Measuring what are students know and are able to do is a vital part of teaching. The question is exactly how we should accomplish this. I read the article "How Should We Measure Student Learning? The Many Forms of Assessment" by Edutopia Staff. and watched the video "Making a Case for Comprehensive Assessment." Both of these items bought up some great points. Not all learners are great test takers. Multiple choice and short answer assessments do not test for things our students are going to need in order to be successful. For instance, in today's world, there is an emphasis on teamwork and collaboration. Neither of these are tested in our current testing instruments. In the video I watched, A New York High School is using performance based assessments to gauge student learning rather than the state's high stakes testing instrument. I think this is an excellent approach to assessing what our students actually know and can be able to do. At this high school they use a system of assessments that include portfolios, presentations and standards bases projects rather than a single assessment item. Our current situation of assessing student knowledge at one time with one instrument just does not make sense to me. Can such an instrument really assess what that student has learned?

Unfortunately, that is the world we live in today. Our teaching is so geared to making sure our students can do well on the state test. I know in my classroom, I actively teach test taking skills. At times, I feel like I am teaching students to be great test takers rather than teaching them the content.

As to my inquiry plan, I would like to focus on student engagement. If students are engaged, they will learn. If they learn the content, they will do well on the assessments.

Domain 1

I picked domain one "Planning and Preparation" because i feel that understanding my content area is one of my strengths. In addition, I spend a lot of time and effort planning quality instructional activities to allow the diverse student body that I teach to be as successfula as possible. I am a huge fan of Howard gardner's multiple intelligences. I strive to address as many of those intelligences as often as I can. For instance, when I teach integers and absolute value, I have the students form a human number line. Other students are then given a number on a card and they have to find their place on the number line. In addition, I will say something like "Johnny is closer to Susie than Ricky is. Johnny's number has a greater value than Ricky's number." I will repeat the procedure on the positive side of zero, again using the student names. I lead the students to come up with the fact that if a number is to the right of another number, it is the larger number. Also, in this unit I use a song about integers. I have a cd of math songs that has a song called "The Integer Song". Months after the lesson, I can sometimes hear a student singing that song!
After what I have just written, it probably comes as no surprise that the component I am most comfortable with is component 1a "Demonstrating Knowledge of Content and Pedagogy". Content knowledge, as I stated previously, is one of my strengths. I love math. I love teaching math. I was very fortunate as an undergraduate to be a part of a program called the "Explorers Math Program." This program was desigened to allow an undergraduate to explore the field of math education before they had reached a point where it would be difficult to change their major. I was a part of this program for the last 3 years of my undergraduate work. There was a professor, who was in charge of this program, who taught me more about HOW to teach math than any of my coursework classes combined. She taught the developmental math classes at the college I attended and, under her direct supervision, she allowed me to plan lessons and to deliver the instruction. After I had taught a lesson, she would constructively point out ways that I could be more effective or ways that I could incorporate different learning styles. The knowledge I gained during that time with her was invaluable.
The component I would like to zero in on is component 3c "Engaging Students in Learning." as my previous posts might have suggested, engaging students is not an easy task. The students of today are so bombarded with information and they are so much a product of a society that wants the quick fix, that engaging them in the learning process can sometimes be very difficult. My questions to others include: "What specific things do you do to help engage your students?"; "How do you deal with student apathy?"; "How do you handle that student who does not want to do the work, does not want to learn the concept you are teaching and then turns around and becomes a discipline problem?" I look forward to hearing any feedback that anyone is willing to give.

Curriculum should be the framework from which we build our instruction on a day to day basis. It should be a guideline to tell us what to teach, and when, to allow our students to learn what we are teaching. The reality is that in this age of high stakes testing, the curriculum itself is being used as a measuring stick to determine how effective a teacher is in the classroom. Kentucky has developed curriculum documents that all teachers in the state are to use to plan their instruction. These documents are broken down into standards that all students are to have mastered at a certain grade level. The students are then tested to see if the standards had been met. The testing generates all kinds of reports showing how many students actually mastered the standard. In turn, the teacher is held accoountable for the results of that test. While I am all for holding teachers accountable, I think that there is not enough accountability for the students taking the tests. As educators, we are always being told to make our instruction relevant, to show the students how they can use the information in their own lives. Then in the Spring, we turn around and give them a test, that has huge implications and consequences, and they are not even held accoutnable for how well they do, much less shown the relevance to their own lives on performing well on the test.

As for having control over the curriculum, teachers have little input. I am of two minds on this. I feel it is vital that there is a standard curriculum that teachers across the state have to follow. The student in Eastern Kentucky, which is part of the Appalachian Mountains, should have the same education as a student in Frankfort. This was the issue that the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) was to address. What I would like to see is that the curriculum be developed ONLY be teachers who have actually taught in the classroom on a day to day basis. Teachers who understand how unrealistic it is to teach everything we are being asked to teach to every group of students. People with limited classroom experience have no business creating a curriculum for which teachers are going to be held accountable.

On a day to day basis, curriculum in my classroomis based around those standards listed in the Kentucky curriculum documents. I take each standard and create objectives from them. Some standards encompass so many concepts that one standard could have many objectives. I then post those objectives on the board for each of my classes. I tell the students before instruction the objective of the day. I will use different formative assessments to determine if the objective was met or not. I will use exit slips, bellwork the next day, questioning, and wipe-board-like activities, to name a few. The results of the formative assessment tell me if I can move to the next concpet or if I need to reteach.

I would like to blog about something that is a little off the subject. Teachers are constantly being told to make their instruction fun and interesting and engaging. While I agree that we need to do all we can to make learning fun, when did making the learning fun become the primary goal? We are teaching our students that if something is not "fun" it is not worth their attention. Life is not always fun. Sometimes in life you have to do something you don't want to do because it has to get done.