FIAE Reflections: Chapter 5

This chapter talks about the importance of tiering assignments in challenging all students regardless of their readiness level. Several structures and techniques were suggested for creating tiers in a classroom. They include: increasing or decreasing complexity, Tomlinson’s Equalizer, learning contracts, learning menus, Tic-tac-toe boards, cubing, summarization pyramid, Frank William’s Taxonomy of Creativity, RAFTS, changing the verb, and one word summaries. I think all of these ideas are intriguing. I know that tiering needs to happen to make the class interesting and engaging for all students regardless of their readiness level. I worry, however, about my ability to be as creative in my own teaching. I am afraid that I will fall back on the ways that I was taught the same material, and forget that there are alternate ways to present the material. That is something I will need to be watchful for.

FIAE Reflections: Chapter 4

There are three types of assessment that are extremely useful. The first is portfolios. They are very good at showing valid student mastery over time. They also give the student an opportunity to reflect on their own progress and make goals based on that knowledge. They are flexible and can be either all hard copy or include digital artifacts as well. However it is difficult to assign them a letter or number grade therefore some teachers avoid using them for grading purposes. I didn’t realize how many forms they can take.

The second form of assessment in this chapter is rubrics. They are really useful because, if done right, the student has much more clarity about what is expected on a big project, and the teacher has a more uniform set of criteria with which to assign a grade for a project. But they do have less consistency from teacher to teacher and even from day to day. I feel a little intimidated by creating my own rubrics. There seem to be a lot of things to keep in mind while making an effective rubric. I especially liked the suggestion that you give the student only the mastery criteria at the beginning so they won’t ‘settle’ for a mediocre grade, because of lack of belief in their ability or out of sheer laziness.

The third form of assessment is self assessment. It is especially important in helping students direct their own educational goals. Strategies include checklists, journals, practicing in front of the mirror, and videotaping presentations. This seems especially useful to me for teaching students to find their own feedback to assess their progress.

MI Chapter 5 Reflections

This chapter describes how to incorporate MI into the curriculum through a graphic organizer. Put your objective in the center and brainstorm ways to use all of the intelligences to teach that objective. When you have enough ideas, choose the most workable activities with the available resources, and put them into a chronological order. Finally¸ collect the materials needed and carry out the lesson plan. Modify them as needed to respond to feedback . This really helped me get a vision of how to incorporate MI theory into a workable curriculum. It will be very helpful in creating meaningful activities for my students that will have something for everyone.

UbD Chapter 5: Reflections

This chapter describes three important principles of good assessment practices. First is: photo albums vs snapshots. This means that to really assess what the student knows you need to look at multiple forms of assessment over time rather than the usual test at the end

Second is: match the measures with the goals. This is talking about crafting your assessments so that they provide the kind of information that addresses your stated goals. The different kinds of knowledge are declarative, procedural, and dispositions. This chapter also introduced the concept of GRASPS.

The third principle is: form follows function. It talks about different times to assess students and the various uses of these assessments. They include Pre-assessment/ Diagnostic at the beginning to assess what they already know, Summative/ Evaluative to assess their final learning, and Formative that assesses progress along the way. Of the three the most important is the formative because it allows you to tailor your teaching to the needs of the students.

This chapter also talked about the importance of offering appropriate choices of assessment and giving useful feedback to the student and the importance of the student using self- assessment and reflection to increase their learning.

I really liked this chapter because it helped me understand how assessment works and how it fits into my goals. Knowing how to properly assess students properly is the difference between a mediocre teacher and a great one.

FIAE Reflections: Chapter 3

This chapter reviews the ways that assessment can be used to further student mastery. The comparison that is made in the chapter is that assessment should be more like a physical than an autopsy. In other words it should be used all through the learning process to help direct learning rather than being simply a way to keep score of success or failure. There are three kinds of assessments: pre-assessment, formative assessment, and summative assessments. Assessments are most useful when they are available to the student, documents real learning, and focuses on enduring and essential content and skills (a.k.a. KUD). I really got a better idea of how to design assessments to give me useful information about my students’ level of understanding through the examples and concepts described here.

FIAE Reflections: Chapter 2

This chapter discusses the concept of mastery. What it is and what it isn’t and how everyone’s concept of it is different. Everyone’s definition is different and it is important for everyone to be on the same page. The definition given here uses the six facets of true understanding found in Understanding by Design (McTighe and Wiggins, 2006). To demonstrate mastery, a student needs to be able to use the information in all of the six ways. All forms of assessment show parts of that mastery but usually more than one are needed to show complete mastery. Written assessments are especially useful in determining mastery. Because it is impossible to develop mastery in all facets of a subject in the time allowed in public school, one of the most important skills for a new teacher to learn is to determine what the most important concepts for their students to master are. There are many resources available to help in this important process.

FIAE Reflections: Chapter 1

This chapter gives a rationale for using differentiation and stresses the fact that it is not a new concept. Differentiation has always been used by the best teachers. Even the military uses differentiation in how it teaches the skills needed to be successful there. Differentiation is fair because it levels the playing field for students based on their learning styles the same way glasses do for vision. Even if the patterns are not continued in later grades or in college, it makes students more successful because the students understand their own learning strengths and are able to supply these for themselves. In addition, the increased understanding of the subject matter helps them with future learning that depends on the prior learning. This chapter really helped me understand more about how differentiation works and how it fits into a workable curriculum.