Cut to Annex Room 2A. There is a lot of noise coming from the door and upon entering the room, you can see the teacher and students talking about something.
The teacher raises her hand and within 15 seconds, so do all the students, prompted by a couple who say, “She got her hand up” and “shut up, y’all, show some respect.” The teacher: Okay! [she smiles, still confused that this works, months after she started it.] Now, let’s do a quick review. In order to make a claim, I have to back it up with… Class: REASONS. The teacher: And those are backed up with? Class: EVIDENCE. The teacher: And what do I do with my evidence? |
Class: EXPLAIN IT.
The teacher: Ja Cori, how? Ja Cori: You explain what it means and how it relates to the thesis. The teacher: Alright alright alright, y’all know your stuff, huh? Well, let’s do a quick exit ticket and you can tell me all about writing introductions and body paragraphs. The students get out sheets of paper, rip them in half and share with their neighbor and the teacher smiles, seeing the routine has stuck. |
This episode is quiet at times and loud at times. It’s the kids and the teacher and them growing together.
I think back to last year and remember all the messes that I made. There was the complete lack of management of the kids and honestly, of myself. Despite all of those problems, I honestly kick myself much more for not truly assessing what my students knew enough. I didn't push them as much as I could've, didn't progress monitor to see who was struggling, didn't create assessments that challenged them to do anything more than spit up what I'd given them. This year, as you know from the portfolio so far, I have moved up with them and gotten a chance for some redemption. That has meant, however, that I needed to change everything about the way I assess in order to prep them for the state test. Like I said, last year's assessments were a mess. I look back at them and wonder how they learned anything. Those tests were aligned to 3rd grade standards and I rarely did anything other than poorly made stop and writes or DOK 1 exit tickets. This year has been much different. On August 4th, Brandi Freed, my consultant, and I sat down in my humid room in the annex and she showed me what meaningful assessments look like, starting from ones that just checked on progress all the way to ones that assessed for mastery. She taught me how to write state test questions, how to find texts for them, and even how to space them and use the right font so the kids would have no surprises when April came. I do several types of assessments now: 1. Informal assessments (progress monitoring) This comes in many forms: exit tickets, class discussions, head down 1-2-3-4 (a multiple choice game), distractor analysis, and whiteboard checks. I use this to see what students know. I "grade" them all but it isn't until we've been working on a standard for a few days that I actually put the grade in the gradebook. Every time they do these assessments, I do data analysis to see which kids are getting it and which kids aren't. Then, I do remediation with the kids who aren't by the 4th or 5th day with practice while the others move forward with it to more complex concepts. 2. Formal assessments: The only formal assessments I use are those that are 100% aligned to the test. The rubric for writing is from MDE for MAP testing. The questions I used are approved by my consultant who helped write test questions. All of these are coded and scanned into a program called Mastery Connect that tracks all my students and their mastery of each standard. After each test, I allow my students to come to tutoring to determine what they got wrong and why. We work through each assessment so that the mistakes they made do not happen again. At the end of April, my students will take their English II State Test. I recently got their benchmark scores back, and my predictions that I gave in the data meeting and the benchmark assessment scores were almost the exact same. Assessments have done that for me this year. They've taught me how to be a better teacher for each kid. |
Sample of an exit ticket.
A theme poster made by one of my favorite artist kids.
Multiple choice test sample.
Sample of an essay prompt.
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