creating a writing continuum.  I am excited to see how this writing continuum comes together.

I have only just started using self assessment and I am seeing how the students are taking more ownership of their learning.  I do believe that it is important to use teacher assessments as well as self assessment.

How do you use assessment in your classroom?